White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

When they were cooked, a trough of popoi and one of feikai, or roasted breadfruit mixed with a cocoanut-milk sauce, were placed on the sand, and all squatted to dine. For a quarter of an hour the only sounds were the plup of fingers withdrawn from mouths filled with popoi, and the faint creaming of waves on the beach. Marquesans feel that eating is serious business. The devil-fish and crabs were the delicacies, and served as dessert. Blackened by the fire, squid and crustacean were eaten without condiment, the tentacles being devoured as one eats celery. I was soon satisfied, and while they lingered over their food and smoked I strolled up the valley a little way, still feeling the pressure of that severed arm.

Hana Hevane had its people one time. They vanished as from a hundred other valleys, before the march of progress. The kindly green of the jungle had hidden the marks of human habitations, where once they had lived and loved and died.

Only the bones of La Corse, the schooner Jerome Capriata had sailed many years, lay rotting under a grotesque and dark banian, never more to feel the foot of man upon the deck or to toss upon the sea. A consoling wave lapped the empty pintles and gave the decaying craft a caress by the element whose mistress she so long had been. Her mast was still stepped, but a hundred centipedes crawled over the hull.

When I returned to the fire, the boatmen were talking. Ugh! Dried-up Stream! his stomach full and smoke in his mouth, bethought himself of a tale, an incident of this very spot. In a sardonic manner he began:

“The men of this island, Tahuata, in the old days descended on Fatu-hiva to hunt the man-meat. After the battle, they brought their captives to Hana Hevane to rest, to build a fire and to eat one of their catch. This they did, and departed again. But when they were in their canoes, they found they had forgotten a girl whom they had thrown on the sand, and they returned for her. The sea was rough, and they had to stay here on the beach for the night.

“As was the custom, they erected a gibbet, two posts and a horizontal bar, and on the bar they hung the living prisoners, with a cord of parau bark passed through the scalp and tied around the hair. Their arms were tied behind them, and they swung in the breeze.

“In the night, when the Tahuata men slept from their gluttony, one of them arose silently and unbound a prisoner who was his friend, and told him to run to the mountains. He then lay down and slept, and in the darkness this man who had been freed returned stealthily in the darkness, and unloosed a girl, the same who had been forgotten on the sand. In the morning the other captives were dead, but those who escaped were months in the fastness of the heights, living on roots and on birds they snared. In the end they went to Motopu. They were well received, for the Tahuata warriors thought a god had aided them, and they and their children lived long there.”

Ugh! smiled reminiscently as if his thoughts were returning from pleasant things, and clapped his hands as a signal for reembarking.

The bowls of food remaining were tied in baskets of leaves and hung in the banian tree to await the boatsmen's return for the night, the steersman was carried to his place, and the boat pushed through the surf.

A gaunt shark swam close to the reefs as we rowed out, a hungry, ill-looking monster. One of the bottles of rum the oarsmen had drunk on the way to Hana Hevane, the other was stored for their return, and to gain a third the son of Ugh! offered to go overboard and tie a rope to the shark's tail, which is the way natives often catch them. A shark was not worth a liter of rum, I said, being in no mind to risk the limbs of a man in such a sport. Besides, I had no more to give away. I could imagine the rage of Seventh Man Who Wallows should he learn of my wasting in such foolishness what would keep us both warm if it rained.