[CHAPTER VII]
CIRCLING TAHITI
The island of Tahiti has been the best known, or rather the most talked-about, point in the South Pacific since those latitudes were added to the mapped sections of the world. From the time that the much-maundered-over mutiny of the Bounty furnished the theme for Byron's "Island," and later events conspired to produce Hermann Melville's charming "Omoo" and Pierre Loti's idyllic "Rarahue," down to the more numerous but less finished efforts of recent years, Tahiti has been the inspiration for more literary endeavour, good and bad, than all the rest of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia combined. Undoubtedly it has had more than its share of publicity—latterly, largely because it is so easily and comfortably reached from both America and Australia—but the fact remains that it is uniquely—if not quite unmixedly—charming, and that it is perhaps better fitted to minister to the creature comforts of the visitor than any other of its sister islands of the South Pacific.
Civilization in the form of the galvanized iron roof, the glass window, the missionary, the holakau or Mother Hubbard wrapper and the whisky bottle has thrown its coldly corrective influence over the native life of Tahiti; but if it is the Kanaka in his pristine purity that one is seeking, Moorea and Bora-Bora—both in the Society Group—and the Paumotos and Marquesas are close at hand, and any of these the venturesome may reach by trading schooner, even if he is not so fortunate as to have a yacht at his disposal.
Chief item in the visitor's program in Tahiti—after he has called on the Governor, appeared at the Club and spent a small sack of Chilean pesos to see a hula which has been so completely "expurgated and legalized" as to make a Maypole dance on the green in his old home appear Bacchanalian by comparison—is the hundred-mile drive around the island. The roads are bad over half the way and the vehicles all the way, but the ride unfolds such an unending panorama of sea, surf and lagoon; of beach and reef; of mountain, cliff and crag; of torrent, cascade and waterfall, and of reckless, riotous, onrushing tropical vegetation as can be found along few, if any, similar stretches of road elsewhere in the world. Our drive, in the company of the American Consul, William Doty, and his sister, on which we were entertained each day by a different district chief with specially-arranged surf-rides, feasts, dances and himines, was one unbroken succession of new and delightful sensations.
At Tautira, the village second in importance to Papeete, we were the guest for three days of the suave and dignified old Ori, a chief who was once the host of the Stevensons for many weeks, and who, on occasion, fairly bubbled with piquant anecdotes of the great novelist. Returning down the leeward side of the island, we spent a day and a night with the wealthy Teta-nui in a big, comfortable two-story house which might have passed for a Southern plantation home of the ante-bellum days, and also found time to accept a luncheon invitation from the scholarly Tau-te Salmon, relation of the late King Pomare, university man and, on the occasion of his visits abroad, the fêted guest of Washington, London and Paris.
Tahitian driving comes pretty near to being the most reckless thing of the kind in my experience. It really isn't driving at all; "herding" is a more appropriate term. If your vehicle has more than one seat there will be three or four horses to haul it, driven "spike" in the former case, by twos in the latter. These animals are attached to the rig by traces that run to their collars, which, with the reins, constitute all there is to the harness. There is nothing in the nature of breeching for holding back, and, as the vehicle never has a brake, there is no way the wheel horses can save their heels but by beating it down the hills. A good driver will handle two horses unaided; beyond that number a boy is required upon the back of each additional one. With your driver and post boys wearing each a gaudy hibiscus or tiaré behind his ear, with their braided whips cracking merrily at everything from stray dogs and blossoms to the horses' ears and each other, and with all of them raising their voices in himine after himine with the indefatigability of a frog-pond chorus, your progress, on the score of picturesqueness at least, has no odds to ask of a Roman Triumph.
We decided to make the circuit by starting to windward and taking the roughest part of the road first. In a mile or two the last straggling Papeetan suburb had been left behind, the tall pillar of the Point Venus lighthouse was passed, and the road, plunging into the half-light of the jungle, became a grassy track. Here and there were breaks in the encompassing walls of verdure, and through them we had transient glimpses of the landscape—"that smiling Tahitian landscape where the weeds laugh at the idea of road boundaries; where the sea, disdaining regular shoreline, straggles aimlessly among its hundred islets; where the mountains flaunt all known laws of natural architecture and the wind disdains regular blasts; where the sun, as careless as the rest, shines one moment above the palm fronds as clear as frosted silver, and the next hides completely behind the lowering mask of a black cloud—a kingdom of laissez-faire."