“And did the fête help the parish?” I asked with that bromidic zeal to please that so often discloses the fly just when the ointment's smell is sweetest.
“Alas!” he replied, with a sorrowful shake of his beard. “Even the girl who had worn the white armor leaped from the mast of a ship to escape infamy and was drowned. Yet there was grandeur of sacrifice in that. But for the others, they die fast, too. Some day the priest will be alone here without a flock.”
He picked up a garment or two, placed the Holy Sacrament with pious care in his breast, and we walked together through the mournful and decaying village, passing a few melancholy natives.
I said to Père Simeon as he stepped into the canoe, “You are like a shepherd who pursues his sheep wherever they may wander, to gather them into the fold at last.”
“C'est vrai,” he smiled sadly. “The bishop himself had to go to Hiva-oa from here, because there were really not enough people left alive for the seat of his bishopric. At least, there will be some here when I die, for I am old. Ah, thirty years ago, when I came here, there were souls to be saved! Thousands of them. But I love the last one. There are still a hundred left on Huapu. There is work yet, for the devil grows more active yearly.”
CHAPTER XXV
America's claim to the Marquesas; adventures of Captain Porter in 1812; war between Haapa and Tai-o-hae, and the conquest of Typee valley.
America might have been responsible for the death of the Marquesan race had not the young nation been engaged in a deadly struggle with Great Britain when an American naval captain, David Porter, seized Nuka-hiva. A hundred years ago the Stars and Stripes floated over the little hill above the bay, and American cannon upon it commanded the village of Tai-o-hae. Beneath the verdure is still buried the proclamation of Porter, with coins of the young republic, unless the natives dug up the bottle after the destruction of the last of Porter's forces. They witnessed the ceremony of its planting, which must have appeared to them a ritual to please the powerful gods of the whites. Unless respect for the tapu placed on the bottle by “Opotee” restrained them, they probably brought it to the light and examined the magic under its cork.
The adventures of Porter here were as strange and romantic as those of any of the hundreds of the gypsies of the sea who sailed this tropic and spilled the blood of a people unused to their ways and ignorant of their inventions and weapons of power.
Porter had left the United States in command of the frigate Essex, to destroy British shipping, capture British ships, and British sailors. Porter, son and nephew of American naval officers, destined to be foster-father of Farragut, the first American admiral, and father of the great Admiral Porter, was then in his early thirties and loved a fight. He harried the British in the Atlantic, doubled Cape Horn without orders, and did them evil on the high seas, and at last, with many prisoners and with prize crews aboard his captures, he made for the Marquesas to refresh his men, repair his ships, and get water, food, and wood for the voyage home.