In the Track of the Trades / The Account of a Fourteen Thousand Mile Yachting Cruise to the Hawaiis, Marquesas, Societies, Samoas and Fijis

by Lewis R. Freeman

A number of Chinamen, with plantations small enough to allow them to do their own work, are making a considerable success of vanilla, but where Kanakas have had to be employed there has been nothing but failure. A native set to pollenize a lot of vines—this has to be done artificially in Tahiti on account of the absence of the insects which perform that service in other countries—is more likely than not to pick the orchidlike flowers to chew or stick behind his ear, or to weave the new tendrils into garlands for his Olympian brow. They tell you in Papeete that the vanilla industry is not flourishing because of the increasing use of artificial flavouring extracts in America; the real reason for its backwardness is the non-use of an artificial—or any other kind of—labour extractor on the Kanaka.

At the Isthmus of Terevao the girdling highway swings back down the leeward side of the island to Papeete. Tautira is reached by a spur which is, however, much better maintained than portions of the main road. The bush is not so dense in this part of the island as along the road we had just traversed, but the mountains, especially in the vicinity of Tautira, assume an even wilder aspect than any down to windward. Knife-pointed pinnacles of every conceivable shade of blue, green and purple are tossed together in an aimless jumble, showing the skyline of a battered saw. Here a mountain has been rent by some Titan to let a river through; there a mountain has refused to rend and a river closes its eyes and launches itself over a thousand-foot cliff, paling with terror as it realizes the magnitude of its leap and changing from a bar of green jade to a fluttering scarf of grey satin, finally to collapse into a rumple of white gossamer where the jungle riots in shimmering verdancy against the foot of the cliff.

Unfathomable gorges with overhanging sides tunnel into the hearts of unclimbable mountains; sheer precipices drop curtains of creepers that dangle their be-tasselled skirts in the quiet river reaches hundreds of feet below; ghostly castles, scarped and buttressed and battlemented, now of mist-wreathed rock, now of rockpierced mist, fade and reappear with the shifting of the curtains of the clouds; and above is the flaming, sun-shot sky, below the wind-tossed, diamond-sprinkled ocean. Very pertinent was Claribel's observation in point.

"What does the Frenchman want of absinthe and the Chinaman of opium when they both have a place like this to look upon?" she ejaculated between jolts as we bounded along between the mountains and the sea on this last lap of the outward journey; "it is a dream that nothing but a flying Tahitian chariot brought up short by a four-foot mid-river boulder can bring you out of."

An instant later the very thing which Claribel had defined as alone being equal to waking one from his dream of the mountains had eventuated, and because the left fore wheel had been called upon to stand more than its share of such jolts, it dished up like a closed umbrella, collapsed, and precipitated every one and everything in the long-suffering old vehicle into the water. Luckily, Tautira, our destination, lay just beyond the farther bank and, salvaging a couple of bags containing changes of only slightly wet clothes, we waded out and proceeded on foot to the house which Chief Ori had prepared for us, leaving the driver to bring on the wreckage at leisure.

Tautira, though the second town of the island, is almost entirely a native settlement, the "foreign colony" consisting of but one missionary, one trader and one French official. This does not mean that the town is backward or decadent, but rather to the contrary. Missionaries, as a pretty general rule, will always be found thickest on the "firing line," and where operations are in the hands of a single white or native preacher it may be taken to indicate that the people, professedly at least, are well within the fold. There is but one trader in Tautira because the natives are shrewd enough to own their own cutters and trade directly with Papeete. The official is there to collect taxes, not because he is needed to keep order. As far as morals are concerned, Consul Doty expressed it very well when he said that "there is more mischief to the square foot—or should I say the rounded ankle?—in Papeete than in all of Tautira."

Except for its scenery, Tautira's chief claim to distinction is Ori, and Ori's chief claim to distinction is the fact that he was the host for a month or more of Robert Louis Stevenson's party on the novelist's first cruise to the South Seas in the Casco. Stevenson, still weak from overwork and hardly yet beginning to feel the beneficial effects of the cruise, was ill during nearly all of his stay in Tautira. No account of this visit appears in his South Sea book, but in the published letters of his mother it is written of at length, and most entertainingly.

From Mrs. Stevenson's account it would appear that the party was tendered the usual round of feasts, dances and gifts, and countered with feasts and gift-givings of its own. They tell you in Papeete that Stevenson's illness during this visit made him see their island through dark glasses, and that this was the reason that he ultimately settled in Samoa instead of Tahiti. From the standpoint of picturesque and tropical loveliness Tautira, and even Papeete, is distinctly ahead of Apia, so that it is more likely that the greater attractiveness of the incomparable Samoan native who, then as now, was much less touched by white influence than the Tahitian, turned the scale in favour of the more westerly group for the novelist's home.

Ori—a wily old hypocrite whose six-feet-four of stature, unlike that of most Tahitians, is not cumbered with an ounce of superfluous flesh—made a great point of assuring us that the whole plan of entertainment provided for our party was patterned on that which he had dispensed to the Stevensons. We were quartered in one of the houses the Stevensons had occupied; quite as many pigs and chickens were slaughtered for our "native" feasts as for those of the Stevensons; full as many singers were mustered for our himines as turned out for the Stevensons; he would lavish quite as rich gifts upon us as he did upon the Stevensons, and—the Stevensons had given him such and such and such things, ad infinitum. Inasmuch as we were paying for our entertainment at a rate which we knew to be about a hundred per cent. above the normal, there was little of base ingratitude in the remark of the Commodore who, when his knife blade turned on the rubberoid leg of one of Ori's broilers, asked that venerable rascal if the drumstick in question came from one of the chickens left over by the Stevensons.