White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

“Bonjour!” said he. “You have slept well. Your angel guardian thinks well of you. The dawn comes.”

I asked him if I might relieve him of tiller and sheet, and he, with an injunction to keep the sail full and far, unpocketed his breviary, and was instantly absorbed in its contents.

Our tack was toward the eastern distance, and no glimpse of land or cloud made us aught but solitary travelers in illimitable space. The sun was beneath the deep, but in the hush of the pale light one felt the awe of its coming. Slowly a faint glow began to gild a line that circled the farthest east. Gold it was at first, like a segment of a marriage ring, then a bolt of copper shot from the level waters to the zenith and a thousand vivid colors were emptied upon the sky and the sea. Roses were strewn on the glowing waste, rose and gold and purple curtained the horizon, and suddenly, without warning, abrupt as lightning, the sun beamed hot above the edge of the world.

The Marquesans stirred, their bodies stretched and their lungs expanded in the throes of returning consciousness. Then one sat up and called loudly, “A titahi a atu! Another day!” The others rose, and immediately began to uncover the popoi bowl. They had canned fish and bread, too, and ate steadily, without a word, for ten minutes. The steersman, who had joined them, returned to the helm, and the priest and I enjoyed the bananas and canned beef with water from the jug, and cigarettes.

All day the Jeanne d'Arc held steadily on the several tacks we steered, and all day no living thing but bird or fish disturbed the loneliness of the great empty sea. Père Victorien read his breviary or told his beads in abstracted contemplation, and I, lying on the bottom of the boat with my hat shielding my eyes from the beating rays of the sun, pondered on what I knew of Tai-o-hae, the port on the island of Nuka-hiva, to which we were bound.

For two hundred years after the discovery of the southern group—the islands we had left behind us—the northern group was still unknown to the world. Captain Ingraham, of Boston, found Nuka-hiva in 1791, and called the seven small islets the Washington Islands. Twenty years later, during the war of 1812, Porter refitted his ships there to prey upon the British, and but for the perfidy,—or, from another view, the patriotism,—of an Englishman in his command, Porter might have succeeded in making the Marquesas American possessions.

Tai-o-hae became the seat of power of the whites in the islands; it waxed in importance, saw admirals, governors, and bishops sitting in state on the broad verandas of government buildings, witnessed that new thing, the making of a king and queen, knew the stolid march of convicts, white and brown, images of saints carried in processions, and schools opened to regenerate the race of idol-worshippers.

Tai-o-hae saw all the plans of grandeur wane, saw saloons and opium, vice and disease, fastened upon the natives, and saw the converted, the old gods overthrown, the new God reigning, cut down like trees when the fire runs wild in the forest.

The dream of minting the strength and happiness of the giant men of the islands into gold for the white labor-kings dissolved into a nightmare as the giants perished. It was hard to make the free peoples toil as slaves for foreign masters, so the foreign masters brought opium. To get this “Cause of Wonder Sleep,” of more delight than kava, the Marquesan was taught to hoe and garner cotton, to gather copra and even to become the servant of the white man. The hopes of the invaders were rosy. They faded quickly. The Marquesans faded faster. The saloons of Tai-o-hae were gutters of drunkenness. The paepaes were wailing-places for the dead. No government arrested vice or stopped the traffic in death-dealing drugs until too late. Then, with no people left to exploit, the colonial ministers in Paris forgot the Marquesas.

In the lifetime of a man, Tai-o-hae swelled from a simple native village with thousands of healthy, happy people, to the capital of an archipelago, with warships, troops, prisons, churches, schools, and plantations, and reverted to a deserted, melancholy beach, with decaying, uninhabited buildings testifying to catastrophe. Since Kahuiti, my man-eating friend of Taaoa, was born, the cycle had been completed.