Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 2

I drew a deep breath of the salt air when there came to me a new and delicious odor. It seemed to steal from a secret garden under the sea, and I thought of mermaids plucking the blossoms of their coral arbors for the perfuming and adornment of their golden hair. But sweeter and heavier it floated upon the slight breeze, and I knew it for the famed zephyr that carries to the voyager to Tahiti the scents of the flowers of that idyllic land. It was the life vapor of the hinano, the tiare and the frangipani exhaled by those flowers of Tahiti, to be wafted to the sailor before he sights the scene itself, the breath of Lorelei that spelled the sense of the voyager. No s.h.i.+pwrecked mariner could have felt more poignancy in his search for a hospitable strand than I on the plunging prow of the Noa-Noa in my quest through the bright suns.h.i.+ne of that afternoon for the haven of desire. I strained my eyes to see it, to realize the gossamer dream I had spun since boyhood from the leaves of beloved poets.

It was shortly after three o'clock that the vision came in reality, more marvelous, more exquisite, more unimaginable than the conception of all my reveries--a dim shadow in the far offing, a dark speck in the lofty clouds, a ma.s.s of towering green upon the blue water, the fast unfoldment of emerald, pale hills and glittering reef. Nearer as sailed our s.h.i.+p, the panorama was lovelier. It was the culmination of enchantment, the fulfilment of the wildest fantasy of wondrous color, strange form, and lavish adornment.

The island rose in changing shape from the soft Pacific sea, here sheer and challenging, there sloping gently from mountain height to ocean sheen; different all about, altering with hiding sun or s.h.i.+fting view its magic mold, with moods as varied as the wind, but ever lovely, alluring, new.

I marked the volcanic make of it, cast up from the low bed of Neptune an eon ago, its loftiest peaks peering from the long cloud-streamers a mile and a half above my eyes, and its valleys embracing caverns of shadow. It was a stupendous precipice suspended from the vault of heaven, and in its ma.s.sive folds secreted the wonders I had come so far to see. Every minute the bewildering contours were trans.m.u.ted by the play of sun and cloud and our swift progression toward the land.

Red spots appeared rare against the field of verdure where the mountain-side had been stripped naked by erosion, and the volcanic cinnabar of ages contrasted oddly with the many greens of frond and palm and hillside grove. Curious, fantastic, the hanging peaks and cloud-capped scarps, black against the fleecy drift, were tauntingly reminiscent of the evening skies of the last few days, as if the divine artist had sketched lightly upon the azure of the heavens the entrancing picture to be drawn firmly and grandly in beetling crag and sublime steep.

Most of all, as the island swam closer, the embracing fringe of cocoanut-trees drew my eyes. They were like a girdle upon the beautiful body of the land, whose lower half was in the ocean. They seemed the freewaving banners of romance, whispering always of nude peoples, of savage whites, of ruthless pa.s.sion, of rum and missionaries, cannibals and heathen altars, of the fierce struggle of the artificial and the primitive. I loved these palms, brothers of my soul, and for me they have never lost their romantic significance.

From the sea, the village of Papeete, the capital and port, was all but hidden in the wood of many kinds of trees that lies between the beach and the hills. Red and gray roofs appeared among the ma.s.s of growing things at almost the same height, for the capital rested on only a narrow shelf of rising land, and the mountains descended from the sky to the very water's-edge. Greener than the Barbadoes, like malachite upon the dazzling Spanish Main, Tahiti gleamed as a promise of Elysium.

A lighthouse, tall minister of warning, lifted upon a headland, and suddenly there was disclosed intimately the brilliant, s.h.i.+mmering surf breaking on the tortuous coral reef that banded the island a mile away. It was like a circlet of quicksilver in the sun, a quivering, s.h.i.+ning, waving wreath. Soon we heard the eternal diapason of these sh.o.r.es, the constant and immortal music of the breakers on the white stone barrier, a low, deep, resonant note that lulls the soul to sleep by day as it does the body by night.

Guardian sound of the South Seas it is, the hushed, echoic roar of a Jovian organ that chants of the dangers of the sea without, and the peace of the lagoon within, the reef.

A stretch of houses showed--the warehouses and shops of the merchants along the beach, the spire of a church, a line of wharf, a hundred tiny homes all but hidden in the foliage of the ferns. These gradually came into view as the s.h.i.+p, after skirting along the reef, steered through a break in the foam, a pa.s.s in the treacherous coral, and glided through opalescent and gla.s.sy shallows to a quay where all Papeete waited to greet us.

The quay was filled with women and men and children and dogs. Carriages and automobiles by the score attended just outside. Conspicuous above all were the Tahitian and part-Tahitian girls. In their long, graceful, waistless tunics of brilliant hues, their woven bamboo or panda.n.u.s hats, decorated with fresh flowers, their feet bare or thrust into French slippers, their brown eyes s.h.i.+ning with yearning, they were so many Circes to us from the sea. They smiled and looked with longing at these strangers, who felt curious thrills at this unknown openness of promise.

Louis de Bougainville wrote in his diary at his first coming to Tahiti a hundred and fifty years ago:

The boats were now crowded with women, whose beauty of face was equal to that of the ladies of Europe, and the symmetry of their forms much superior.

Leboucher called to his mother. "Madre mia! Como estas tu?"

Cries rang out in French, in Tahitian and in English. Islanders, returning, demanded information as to health, business ventures, happenings. Merry laughter echoed from the roof of the great shed, and I felt my heart suddenly become joyous.

The girls and women absorbed the attention of pa.s.sengers not of Tahiti. The New-Zealanders of the crew called excitedly to various ones. Most of the men pa.s.sengers, tarrying only with the vessel, planned to see a hula, and they wondered if any of those on the wharf were the dancers.

A white flower over the ear seemed a favorite adornment, some wearing it on one side and some on the other. What struck one immediately was the erect carriage of the women. They were tall and as straight as sunflower-stalks, walking with a swimming gait. They were graceful even when old. Those dark women and men seemed to fit in perfectly with the marvelous background of the cocoas, the bananas and the brilliant foliage. The whites appeared sickly, uncouth, beside the natives, and the white women, especially, faded and artificial.

The Noa-Noa was warped to the wharf, and I was within a few feet now of the welcoming crowd and could discern every detail.

Those young women were well called les belles Tahitiennes. Their skins were like pale-brown satin, but exceeding all their other charms were their l.u.s.trous eyes. They were very large, liquid, melting, and indescribably feminine--feminine in a way lost to Occidental women save only the Andalusians and the Neapolitans. They were framed in the longest, blackest, curly lashes, the lashes of dark Caucasian children. They were the eyes of children of the sun, eyes that had stirred disciplined seamen to desertion, eyes that had burned s.h.i.+ps, and created the mystery of the Bounty, eyes of enchantresses of the days of Helen.

"Prenez-garde vous!" said Madame Aubert, the invalid, in my ear.

Mixed now with the perfumes of the flowers was the odor of cocoanuts, coming from the piles of copra on the dock, a sweetish, oily smell, rich, powerful, and never in foreign lands to be inhaled without its bringing vividly before one scenes of the tropics.

The gangway was let down. I was, after years of antic.i.p.ation, in Tahiti.

Chapter III

Description of Tahiti--A volcanic rock and coral reef--Beauty of the Scenery--Papeete the center of the South Seas--Appearance of the Tahitians.

Tahiti was a molten rock, fused in a subterranean furnace, and cast in some frightful throe of the cooling sphere, high up above the surface of the sea, the seething ma.s.s forming into mountains and valleys, the valleys hemmed in except at their mouths by lofty barriers that stretch from thundering central ridges to the slanting shelf of alluvial soil which extends to the sand of the beach. It is a ma.s.s of volcanic matter to which the air, the rain, and the pa.s.sage of a million years have given an all-covering verdure except upon the loftiest peaks, have cut into strangely shaped cliffs, sloping hills, s.p.a.cious vales, and shadowy glens and dingles, and have poured down the rich detritus and humus to cover the coral beaches and afford sustenance for man and beast. About the island countless trillions of tiny animals have reared the s.h.i.+mmering reef which bears the brunt of the breaking seas, and spares their impact upon the precious land. These minute beings in the unfathomable scheme of the Will had worked and perished for unguessed ages to leave behind this monument of their existence, their charnel-house. Man had often told himself that a G.o.d had inspired them thus to build havens for his vessels and abodes of marine life where man might kill lesser beings for his food and sport.

Always, in the approach to the island in steams.h.i.+p, schooner, or canoe, one is amazed and transported by the varying aspect of it. A few miles away one would never know that man had touched it. His inappreciable structures are erased by the flood of green color, which, from the edge of the lagoon to the spires of La Diademe, nearly eight thousand feet above the water, makes all other hues insignificant. In all its hundred miles or so of circ.u.mference nature is the dominant note--a nature so mysterious, so powerful, and yet so soft-handed, so beauty-loving and so laughing in its indulgences, that one can hardly believe it the same that rules the Northern climes and forces man to labor in pain all his days or to die.

The scene from a little distance is as primeval as when the first humans climbed in their frail canoes through the unknown and terrible stretches of ocean, and saw Tahiti s.h.i.+ning in the sunlight. A mile or two from the lagoon the fertile land extends as a slowly-ascending gamut of greens as luxuriant as a jungle, and forming a most pleasing foreground to the startling amphitheater of the mountains, darker, and, in storm, black and forbidding.

Those mountains are the most wonderful examples of volcanic rock on the globe. Formed of rough and crystalline products of the basic fire of earth, they hold high up in their recesses coral beds once under the sea, and lava in many shapes, tokens of the island's rise from the slime, and of mammoth craters now almost entirely obliterated by denudation--the denudation which made the level land as fertile as any on earth, and the suitable habitation of the most leisurely and magnificent human animals of history.

A thousand rills that drink from the clouds ever encircling the crags, and in which they are often lost from view, leap from the heights, appearing as ribbons of white on a clear day, and not seldom disappearing in vapor as they fall sheer hundreds of feet, or thousands, in successive drops. When heavy rains come, torrents suddenly spring into being and dash madly down the precipitous cliffs to swell the brooks and little rivers and rush headlong to the sea.

Tahiti has an unexcelled climate for the tropics, the temperature for the year averaging seventy-seven degrees and varying from sixty-nine to eighty-four degrees. June, July, and August are the coolest and driest months, and December to March the rainiest and hottest. It is often humid, enervating, but the south-east, the trade-wind, which blows regularly on the east side of the islands, where are Papeete and most of the settlements, purifies the atmosphere, and there are no epidemics except when disease is brought directly from the cities of America or Australasia. A delicious breeze comes up every morning at nine o'clock and fans the dweller in this real Arcadia until past four, when it languishes and ceases in preparation for the vesper drama of the sun's retirement from the stage of earth.

Typhoons or cyclones are rare about Tahiti, but squalls are frequent and tidal waves recurrent. The rain falls more than a hundred days a year, but usually so lightly that one thinks of it as liquid suns.h.i.+ne. In the wet quarter from December until March there are almost daily deluges, when the air seems turned to water, the land and sea are hidden by the screen of driving rain, and the thunder shakes the flimsy houses, and echoes menacingly in the upper valleys.

Papeete, the seat of government and trade capital of all the French possessions in these parts of the world, is a sprawling village stretching lazily from the river of Fautaua on the east to the cemetery on the west, and from the sea on the north to half a mile inland. It is the gradual increment of garden and house upon an aboriginal village, the slow response of a century to the demand of official and trading white, of religious group and ambitious Tahitian, of sailor and tourist. Here flow all the channels of business and finance, of plotting and robbery, of pleasure and profit, of literature and art and good living, in the eastern Pacific. Papeete is the London and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, dispensing the styles and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making the laws and enforcing or compromising them, giving justice and injustice to litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the archipelagoes in these seas.

The French, who have domination in these waters of a hundred islands and atolls between 8 and 27 south lat.i.tude, and between 137 and 154 west longitude, a stretch of about twelve hundred miles each way, make them all tributary to Papeete; and thus it is the metropolis of a province of salt water, over which come its couriers and its freighters, its governors and its soldiers, its pleasure-seekers and its idlers. From it an age ago went the Maoris to people Hawaii and New Zealand.

Papeete has a central position in the Pacific. The capitals of Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and California are from two and a half to three and a half thousand miles away. No other such group of whites, or place approaching its urbanity, is to be found in a vast extent of lat.i.tude or longitude. It is without peer or compet.i.tor in endless leagues of waves.

Yet Papeete is a little place, a mile or so in length and less in width, a curious imposition of European houses and manners upon a Tahitian hamlet, hybrid, a mixture of loveliness and ugliness, of nature savage and tamed. The settlement, as with all ports, began at the waterfront, and the harbor of Papeete is a lake within the milky reef, the gentle waters of which touch a strip of green that runs along the sh.o.r.e, broken here and there by a wall and by the quay at which I landed. Coral blocks have been quarried from the reef and fitted to make an embankment for half a mile, which juts out just far enough to be usable as a mole. It is alongside this that sailing vessels lie, the wharf being the only land mooring with a roof for the housing of products. A dozen schooners, small and large, point their noses out to the sea, their backs against the coral quay, and their hawsers made fast to old cannon, brought here to war against the natives, and now binding the messengers of the nations and of commerce to this sh.o.r.e. Where there are no embankments, the water comes up to the roots of the trees, and a carpet of gra.s.s, moss, and tropical vegetation grows from the salt tide to the roadway.

Following the contour of the beach, runs a fairly broad road, and facing this original thoroughfare and the sea are the princ.i.p.al shops of the traders and a few residences. French are some of these merchants, but most are Australasian, German, American and Chinese. France is ten thousand miles away, and the French unequal in the struggle for gain. Some of the stores occupy blocks, and in them one will find a limited a.s.sortment of tobacco, anchors, needles, music-boxes, candles, bicycles, rum, novels, and silks or calicos. Here in this spot was the first settlement of the preachers of the gospel, of the conquering forces of France, and of the roaring blades who brought the culture of the world to a powerful and spellbound people. Here swarmed the crews of fifty whalers in the days when "There she blows!" was heard from crows'-nests all over the broad Pacific. These rough adventurers, fighters, revelers, pa.s.sionate bachelors, stamped Tahiti with its first strong imprint of the white man's modes and vices, contending with the missionaries for supremacy of ideal. They brought gin and a new lecherousness and deadly ills and novel superst.i.tions, and found a people ready for their wares. An old American woman has told me she has seen a thousand whalemen at one time ash.o.r.e off s.h.i.+ps in the harbor make night and day a Saturnalia of Occidental pleasure, a hundred fights in twenty-four hours.

As more of Europe and America came and brought lumber to build houses, or used the hard woods of the mountains, the settlement pushed back from the beach. Trails that later widened into streets were cut through the brush to reach these homes of whites, and the thatched huts of the aborigines were replaced by the ugly, but more convenient, cottages of the new-comers. The French, when once they had seized the island, made roads, gradually and not too well, but far surpa.s.sing those of most outlying possessions, and contrasting advantageously with the neglect of the Spanish, who in three hundred years in the Philippines left all undone the most important step in civilization. One can drive almost completely around Tahiti on ninety miles of a highway pa.s.sable at most times of the year, and bridging a hundred times the streams which rush and purl and wind from the heights to the ocean.

The streets of Papeete have no plan. They go where they list and in curves and angles, and only once in a mile in short, straight stretches. They twist and stray north and south and nor'nor'west and eastsou'east, as if each new-comer had cleft a walk of his own, caring naught for any one else, and further dwellers had smoothed it on for themselves.

I lost myself in a maze of streets, looked about for a familiar landmark, strolled a hundred paces, and found myself somewhere I thought a kilometer distant. Everywhere there are shops kept by Chinese, restaurants and coffee-houses. The streets all have names, but change them as they progress, honoring some French hero or statesman for a block or two, recalling some event, or plainly stating the reason for their being. All names are in French, of course, and many are quaint and sonorous.

As the sea-wall grew according to the demands of defense or commerce the sections were rechristened. The quai des Subsistences tells its purpose as does the quai de l'Uranie. The rue de l'Ecole and the rue de la Mission, with the rue des Remparts, speak the early building of school and Catholic church and fortifications.

Rue Cook, rue de Bougainville and many others record the giant figures of history who took Tahiti from the mist of the half-known, and wrote it on the charts and in the archives. Other streets hark back to that beloved France to which these French exiles gaze with tearful eyes, but linger all their years ten thousand miles away. They saunter along the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, and see again the magnificence of the Tuileries, and hear the dear noises of la belle Paris. They are sentimental, these French, patriots all here, and overcome at times by the flood of memories of la France, their birthplaces, and their ancestral graves. Some born here have never been away, and some have spent a few short months in visits to the homeland. Some have brown mothers, half-islanders; yet if they learn the tripping tongue of their French progenitor and European manners, they think of France as their ultimate goal, of Paris their playground, and the "Ma.r.s.eillaise" their himene par excellence.

One might conjure up a vision of a tiny Paris with such names in one's ears, and these French, who have been in possession here nearly four-score years, have tried to make a French town of Papeete.

They have only spoiled the scene as far as unfit architecture can, but the riot of tropical nature has mocked their labors. For all over the flimsy wooden houses, the wretched palings, the galvanized iron roofing, the ugly verandas, hang gorgeous draperies of the giant acacias, the brilliant flamboyantes, the bountiful, yellow allamanda, the generous breadfruit, and the uplifting glory of the cocoanut-trees, while magnificent vines and creepers cover the tawdry paint of the facades and embower the homes in green and flower. If one leaves the few princ.i.p.al streets or roads in Papeete, one walks only on well-worn trails through the thick growth of lantana, guavas, panda.n.u.s, wild coffee, and a dozen other trees and bushes. The paths are lined with hedges of false coffee, where thrifty people live, and again there are open s.p.a.ces with vistas of little houses in groves, rows of tiny cabins close together. Everywhere are picturesque disorder, dirt, rubbish, and the accrued wallow of years of laissez-aller; but the mighty trade-winds and the constant rains sweep away all bad odors, and there is no resultant disease.

"My word," said Stevens, a London stockbroker, here to rehabilitate a broken corporation, "if we English had this place, wouldn't there be a cleaning up! We'd build it solid and sanitary, and have proper rules to make the bally natives stand around."

The practical British would that. They have done so in a dozen of their far-flung colonies I hare been in, from Singapore to Barbadoes, though they have failed utterly in Jamaica. Yet, I am at first sight, of the mind that only the Spanish would have kept, after decades of administration, as much of the simple beauty of Papeete as have the Gauls. True, the streets are a litter, the Government almost unseen as to modern uplift, the natives are indolent and life moves without bustle or goal. The republic is content to keep the peace, to sell its wares, to teach its tongue, and to let the gentle Tahitian hold to his island ways, now that his race dies rapidly in the spiritual atmosphere so murderous to natural, non-immunized souls and bodies.

Many streets and roads are shaded by spreading mango-trees, a fruit brought in the sixties from Brazil, and perfected in size and flavor here by the patient efforts of French gardeners and priests. The trees along the town ways are splendid, umbrageous ma.s.ses of dark foliage whose golden crops fall upon the roadways, and which have been so chosen that though they are seasonal, the round mango is succeeded by the golden egg, and that by a small purple sort, while the large, long variety continues most of the year. Monseigneur Jaussen, the Catholic bishop who wrote the accepted grammar and dictionary of the Tahitian language, evolved a delicious, large mango, with a long, thin stone very different from the usual seed, which occupies most of the circ.u.mference of this slightly acidulous, most luscious of tropical fruits. Often the pave is a spatter of the fallen mangos, its slippery condition of no import to the barefooted Tahitian, but to the shod a cause of sudden, strange gyrations and gestures, and of irreverence toward the Deity.

Scores of varieties of fruits and flowers, shade-trees, and ornamental plants were brought to Tahiti by s.h.i.+p commanders, missionaries, officials, and traders, in the last hundred years, while many of the indigenous growths have been transplanted to other islands and continents by those whose interests were in them. The Mutiny of the Bounty, perhaps the most romantic incident of these South Seas, was the result of an effort to transport breadfruit-tree shoots from Tahiti to the West Indies. It is a beautiful trait in humankind, which, maybe, designing nature has endowed us with to spread her manifold creations, that even the most selfish of men delight in planting in new environments exotic seeds and plants, and in enriching the fauna of faraway islands with strange animals and insects. The pepper- and the gum-tree that make southern California's desert a bower, the oranges and lemons there which send a million golden trophies to less-favored peoples, are the flora of distant climes. Since the days of the white discoverers, adventurers and priests, fighting men and puritans, have added to the earth's treasury in Tahiti and all these islands.

Walking one morning along the waterfront, I met two very dark negresses. They had on pink and black dresses, with red cotton shawls, and they wore flaming yellow handkerchiefs about their woolly heads. They were as African as the Congo, and as strange in this setting as Eskimos on Broadway. They felt their importance, for they were of the few good cooks of French dishes here. They spoke a French patois, and guffawed loudly when one dropped her basket of supplies from her head. They were servants of the procureur de la Republique, who had brought them from the French colony of Martinique.

Many races have mingled here. One saw their pigments and their lines in the castes; here a soupcon of the French and there a touch of the Dane; the Chileno, himself a mestizo, had left his print in delicacy of feature, and the Irish his freckles and pug, which with tawny skin, pearly teeth, and the superb form of the pure Tahitian, left little to be desired in fetching and saucy allurement. Thousands of sailors and merchants and preachers had sowed their seed here, as did Captain Cook's men a century and a half ago, and the harvest showed in numerous shadings of colors and variety of mixtures. Tahiti had, since s.h.i.+p of Europe sighted Orofena, been a pasture for the wild a.s.ses of the Wanderl.u.s.t, a paradise into which they had brought their snakes and left them to plague the natives.