Tahitian royalty was hereditary, and women were not excluded. There were chiefs and chiefesses governing tribes, and head chiefs and head chiefesses ruling over several tribes or the whole island. There were no crowns and no sceptres. The insignia of royalty was a belt ornamented with feathers. The red feathers were what the diamonds and other precious stones are in ancient and modern crowns. This belt was called Maro. Captain Cook gives the following description of a maro:
It is a girdle, about five yards long, and fifteen inches broad; and, from its name, seems to be put on in the same manner as is the common maro, or piece of cloth used by these people to wrap round the waist. It was ornamented with red and yellow feathers; but mostly with the latter, taken from a dove found upon the island. The one end was bordered with eight pieces, each about the size and shape of a horseshoe, having their edges fringed with black feathers. The other end was forked, and the points were of different lengths. The feathers were in square compartments, ranged in two rows, and otherwise so disposed to produce a pleasing effect. They had been first pasted or fixed upon some of their own cloth, and then sewed to the upper end of the pendant which Captain Wallis had displayed, and left flying ashore, the first time that he landed at Matavai.
This insignia of office was highly respected by the natives and was handed down from one generation of rulers to the other, carrying with it the sovereignty of the office. One of the civil wars in the island was caused by a failure on the part of one of the chief esses (Purea) to deliver the maro to her legitimate successor.
DISEASES OF TAHITI
Before the Europeans came to Tahiti, the beautiful little island was a sanatorium. The natives were temperate, frugal in their habits, subsisting almost exclusively on fish, fruit and vegetables, and lived practically an outdoor life even in their bamboo huts. They were unencumbered by useless clothing and spent, as they do now, much of their time in sea and fresh-water bathing. They were almost exempt from acute destructive diseases. They were free from the most fatal of acute contagious and infectious diseases, such as smallpox, measles, scarlatina, cholera, etc. Tuberculosis and venereal diseases were unknown before the white man invaded the island. The immediate effect of the European civilization on the health and lives of the natives was frightful. On this subject I will let Ariitaimai speak:
When England and France began to show us the advantages of their civilization, we were, as races then went, a great people. Hawaii, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Tonga, Samoa and New Zealand made a respectable figure on the earth's surface, and contained a population of no small size, better fitted than any other possible community for the condition in which they lived. Tahiti, being the first to come in close contact with the foreigners, was first to suffer. The people, who numbered, according to Cook, two hundred thousand in 1767, numbered less than twenty thousand in 1797, according to the missionaries, and only about five thousand in 1803. This frightful mortality has been often doubted, because Europeans have naturally shrunk from admit ting the horrors of their own work, but no one doubts it who belongs to the native race. Tahiti did not stand alone in misery; what happened there happened everywhere, not only in the great groups of high islands, like Hawaii with three or four hundred thousand people, but in little coral atolls which could only support a few score.
FISHERMEN'S HOME
Moerenhout, who was the most familiar of all travelers with the islands in our part of the ocean, told the same story about all. He was in the Austral group in 1834. At Raivave he found ninety or one hundred native rapidly dying, where fully twelve hundred had been living only twelve or fourteen years before. At Tubuai he found less than two hundred people among the ruins of houses, temples and tombs. At Rurutu and Rimitava, where a thousand or twelve hundred people had occupied each, hardly two hundred were left, while nearly all the women had been swept away at Rurutu. Tlie story of the Easter Islanders is famous. That of the Marquesas is about as pathetic as that of Tahiti or Hawaii. Everywhere the Polynesian perished, and to him it mattered little whether he died of some new disease or from some new weapon, like the musket, or from misgovernment, caused by the foreign intervention.
No doubt the new diseases were most fatal. Almost all of them took some form of fever, and comparatively harmless epidemics, like measles, became frightfully fatal when the native, to allay the fever, insisted on bathing in cold water. Dysentery and ordinary colds, which the people were too ignorant and too indolent to nurse, took the proportions of plagues. For forty generations these people had been isolated in this ocean, as though they were in a modern sanatorium, protected from contact with new forms of disease, and living on vegetables and fish. The virulent diseases which had been developed among the struggling masses of Asia and Europe found a rich field for destruction when they were brought to the South Seas. Just as such pests as lantana, the mimosa or sensitive plant, and the guava have overrun many of the islands, where the field for them was open, so diseases ran through the people. For this, perhaps, the foreigners were not wholly responsible, although their civilization certainly was; but for the political misery the foreigner was wholly to blame, and for the social and moral degradation he was the active cause. No doubt the ancient society of Tahiti had plenty of vices and was a sort of Paris in its refinements of wickedness, but these had not prevented the islanders from leading as happy lives as had ever been known among men.
These are strong words, but they are nevertheless only too true. Civilization brings to savage races curses as well as blessings. The primitive people are more receptive of new vices than new virtues.