In the days of Captain Cook—The first Spanish missionaries—Difficulties of converting the heathens—Wars over Christianity—Ori-a-Ori, the chief, friend of Stevenson—We read the Bible together—The church and the himene.
Captain Cook barely escaped shipwreck here. The Bay of Tautira is marked on the French map, “Mouillage de Cook,” the anchorage of Cook. That indomitable mariner risked his vessels in many dangerous roadsteads to explore and to procure fresh supplies for his crews. When he had exhausted the surplus of pigs, cocoanuts, fowls, and green stuff at one port, he sailed for another. Scurvy, the relentless familiar of the sailor on the deep sea, made no peril or labor too severe. At night Cook’s ships approached Oati-piha, or Ohetepeha, Bay, as his log-writers termed this lagoon, from the Vaitapiha River, flowing into it, and the dawn found them in a calm a mile and a half from the reef.
They put down boats and tried to tow off their ships, but the tide set them in more and more toward the rocks. For many hours they despaired of saving the vessels, though they used “warping-machines,” anchors, and kedges. From my cook-house I saw where they had struggled for their lives with breaker, current, and chartless bottom. A light breeze off the land saved them, and in another day they returned to “obtain cocoanuts, plantains, bananas, apples, yams and other roots, which were exchanged for nails and beads.” From the very pool into which I dived Cook’s hearties filled their casks with fresh water, after shooting “two muskets and a great gun along the shore to intimidate the Indians who were obstinate.”
Cook, on his third voyage to Tahiti, found here a large wooden cross on which was inscribed in Latin:
Christ conquered
Charles the Third Emperor
1774
It was plain that Spaniards had erected the cross, for Charles III was King of Spain. These English tars hated the dons, with whom they had but recently been embattled. When they were convinced that a Spanish ship had been at Tautira twice since they had departed, and that the builders of the cross had earned the respect and affection of the natives, the Britons, in their old way of fair and assertive dealing, left the cross standing after carving on the reverse in good Latin as a claim of prediscovery:
George III King
1767, 1769, 1773, 1774, 1777.
Two Spanish priests, they learned, had lived in the village between the arrival and return of the Spanish ships from Peru. They left no imprint of their Catholic religion except the cross and a memory of kindness; and why they resigned their mission to Tahiti is not known. The British missionaries did not come until 1797, on the Duff. They planted gardens and worked diligently and prayed. They had vast patience, and confidence in their all-powerful and avenging God, and a rapt devotion to his son, who forgave the sins of those who adopted His faith. Their ideals were as fixed as the stars, and their courage superior to the daily discouragements of their lives and continuous hardships of separation from home. But they could not break the strength of the superstitions of the pagans. A dozen years these English ecclesiastics delved in their gardens, built their houses, and begged Jehovah and Jesus to give them victory. Five years they mourned without message or aid from England. Their clothes were in tatters, and as covering their whole bodies with European garments from feet to scalp, except face and hands, was a rigid prescription of their own morals’ and an example to the almost nude Tahitians, they suffered keenly from shame. When, after half a decade, a brig arrived, its supplies were found ruined by salt water and mold. The poor clerics, in an earthly paradise, but hostile atmosphere, with little to report to an unheeding England save the depths of the untilled field of heathenry and depravity, might not have been blamed if they, too, had given up their mission. The fruits of twelve years of gardening and horticulture were destroyed in a day by ravaging parties. The fact that their lives were spared and their persons not attacked, except in a rare instance of an individual piece of villainy, is proof of the mild dispositions of the infidels. The Tahitians worshiped their gods with a superstitious awe not exceeded anywhere, and the outlandish white men proclaimed openly that these gods were dirty lumps of wood and stone and fiber, and to be despised in comparison with the Christian Gods, Father and Son, which they implored them under pain of eternal punishment to adopt. Imagine the fate of strangers who settled in New England or Spain a hundred and twenty years ago and who announced daily year in and year out that all the ancestors of the people there were in hell, that their God and their angels, saints, priests, and images were demons, or doing the work of demons, and that only by acknowledging their belief in a deity unheard-of before, by having water sprinkled on their heads, and ceasing the customs and thoughts taught as most moral and divine by their own revered priests, could they escape eternal misery as a consequence of a mistake made by a man and a woman named Atamu and Ivi six thousand years earlier! In Spain at that date the king whose name had been coupled with Christ’s on the cross near my house at Tautira was expelling the Jesuits from his kingdom, and the Holy Office recorded its thirtieth thousand human being burned at the stake in that country in the name of Jesus Christ.
The incredulous Tahitians tolerated the queer white men who wore long, black coats and who had learned their language, and who, except as to religion, spoke gently to them, healed their wounds, patted their children on the head, and taught them how to use iron and wood in unknown fashions. They saw that these men drank intoxicants in great moderation, lived in amity, and did not advantage themselves in trade or with the native women, as did all the other white men. And they wondered.
But they were convinced of the truth of their own religion. Their chiefs and priests replied: