The boat shot rapidly forward, and readily passed through the opening between the cliffs. On each side, the rocks, jagged and rough, rose threateningly, but a further recess to the right afforded shelter, and the water became comparatively smooth. Passing through the channel and rounding the obstructing rocks they found another passage of similar extent which led further inland and brought them into a little crescent shaped bay of something like a half mile in length by a quarter of a mile in width. At several points were observed small strips of sandy beach, and strange wading birds of the stork species were seen, but not a suggestion or sign of a habitation.
“Crescent Bay!” cried Jim, noting the shape. “Isn’t it fine here!”
“It’s fine!” exclaimed the professor. “Who would think of such a place as this hidden away in the fastness of these hills. It’s like some of the secret haunts of the buccaneers.”
“It would be a nice bit of seamanship to bring a craft through that channel, though,” said Juarez.
“But I believe it could be done,” said Jim.
The scenery grew wilder and more beautiful with every stroke of the oars. From caverns of leafy shade came the gleam and flicker of many colored plumage.
Few readers but are familiar with the glowing color in which voyagers have painted the beautiful islands of the South Pacific. Nature has lavished upon them her rarest gifts; deep shadowy groves, valleys musical with murmuring streams, lofty mountains rising into the sapphire heaven out of a girdle of eternal foliage; wonderous visions of color in shrub and flower, the golden-yellow of the low-growing chinquapins, and the blood red osiers; a bright fresh air, redolent of fragrance, and a sea dimpling in cloudless sunshine.
But this fairy region, where Shakespeare might have fitly placed his Oberon and Titania, was inhabited by a race unworthy of its charms; a race enervated and corrupted, and abandoned to all those vices which usually accompany or originate in a degrading and sanguinary idolatry.
The Tahitians were not cannibals, but they sacrificed human victims in frightful numbers on the shrines of their hideous divinities.
Intoxication and theft were their predominant vices; continual wars decimated the population so that in some cases great islands were left absolutely without an inhabitant; infanticide was a universally prevalent custom, and that fully two-thirds of the young were cruelly murdered is a fact vouched for by the missionary Williams, one of the most intelligent, persevering, and successful of the pioneers of the true religion in Polynesia. This beautiful Tahitian group of islands was, therefore, a sink of vice and crime.