Deck and port /

by Walter Colton

Should suck him back to her insatiate grave.”

The young females are as fond of the water as the men. We passed in a boat yesterday a group of them sitting on the coral reef a mile out at sea. They were enjoying the surf, which broke over them with each successive billow. Now and then a stronger wave would sweep some of them from their perch, and bear them to a great distance in its whirling foam. But they would soon swim back again amidst the laughter of their companions. They were without covering, and plunged under the water till our boat had got past, and then recovered their position on the reef; and there they sat like mermaids,

Serene amid the breakers’ roar,

Their dark locks floating on the surge,

Attuning shells, through which they pour

The solemn ocean’s mimic dirge.

Saturday, June 20. Saturday here is a gala day, especially the afternoon, when the natives give themselves up to amusement. Every horse is in requisition; and though often without saddle or bridle, has a rider on him, who is dashing about like an adjutant at a regimental training. The great plain at the eastern end of the town is alive with groups that have collected to witness or participate in the fun. The variety of colors, which blended their hues in Joseph’s coat, hold no comparison with the motley dyes which flare up here in the costume of the crowd. They resemble the tints of the forest, when the autumn’s breath has touched its leaves with frost; the foam of ocean breaking over their coral reef is not more tumultuous than the roar and rush of these living tides.

Here streams away a valetudinarian, whose puny frame has been borne to this shore like a bubble from some foreign clime. His light horse, fleet of foot, heeds his weight as little as if he were an elf that had left the forest to frolic on the green. His thin legs lie in the shadow of his stirrup-straps, while his sharp face peers up between the high pommel and stern of his saddle like a famished owl, watching between two old turrets a lunar eclipse.

Near him dashes on the wife of a chief, whose vast bulk shakes over the plunge of her strong horse as if the fat would fall from her sides in living flakes. The broad leaves of the koa tremble in the chaplet that encircles her head; her great shawl floats on the wind like a topsail, while the vast sweep of her garments rolls down over her courser’s sides like the folds of an Arab’s tent. By the side of her puny attendant she shows like the full-orbed moon with a little star twinkling near her rim; or like a giant oak with an alder in its shade; or like a ship-of-the-line with a cockle-boat under her lee.

Here sweeps past a compact figure on a horse half wild from the woods. His white trowsers, his blue roundabout, and tarpaulin with its yard of black ribbon streaming over the right ear, show him to be a tar fresh from the deck. His hammock-blanket, with its nettings for a girth, serve him for a saddle; while his bridle is a rope bent on a small anchor, which is wreathed with leaves and flowers, and which he can let go, when he would bring up his unkeeled craft. A shout follows wherever his unmanageable horse dashes,—unless it be among the crowd, and then there is such a scattering as there would be among sheep at the pounce of a wolf, or among pigeons at the swoop of the hawk.