Thus pig-sticking in the Marquesas. It is bloody and cruel, as is the killing of all animals; but, because the quarry is nearly always dropped in its tracks, it is far less open to criticism on that score than most other forms of hunting. But the finest thing—I may well say, the grandest thing—about it is the fact that it is a strictly man-to-beast, give-and-take affair, with the hunter meeting his quarry more nearly on equal terms than in any other form of hunting practised since the days of the Cave Men.
Of the wild cattle hunt which McGrath, after infinite trouble, arranged for one of the final days of our stay in Nukahiva, I have written elsewhere.
[CHAPTER V]
THE PASSION PLAY AT UAHUKA
The decennial Passion Play at Oberammergau is, perhaps, the most written and talked about theatrical performance that has ever been staged, and even the annual pageants put on during Holy Week in certain of the Italian, Spanish and South American theatres have attained to considerable publicity in other parts of the world; the Passion Play of the French mission at Uahuka, an island of the Marquesan group, has been witnessed by less than half a dozen non-resident white men, and as a consequence the fame of it, except such hazy versions as have found their way to France through the channels of the missionary society records, scarcely reaches beyond the coral reefs that fringe the rocky Uahukan shores.
Vague rumours of a strange Marquesan Passion Play had come to us before we sailed from Hawaii, and on the arrival of the yacht in Taio-haie, the capital of that group, we were assured that such a performance was "staged" annually. The interest of this announcement was tempered by the news that the last performance had taken place a fortnight previously and that another would not be put on until Holy Week of the following year. We did not make our projected visit to Uahuka, therefore, and I was consequently unable to secure firsthand data regarding this unique event. The somewhat fragmentary and frivolous account I am writing smacks strongly, I fear, of the sources from which my information was gathered, this or that trader and skipper of the "beaches" of Taio-haie and Tahiti, and especially a fascinating renegade by the name of Bruce Manners, who came off to the yacht one night in Papeete and smoked a half dozen of the Commodore's Perfectos while spinning us yarns of his lurid career in the Marquesas and Paumotos.
All through the South Pacific missionary work follows closely the lines of nationality, with the London Missionary Society dominant in the British possessions, and French organizations, both Protestant and Catholic, monopolizing the field in the islands over which the jaunty tri-colour of France whips itself to tatters in the whistling Southeast Trades. As the United States holds only a naval station at Pago Pago, Samoa, and Germany is now out of the Pacific altogether, missionaries of American and Teutonic extraction are a negligible quantity. This alignment gives the aggressive British society most of the reclamation work west of the 180th meridian, and the French the territory to the east. The headquarters of the French missionary system is that country's capital in the South Seas, Papeete, Tahiti, in the Society group; but the active zone, the "firing line," so to speak, is in the barbaric and cannibalistic Marquesas, and centres in the big island of the north group, Uahuka.