“Did you not lie in wait for those murderers?”
Tutaiei hemmed and cast down his eye.
“The French came then with soldiers and made it so that if I killed any one, they killed me; the law, they call it. They did nothing to those warriors because the deed was done before the French came. I waited and thought. I bought a gun from a whaler. But the time never came.
“All my people had died at their hands. Six heads they carried back to feast on the brains. They ate the brains of my wife. I kept the names of those that I should kill. There was Kiihakia, who slew Moariniu, the blind man; Nakahania, who killed Hakaie, husband of Tepeiu; Niana, who cut off the head of Tahukea, who was their daughter and my woman; Veatetau should die for Tahiahokaani, who was young and beautiful, who was the sister of my woman. I waited too long, for time took them all, and I alone survive of the people of Oi, or of those who killed them.”
“The vendetta between valleys—called umuhuke, or the Vengeance of the Oven,—thus wiped out the people of Oi,” commented Père Olivier. “The skulls were kept in banian-trees, or in the houses. Frère Fesal started the mission here and built that little church. There were plenty of people to work among. But now, after thirty years I have been here, they are nearly finished. They have no courage to go on, that is all. C'est un pays sans l'avenir. The family of the dying never weep. They gather to eat the feast of the dead, and the crying is a rite, no more. These people are tired of life.”
It was Stevenson who though that “the ending of the most healthful, if not the most humane, of field sports—hedge warfare—” had much to do with depopulation. Either horn of the dilemma is dangerous to touch. It is unthinkable, perhaps, that white conquerors should have allowed the Marquesans to follow their own customs of warfare. But changes in the customs of every race must come from within that race or they will destroy it. The essence of life is freedom.
Any one who has read their past and knows them now must admit that the Marquesans have not been improved in morality by their contact with the whites. Alien customs have been forced upon them. And they are dying for lack of expression, nationally and individually. Disease, of course, is the weapon that kills them, but it finds its victims unguarded by hope or desire to live, willing to meet death half way, the grave a haven.
Beach at Oomoa