Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits in scales. Man originated on the seashore, and many of the most primitive habits of humans, as well as their bodily differences from the apes, came from their early life there. Man pushed back from the salt water slowly.

The official affairs of the çhefferie, beyond the repair of roads and bridges, were few. Crime among Tahitians being almost unknown, the chief’s duties as magistrate were negligible, and the family uttered many aues when I related to them the conditions of our countries, with murders, assaults, burglaries and rapine as daily news. The French law required a civil ritual for marriage, and Tetuanui tied the legal knots in his district. I was at the çhefferie when a union was performed. The bride and groom were of the middle class of prosperous landholders. They arrived in an automobile wonderfully adorned with flowers, with great bouquets of roses and ferns on the lamps. They were accompanied by cars and carriages filled with their families and friends. The bride was in a white-lace dress from Paris, with veil and orange-blossoms, and the groom in a heavy black frock-coat over white drill trousers with lemon-colored, tight shoes; both looking very ill at ease and hot. The father of the groom must have us to the church and to the wedding feast, so Brooke and I rode in a cart, I on the mother’s lap, and the poet on the knees of the father. The jollity of the arearea was already apparent, and the father vainly whipped his horse to outspeed the automobile. All the vehicles raced along the road and into the yard of the Protestant church of Mataiea at top gait.

It was the season of assemblage of the manu patia, the wasps brought from abroad, and quite ten thousand were clustered on the church ceiling, while thousands more patrolled the air just over our heads, courting and quarreling, buzzing and alighting on our heads and necks. The preacher in a knee-length Prince Albert of black wool, opened so that I saw he had nothing but an undershirt beneath, recited the ceremony and addressed the couple. He took a ring from his trousers-pocket, unwrapping and opening its box. A bridesmaid in a rose-colored satin gown had taken off the bride’s glove, and the pastor put the ring upon her finger. A number of young men acted as aids and witnesses, and all who stood were pounced upon by the wasps. They betrayed no evidence of nervousness, but at the installation of the ring, the groom, with a desperate motion, tore off his stiff collar and bared his robust neck. He did not replace it that day. The bride’s mother wept upon my shoulder throughout the quarter of an hour. Not a trace was indicated of the old wedding customs of the Tahitians, as Christianity had effaced them rigorously, and though the Tahitians had had plenty of ceremonies for all public acts, as had the Greeks and Romans, many had been forgotten under the scourge of orthodoxy before any white wrote freely of the island. They are lost to record with the old language.

After the rite, all made a dash for their equipages, and raced for the bride’s home, where, as customary, the fête champêtre was given. Again on mama’s lap, and Brooke on papa’s, both ample, we hurried, the bon père not averse to taking a wheel off the bridal party’s motor-car. With cries of delight we drove into a great cocoanut-grove, and a thousand feet back from the Broom Road emerged into a sunlit, but shady, clearing. Huro! the banquet was already being spread. From different parts of the plantation men came bearing huge platters of roasted pig, chicken, taro, breadfruit, and feis, with bamboo tubes of the taiaro sauce like the reeds of a great pipe-organ. Caldrons of shrimp, crabs, prawns, and lobsters bubbled, and monstrous heaps of tiny oysters were being opened. Fresh fruit was in rich hoards: bananas, oranges, custard-apples, papayas, pomegranates, mangoes, and guavas.

A magnificent bower a hundred feet long, broad and high, had been erected of bamboo and gigantic leaves. It was similar to a temple builded by the ardent worshipers of Dionysus to celebrate the vine-god’s feast. The roof of green thatch was supported on a score of the slender pillars of the ohe, the golden bamboo, and there were neither sides nor doors. The pillars were wreathed with ferns and orchids from the forest near by, and on the sward between them were spread a series of yellow mats woven in the Paumotu atolls. They carpeted the green floor of the temple, and upon them, in the center, the graceful leaves of the cocoanut stretched to mark the division of the vis-à-vis.

From these long leaves rose graduated alabaster columns, the inner stalks of the banana-plants, and on them were fastened flowers and ornaments, fanciful creations of the hands of Tahitian women, fashioned of brilliant leaves and of bamboo-fiber and the glossy white arrowroot-fiber. From the top of each column floated the silken film of the snowy reva-reva, the exquisite component of the interior of young cocoa-palm-leaves, a gossamer substance the extraction of which is as difficult as the blowing of glass goblets. Varos, marvelously spiced, prawns, and crayfish, garlanded the bases of these sylvan shafts, all highly decorative, and within reach of their admirers.

The stiff hand of the white which had garbed the wedding party in the ungraceful clothing of the European mode had failed to pose the natural attitude of the Tahitian toward good cheer.

A pile of breadfruit-leaves were laid before each feaster’s space in lieu of plates, and four half-cocoanut-shells, containing drinking water, cocoanut-milk, grated ripe cocoanut, and sea-water. The last two were to be mixed to sauce the dishes, and the empty one filled with fresh water for a finger-bowl.

The bride and groom sat at the head of the leafy board, their intimates about them, and the pastor, who had joined them, stood a few moments with bowed head and closed eyes to invoke the blessing of God upon the revel, as did the orero, the pagan priest of Tahiti a few generations ago. The pastor and I, with the owner of the Atimaona plantation and a Mr. Davey, had had an appetizer a moment before.

We all sat on the mats according to bodily habit, the lithe natives on their heels, the grosser ones and we whites with legs crossed, and with the minister’s raising of his head we fell to, with ease of position, and no artificial instruments to embarrass our hands. We transferred each to his own breadfruit-leaves what he desired from the stores in the center, meat and vegetables and fruit, and seasoned it as we pleased. New leaves brought by boys and girls constantly replaced used ones, and the shells of salt and fresh water were refilled.