Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

Typhoons or cyclones are rare about Tahiti, but squalls are frequent and tidal waves recurrent. The rain falls more than a hundred days a year, but usually so lightly that one thinks of it as liquid sunshine. In the wet quarter from December until March there are almost daily deluges, when the air seems turned to water, the land and sea are hidden by the screen of driving rain, and the thunder shakes the flimsy houses, and echoes menacingly in the upper valleys.

Papeete, the seat of government and trade capital of all the French possessions in these parts of the world, is a sprawling village stretching lazily from the river of Fautaua on the east to the cemetery on the west, and from the sea on the north to half a mile inland. It is the gradual increment of garden and house upon an aboriginal village, the slow response of a century to the demand of official and trading white, of religious group and ambitious Tahitian, of sailor and tourist. Here flow all the channels of business and finance, of plotting and robbery, of pleasure and profit, of literature and art and good living, in the eastern Pacific. Papeete is the London and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, dispensing the styles and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making the laws and enforcing or compromising them, giving justice and injustice to litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the archipelagoes in these seas.

The French, who have domination in these waters of a hundred islands and atolls between 8° and 27° south latitude, and between 137° and 154° west longitude, a stretch of about twelve hundred miles each way, make them all tributary to Papeete; and thus it is the metropolis of a province of salt water, over which come its couriers and its freighters, its governors and its soldiers, its pleasure-seekers and its idlers. From it an age ago went the Maoris to people Hawaii and New Zealand.

Papeete has a central position in the Pacific. The capitals of Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and California are from two and a half to three and a half thousand miles away. No other such group of whites, or place approaching its urbanity, is to be found in a vast extent of latitude or longitude. It is without peer or competitor in endless leagues of waves.

Yet Papeete is a little place, a mile or so in length and less in width, a curious imposition of European houses and manners upon a Tahitian hamlet, hybrid, a mixture of loveliness and ugliness, of nature savage and tamed. The settlement, as with all ports, began at the waterfront, and the harbor of Papeete is a lake within the milky reef, the gentle waters of which touch a strip of green that runs along the shore, broken here and there by a wall and by the quay at which I landed. Coral blocks have been quarried from the reef and fitted to make an embankment for half a mile, which juts out just far enough to be usable as a mole. It is alongside this that sailing vessels lie, the wharf being the only land mooring with a roof for the housing of products. A dozen schooners, small and large, point their noses out to the sea, their backs against the coral quay, and their hawsers made fast to old cannon, brought here to war against the natives, and now binding the messengers of the nations and of commerce to this shore. Where there are no embankments, the water comes up to the roots of the trees, and a carpet of grass, moss, and tropical vegetation grows from the salt tide to the roadway.

Following the contour of the beach, runs a fairly broad road, and facing this original thoroughfare and the sea are the principal shops of the traders and a few residences. French are some of these merchants, but most are Australasian, German, American and Chinese. France is ten thousand miles away, and the French unequal in the struggle for gain. Some of the stores occupy blocks, and in them one will find a limited assortment of tobacco, anchors, needles, music-boxes, candles, bicycles, rum, novels, and silks or calicos. Here in this spot was the first settlement of the preachers of the gospel, of the conquering forces of France, and of the roaring blades who brought the culture of the world to a powerful and spellbound people. Here swarmed the crews of fifty whalers in the days when “There she blows!” was heard from crows’-nests all over the broad Pacific. These rough adventurers, fighters, revelers, passionate bachelors, stamped Tahiti with its first strong imprint of the white man’s modes and vices, contending with the missionaries for supremacy of ideal. They brought gin and a new lecherousness and deadly ills and novel superstitions, and found a people ready for their wares. An old American woman has told me she has seen a thousand whalemen at one time ashore off ships in the harbor make night and day a Saturnalia of Occidental pleasure, a hundred fights in twenty-four hours.

As more of Europe and America came and brought lumber to build houses, or used the hard woods of the mountains, the settlement pushed back from the beach. Trails that later widened into streets were cut through the brush to reach these homes of whites, and the thatched huts of the aborigines were replaced by the ugly, but more convenient, cottages of the new-comers. The French, when once they had seized the island, made roads, gradually and not too well, but far surpassing those of most outlying possessions, and contrasting advantageously with the neglect of the Spanish, who in three hundred years in the Philippines left all undone the most important step in civilization. One can drive almost completely around Tahiti on ninety miles of a highway passable at most times of the year, and bridging a hundred times the streams which rush and purl and wind from the heights to the ocean.

The streets of Papeete have no plan. They go where they list and in curves and angles, and only once in a mile in short, straight stretches. They twist and stray north and south and nor’nor’west and eastsou’east, as if each new-comer had cleft a walk of his own, caring naught for any one else, and further dwellers had smoothed it on for themselves.

I lost myself in a maze of streets, looked about for a familiar landmark, strolled a hundred paces, and found myself somewhere I thought a kilometer distant. Everywhere there are shops kept by Chinese, restaurants and coffee-houses. The streets all have names, but change them as they progress, honoring some French hero or statesman for a block or two, recalling some event, or plainly stating the reason for their being. All names are in French, of course, and many are quaint and sonorous.

As the sea-wall grew according to the demands of defense or commerce the sections were rechristened. The quai des Subsistences tells its purpose as does the quai de l’Uranie. The rue de l’Ecole and the rue de la Mission, with the rue des Remparts, speak the early building of school and Catholic church and fortifications.