Scenically the Marquesas are incomparably more beautiful than any of the other island groups of the Pacific, Hawaii not excepted. It is usual to hear the traveller who has covered Polynesia by the steamer route speak in similar terms of the Society Islands—especially Moorea and Tahiti—Samoa and Fiji, whichever may have chanced to tickle his fancy, quite losing sight of the fact that the route of his boat has been laid out along the lines of commerce irrespective of scenery. Not one steamer—save an occasional gunboat—goes to the Marquesas in a decade, the mail of the islands being carried to and from Tahiti every three or four months in a trading schooner. In the last twenty years scarce that number of strangers have visited the group, and a dozen or more of these came on the only three yachts that have ever found their way there. How little, therefore, the average South Sea tourist really knows of these islands may readily be seen.
The rock walls and cliffs of Moorea would be lost in the shadows of the great 4,000-foot spires that tower above the bay of Hatiheu; the 600-foot fall of Faatua, in Tahiti, might be shut from sight in the spray of the 2,000-foot fall of the Typee in Nukahiva; and the great cliff of Bora-Bora, the creeper-tapestried walls of the bay of Pago-Pago and the great gorge of the upper Rewa, in Fiji, could be hidden away in corners of the stupendous Atouna valley of Hiva-oa so effectually that they would pass unnoticed.
In the matter of riotous tropical growth, the Marquesas, being nearer the Line than any other of the South Sea islands that may lay claim to scenic beauty, have also all the best of the comparison. Nukahiva is an almost impenetrable jungle of lantana, burao, acacia, banana, guava and scores of other trees and bushes, nearly all of them flowering and fruit bearing. Indigenous to the island is the cassi plant, a thick shrub which covers patches of the lower hills in dense masses and which blossoms out in tiny yellow balls of almost solid pollen. The latter has a perfume of most penetrating sweetness, and in flowering time is blown by the Trades many leagues to the leeward of the island. This is the odour which I mentioned that we noted in the air while the yacht was still a hundred miles or more from land. Beating into the incomparable bay of Hatiheu at night with this perfumed breeze sweeping the deck, the wake a comet of golden-green light and the surf bursting in vivid spurts of phosphorescence along the silver-bright band of the beach, is to anticipate the approach to the mystical Islands of the Blest.
At a number of widely-separated points in the South Pacific—notably at Easter Island, Tahiti and Kusaie, of the Caroline group—are to be found great images of stone, the ruins of huge temples and other evidences of the existence of prehistoric races who, at least as builders, were far in advance of the Polynesian of today. French scientists had noted that in the Marquesas some of the abandoned house-foundations or pai-pais, contained far larger blocks of stone than any of those of later construction, but not until very recently was it known that there were works in the group not unworthy of comparison with the stone gods of Easter Island.
Just previous to our visit to Nukahiva, our friend McGrath, the trader of Hatiheu, while following up a wounded boar in the Typee Valley, chanced on an ancient Marquesan "Olympus," containing nine large stone images in a comparatively good state of preservation. Though this most interesting discovery lies within 300 yards of the main trail up the Typee Valley, no native on the island, either by actual knowledge or through tradition, has been able to shed light on its origin, purpose or probable age.
McGrath conducted our party to his "Goddery," as he facetiously called it, when we were crossing the island to pay a visit to the Queen of Hatiheu, and the several films which I exposed in a driving rainstorm resulted in what are undoubtedly the first photographs of these strange Marquesan images. The ancient shrine—for such it must have been—is situated on a terrace in the steeply-sloping side hill, and though the underbrush thins out somewhat in its immediate vicinity, the overarching bows of maupé and hau trees form so dense a screen that the heavens are completely obscured. Though it was full noonday when we visited the place, the light—partly, no doubt, on account of the rain—was as dim as that of an old cathedral, and my films, which were exposed four minutes each, would have turned out much better with ten.
The images, which had been set at regular intervals around an open stone-paved court, were from six to eight feet in height and averaged about three feet in thickness. We estimated each to contain from forty to sixty cubic feet of hard basaltic stone, the weight of which must have been several tons. As raising so great a weight up the sixty or seventy per cent. incline from the valley would have been almost impossible, and as no outcroppings of stone of similar nature appeared nearby, we were forced to the conclusion that the material for the images must have been quarried out at some point higher up the mountain and laboriously lowered to the terrace prepared for them.
"All of the images were covered with moss"
