The early missionaries who had to combat the influence of the Arioi may have exaggerated its baseness. In their unsophisticated minds, unprepared by reading or experience for comparisons, most of them sailing directly from English divinity schools or small bucolic pastorates, the devout preachers thought Sabbatarianism of as much consequence as morals, and vastly more important than health or earthly happiness. They believed in diabolical possession, and were prone to magnify the wickedness of the heathen, as one does hard tasks. When Christianity had power in Tahiti, the bored natives were sometimes scourged into church, and fines and imprisonment for lack of devotion were imposed by the native courts. Often self-sacrificing, the missionaries felt it was for the natives’ eternal walfare, and that souls might be saved even by compulsion. The Arioi society melted under a changed control and Christian precepts.
Livingstone in the wilds of primeval Africa, making few converts, but giving his life to noble effort, meditated often upon the success of the missionaries in the South Seas—a success perhaps magnified by the society which financed and cheered the restless men whom it sent to Tahiti. Livingstone in his darker moments, consoling himself with the accounts of these achievements in the missionary annals, doubted his own efficacy against the deep depravity and heathenism of his black flock. The fact unknown to him was that the missionaries in Polynesia preached and prayed, doctored and taught, ten years before they made a single convert. It was not until they bagged the king that a pawn was taken by the whites from the adversaries’ stubborn game. The genius of these strugglers against an apparent impregnable seat of wickedness was patience, “the passion of great hearts.”
But conquering once politically, the missionaries found their task all but too easy to suit militant Christians. As the converted drunkard and burglar at a slum pentecost pour out their stories of weakness and crime, so these Arioi, glorying in their being washed white as snow, recited to hymning congregations confessions that made the offenses of the Marquis de Sade or Jack the Ripper fade into peccadilloes.
Christian says:
Their Hevas or dramatic entertainments, pageants and tableaus, of varying degrees of grossness, similar to the more elaborate and polished products of the early Javanese and Peruvian drama ... one cannot help fancying must be all pieces out of the same puzzle ... I have with some pains discovered the origin of the name “Arioi.” It throws a lurid light on the character of some of the Asiatic explorers who must have visited this part of the Eastern Pacific prior to the Europeans. In Maori the word Karioi means debauched, profligate, good-for-nothing. In Raratonga [an island near Tahiti] the adjective appears as Kariei. These are probably slightly worn down forms of the Persian Khara-bati, which has precisely the same significance as the foregoing. One is forced to the conclusion that the Arabian Nights stories of the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor were founded on a bed-rock of solid fact, and that Persian and Arab merchants, pirates and slave-traders, must have penetrated into these far-off waters, and brought their vile, effeminate luxury and shameful customs with them from Asia, of which transplanted iniquity, the parent soil half-forgotten, this word, like several others connected with revelry and vice, like a text in scarlet lettering, survives to this day.
The first Jesuit missionaries to the Caroline Islands found there an organization with privileges and somewhat the same objects as the Arioi, which was called Uritoi. As “t” is a letter often omitted or altered in these island tongues, it is not hard by leaving it out to find a likeness in the names Arioi and Urioi. The Carolines and Tahiti are thousands of miles apart, and not inhabited by the same race.
Ellis was a missionary incapable by education, experience, and temperament of appreciation of the artistic life of the Arioi. He would have chased the faun into seclusion until he could clothe him in English trousers, and would have rendered the Venus of Milo into bits. Despite an honest love for mankind and considerable discernment, he saw nothing in the Arioi but a logical and diabolical condition of paganism. Artistry he did not rank high, nor, to find a reason for the Arioi, did he go back of Satan’s ceaseless seeking whom he may devour.
Bovis, a Frenchman, world traveled, having seen perhaps the frescos of Pompeii, and familiar with the histories of old Egypt, India, Greece, Persia, and Rome, knew that Sodom and Gomorrah had their replicas in all times, and that often such conduct as that of the Arioi was associated among ancient or primitive peoples with artistic and interesting manifestations.
He searched the memories of the old men and women for other things than abominations, and gave the Arioi a good name for possession of many excellent qualities and for a rare development of histrionic ability. But more than being mere mimes and dancers, the Arioi were the warriors, the knights of that day and place, the men-at-arms, the chosen companions of the king and chiefs, and in general the bravest and most cultivated of the Tahitians. They were an extended round-table for pleasure in peace and for counsel and deeds of derring-do in war. The society was a nursery of chivalry, a company which recruited, but did not reproduce themselves. They had a solid basis, and lasted long because the society kept out of politics.
The members never forgot the duty due their chiefs. They accompanied them in their enterprises, and they killed their fellow-members in the enemy’s camp, as Masons fought Masons in the American Civil War and in the wars of Europe. In peace they were epicures. They consorted together only for pleasure and comfort in their reunions. The Arioi made their order no stepping-stone to power or office, but in it swam in sensuous luxury, each giving his talents to please his fellows and to add luster to his society.