"In 1853 an English missionary named Bicknell and four Hawaiian teachers, accompanied by their wives, went to the Marquesas at the request of a Marquesan chief, who had gone to the Sandwich Islands in a whale-ship to present the invitation. The French priests opposed the coming of these missionaries, but the chiefs refused to give them up, and so the teachers remained, but they made little progress in converting the natives to Christianity.
"The Catholic mission supports quite a number of priests and a bishop at the Marquesas. The mission has had very poor success in securing adherents to its faith, but it has done much good in the way of showing the natives the result of industry. Around each mission station there is a well-cultivated garden, and some of the finest cotton-fields on the islands may be found there. I have never seen anywhere a prettier cotton-field than at the mission we visited.
"There is a convent at Nookaheeva, where the French Sisters are educating about sixty Marquesan girls, whose ages vary from four to sixteen years. There is a similar school for boys, which is under the charge of the mission; and the bishop hopes that these boys and girls will be of service in educating and converting their people to the religion and civilization of the foreigner. But from all we can learn it will be a long time before his hopes are realized. The Queen is a devout Catholic, while the King is a nominal one, and each missionary has a small flock of followers; but the great majority are as much heathen as ever, and cling firmly to their old superstitions.
"One of the curious customs of the South Sea Islands is the tabu, and it prevails much more strongly at the Marquesas at the present time than anywhere else. The word is Polynesian, and singularly resembles in sound and meaning the to ebah of the ancient Hebrews. It has a good and a bad meaning, or rather it may apply to a sacred thing or to a wicked one. A cemetery, being consecrated ground, would be tabu, or sacred, and to fight there would be tabu, or wicked. Our English word 'tabooed' (forbidden) comes from the Polynesian one.
IN A GALE NEAR THE MARQUESAS.
"It would take too long to describe all the operations of tabu as it formerly prevailed through Polynesia and still exists in some of the islands, and especially in the Marquesas. There were two kinds of tabu, one of them permanent, the other temporary. The permanent tabu was a sort of traditional or social rule, and applied to everybody. All grounds and buildings dedicated to any idol or god were tabu, and therefore became places of refuge to men fleeing from an enemy, exactly like the Cities of Refuge mentioned in the Bible. It was tabu to touch the person of a chief or any article belonging to him, or eat anything he had touched. In the Tonga Islands it was tabu to speak the name of father or mother or of father-in-law or mother-in-law, to touch them, or to eat in their presence except with the back turned, when they were constructively supposed to be absent.