Before leaving Nukahiva the four of us from the Lurline, under the guidance of our good friend McGrath, journeyed on pony-back across the island to visit Queen Mareu of Hatiheu. The road led over two 3,000-foot mountain passes and along the whole length of the incomparable Typee Valley, immortalized by Herman Melville, and though something like eight inches of rain fell during the nine hours we were in the saddle, there were ample intervals between cataclysms in which to glimpse the beauties by the way. Lovely as we had found Taio-haie and Typee, however, the glamour of their charms paled before the supreme grandeur of the bay of Hatiheu, the most sublime combination of mountain, vale, and sea that my eyes have ever rested on.
The cliff-girt bay of Hatiheu, like those others of Nature's superlatives, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi and the Himalayas from Darjeeling, is one of the kind of things that makes a man feel foolish to attempt to describe, and I pay my silent tribute in the thrill which never fails to stir my heart at the mention of the name. My photograph gives a suggestion—just a suggestion—of what a single coup d'œil reveals.
Hatiheu was McGrath's headquarters where, in addition to conducting a trading business with the natives, he appeared to act as a sort of "Lord Chamberlain" to the Queen. Her Highness seemed very fond of the attractive young Canadian, and told us that she never took action in important "affairs of state" without first securing his advice. His word appeared to be law in the village, and I never heard him give an order that was not instantly carried out. He told off a body servant to look after each of us during our visit to Hatiheu, the one allotted to Claribel being a grizzled old cannibal, with a black band like a highwayman's mask tattooed across his face, who gave her a stone knife which he swore he had himself used in carving "long-pig," and who wept disconsolately on her departure.
One morning McGrath took us down to the beach and showed us with justifiable pride a half-completed cutter—an open boat of about thirty feet in length designed to be rigged as a sloop—which he was building to use in picking up copra from other villages along the coast of the island. All of the wood used had been hewed from trees felled within a hundred feet of the beach, he told us, and all of the work was being done with his own hands. The Commodore discoursed learnedly on the lines and construction of the little craft, and the rest of us commended its builder for his industry and ingenuity. No one of us dreamed that we were looking at the frame of a boat which was destined shortly to make a voyage that must be rated for all time as one of the miracles of deep sea sailing.
Our intercourse with Queen Mareu was somewhat restricted as a result of having to be carried on through the medium of an interpreter. We found her a most personable young lady of about twenty-five, with a striking face and figure and a glint of sombre fire slumbering in the depths of her dark eyes that indicated temper or temperament, and probably both. She had ascended the "throne" a year previously, after her father, the late King, had slipped on a ripe mango in endeavouring to elude the charge of a wild bull he was hunting. Her manifest determination to rule her home as well as her people was responsible, it was said, for the flight to Tahiti of her husband—a young half-caste of little account—a month or two later. Since then she had ruled alone. Of what mind she was in the matter of taking a "Prince Consort," we were unable to learn; but a tender light in the sloe eyes when "Lord Chamberlain" McGrath was about might have furnished a clue to the trend of her intentions. Whatever these might have been, however, Fate, as far as the near future was concerned, had other plans incubating for the slender, blue-eyed trader to whom every one that came in contact with him seemed to become so much attached.
The print holakau or Mother Hubbard wrapper—which descended upon the South Seas with the missionaries—would ordinarily hardly be rated as a regal garment; but Mareu, with the sweeping lines of her Dianesque figure softly outlined by the clinging calico, carried hers as if it was a Grecian robe, and was distinctly—well, I noted that even the Commodore was keeping his weather eye lifting whenever she hove above the horizon. But she was at her best when, in a bathing suit improvised from a pareo, she sported with the gay abandon of a porpoise in a natural pool of pink and blue coral where the beach curved up to the base of the great cliff, or, perched cross-legged in the stern of her little out-rigger canoe, sent that slender craft, a sliver of shining silver, speeding through the surf-swept mazes of the outer reef. She was indeed a consummate canoeist—quite the best I have ever seen—and in the light of subsequent events I have often recalled the words with which McGrath once referred to her skill with the paddle.
"Hatiheu, the most sublime combination of mountain, vale and sea that my eyes
have ever rested upon"
A Marquesan fisherman of Hatiheu