His appearance was eccentric. He was stout, and with a rough, white beard all over his face and neck, and even on his chest. He wore a frock coat and a large cow-boy hat of white felt. His sockless feet were in old base-ball shoes of “eelskin,” which were of the exact color of his coat, a dull green, like moldy, dried peas. Apparently the coat was his only garment; but it was capacious, and came almost to his knobby knees. Missing buttons down its front were replaced by bits of cord or rope. The pockets were stuffed with papers, mangos, and a hunk of bread. A stump of lead-pencil was behind his ear. His hair, a dusty white, met the frayed collar of the coat, and through the temporary gaps which he made in its length to cool his body, I saw it like a gnarled and mossy tree. His hands were grimy and his nails black-edged, but there was intellect in his eye, and a broken force in his huddled, loosed attitude. He was not decrepit, or with a trace of humility, but had the ease of the philosopher and also his detachment. It was plain he did the best he could with his garb, and was entirely undisturbed, and perhaps even unmindful, of its ludicrousness. He was as serene as Diogenes must have been when he crawled naked from his tub into the sun.
We talked first of the horses in the lagoon a dozen yards from us, their grooms or their owners submerging them, and squatting on the ground to chat as the horses wallowed willingly in five feet of salt water. We agreed that the Tahitians were as bad drivers as the Chinese, and that they were, wittingly or unwittingly, cruel to their beasts of burden. This led to a discussion of native traits, and he was caustic in his castigation of the Tahitians. He asked me my name and what brought me to Tahiti; and when, wanting to be as honest-spoken as he, I said, “Romance, adventure,” he burst out that I was crazy.
“I have been here seventeen years,” he said bitterly—“me, Ivan Stroganoff, who was once happy as secretary to the governor of Irkutsk! I was better off when I was on the Merrimac fighting the Monitor, or with Mosby, the guerilla, than I am in this accursed island. I think a man is mad who can leave Tahiti and stays here. I wish I could go away. I would like to die elsewhere. I am eighty years old, I starve here, and I sleep in a chicken-coop in the suburbs.”
“You are lodged exactly as was Charlie Stoddard, who wrote ‘South Sea Idylls,’ ” I interposed.
“They have lied always, those writers about Tahiti,” said Ivan Stroganoff. “Melville, Loti, Moerenhout, Pallander, your Stevenson,—I don’t know that Stoddard,—all are meretricious, with their pomp of words and no truth. I have comparisons to make with other nations. I am more than sixty years a traveler, and I am here seventeen years without cessation, in hell all the time.”
“You Russians always like the French. How about their achievements here?” I questioned, hoping to lift his shade of melancholy.
“The French?” he repeated. “They are brigands and weak governors. They have been in Tahiti four generations. Do you want to know how they got hold here? A monarchy, a foolish Louis, sent a marine savant and soldier named Dumont D’Urville to the South Seas with the casual orders:
“ ‘D’apprivoiser les hommes, et de rendre les femmes un peu plus sauvages;’ to tame the men and make the women a little more savage. The French did both, and took all of this part of the world they could find unseized by Europe, and tamable, at not too great a shedding of French blood. They said that it was their duty to restore Temoana his kingdom in the Marquesas Islands, eight hundred miles from here, northward, Temoana had been a singer of psalms at the Protestant mission in his valley of Tai-o-hae, in the island of Nukahiva, a victim of shanghaiers, a cook on a whaler, a tattooed man in English penny shows, a repatriate, a protege of the Catholic archbishop of the Marquesans, and finally, through the influence of the Roman church, a king. He worked damned hard for the French flag and the church, and the generous colonial bureau of France paid his widow a pension of ten dollars a month until she died of melancholy among the nuns. I knew her and I knew men who knew him. He was given a gorgeous uniform of gold lace by his promoters, which I think killed him, though when he sweated, he would strip to his handsomely marked skin and sit naked in the breeze. The queen never wore more than a diaper or a gown.
“With the Marquesas Islands taken, the French warships came to Tahiti. French Catholic priests had been deported from here because the Protestants were already in possession, and objected to competition, saying that the priests were children of Beelzebub, and taught false doctrines and morals. The Queen of Tahiti, whose dynasty the Protestant missionaries had created, advised the pope’s men to seek a heathen people not already worshiping the true God. The zealous priests who had come with explicit commands to found a mission in Tahiti, launched the curse of Rome upon the king, the Protestant ministers, and especially upon Mr. Pritchard, the British consul and the queen’s physician and spiritual adviser.
“Pritchard had the interests of England and the Lord at heart, and his whispers in the queen’s ear sent the earnest priests aboard a ship bound for a distant port. They complained, and the French admiral then arrived and pointed his guns at the palace and the Protestant mission, and demanded thirty thousand dollars for the insult to the French flag; and for the jibe at the pope, the matching of every Protestant church in the islands, by a Catholic edifice. The queen had a panic and fled to Moorea in a canoe. The admiral then put Consul Pritchard in jail for ten days, and after chastening his mood, put him on an English ship at sea homeward bound. France and England were showing their teeth at each other over more important differences, which ended in a revolution in Paris and a change of kings, so that the admiral had his way. The queen came back, the priests established their mission and their churches, and the Tahitians with any blood in them went to war again. The French built forts about the island, and killed off with their guns all the natives they could get sight of. Then they took all the other islands around here that England didn’t have, declared Tahiti had to be a protectorate in 1843, and in 1880 gave King Pomaré Fifth twelve thousand dollars a year to let them annex his kingdom. You see, after all, his crown was made by the British puritans, and taken from him by the French or Romish Church.”