Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (816 page)

We had no cause to blush with Brother Michel.  Our new parents were kind, gentle, well-mannered, and generous in gifts; the wife was a most motherly woman, the husband a man who stood justly high with his employers.  Enough has been said to show why Moipu should be deposed; and in Paaaeua the French had found a reputable substitute.  He went always scrupulously dressed, and looked the picture of propriety, like a dark, handsome, stupid, and probably religious young man hot from a European funeral.  In character he seemed the ideal of what is known as the good citizen.  He wore gravity like an ornament.  None could more nicely represent the desired character as an appointed chief, the outpost of civilisation and reform.  And yet, were the French to go and native manners to revive, fancy beholds him crowned with old men’s beards and crowding with the first to a man-eating festival.  But I must not seem to be unjust to Paaaeua.  His respectability went deeper than the skin; his sense of the becoming sometimes nerved him for unexpected rigours.

One evening Captain Otis and Mr. Osbourne were on shore in the village.  All was agog; dancing had begun; it was plain it was to be a night of festival, and our adventurers were overjoyed at their good fortune.  A strong fall of rain drove them for shelter to the house of Paaaeua, where they were made welcome, wiled into a chamber, and shut in.  Presently the rain took off, the fun was to begin in earnest, and the young bloods of Atuona came round the house and called to my fellow-travellers through the interstices of the wall.  Late into the night the calls were continued and resumed, and sometimes mingled with taunts; late into the night the prisoners, tantalised by the noises of the festival, renewed their efforts to escape.  But all was vain; right across the door lay that god-fearing householder, Paaaeua, feigning sleep; and my friends had to forego their junketing.  In this incident, so delightfully European, we thought we could detect three strands of sentiment.  In the first place, Paaaeua had a charge of souls: these were young men, and he judged it right to withhold them from the primrose path.  Secondly, he was a public character, and it was not fitting that his guests should countenance a festival of which he disapproved.  So might some strict clergyman at home address a worldly visitor: ‘Go to the theatre if you like, but, by your leave, not from my house!’  Thirdly, Paaaeua was a man jealous, and with some cause (as shall be shown) for jealousy; and the feasters were the satellites of his immediate rival, Moipu.

For the adoption had caused much excitement in the village; it made the strangers popular.  Paaaeua, in his difficult posture of appointed chief, drew strength and dignity from their alliance, and only Moipu and his followers were malcontent.  For some reason nobody (except myself) appears to dislike Moipu.  Captain Hart, who has been robbed and threatened by him; Father Orens, whom he has fired at, and repeatedly driven to the woods; my own family, and even the French officials - all seemed smitten with an irrepressible affection for the man.  His fall had been made soft; his son, upon his death, was to succeed Paaaeua in the chieftaincy; and he lived, at the time of our visit, in the shoreward part of the village in a good house, and with a strong following of young men, his late braves and pot-hunters.  In this society, the coming of the
Casco
, the adoption, the return feast on board, and the presents exchanged between the whites and their new parents, were doubtless eagerly and bitterly canvassed.  It was felt that a few years ago the honours would have gone elsewhere.  In this unwonted business, in this reception of some hitherto undreamed-of and outlandish potentate - some Prester John or old Assaracus - a few years back it would have been the part of Moipu to play the hero and the host, and his young men would have accompanied and adorned the various celebrations as the acknowledged leaders of society.  And now, by a malign vicissitude of fortune, Moipu must sit in his house quite unobserved; and his young men could but look in at the door while their rivals feasted.  Perhaps M. Grévy felt a touch of bitterness towards his successor when he beheld him figure on the broad stage of the centenary of eighty-nine; the visit of the
Casco
which Moipu had missed by so few years was a more unusual occasion in Atuona than a centenary in France; and the dethroned chief determined to reassert himself in the public eye.

Mr. Osbourne had gone into Atuona photographing; the population of the village had gathered together for the occasion on the place before the church, and Paaaeua, highly delighted with this new appearance of his family, played the master of ceremonies.  The church had been taken, with its jolly architect before the door; the nuns with their pupils; sundry damsels in the ancient and singularly unbecoming robes of tapa; and Father Orens in the midst of a group of his parishioners.  I know not what else was in hand, when the photographer became aware of a sensation in the crowd, and, looking around, beheld a very noble figure of a man appear upon the margin of a thicket and stroll nonchalantly near.  The nonchalance was visibly affected; it was plain he came there to arouse attention, and his success was instant.  He was introduced; he was civil, he was obliging, he was always ineffably superior and certain of himself; a well-graced actor.  It was presently suggested that he should appear in his war costume; he gracefully consented; and returned in that strange, inappropriate and ill-omened array (which very well became his handsome person) to strut in a circle of admirers, and be thenceforth the centre of photography.  Thus had Moipu effected his introduction, as by accident, to the white strangers, made it a favour to display his finery, and reduced his rival to a secondary
rôle
on the theatre of the disputed village.  Paaaeua felt the blow; and, with a spirit which we never dreamed he could possess, asserted his priority.  It was found impossible that day to get a photograph of Moipu alone; for whenever he stood up before the camera his successor placed himself unbidden by his side, and gently but firmly held to his position.  The portraits of the pair, Jacob and Esau, standing shoulder to shoulder, one in his careful European dress, one in his barbaric trappings, figure the past and present of their island.  A graveyard with its humble crosses would be the aptest symbol of the future.

We are all impressed with the belief that Moipu had planned his campaign from the beginning to the end.  It is certain that he lost no time in pushing his advantage.  Mr. Osbourne was inveigled to his house; various gifts were fished out of an old sea-chest; Father Orens was called into service as interpreter, and Moipu formally proposed to ‘make brothers’ with Mata-Galahi - Glass-Eyes, - the not very euphonious name under which Mr. Osbourne passed in the Marquesas.  The feast of brotherhood took place on board the
Casco
.  Paaaeua had arrived with his family, like a plain man; and his presents, which had been numerous, had followed one another, at intervals through several days.  Moipu, as if to mark at every point the opposition, came with a certain feudal pomp, attended by retainers bearing gifts of all descriptions, from plumes of old men’s beard to little, pious, Catholic engravings.

I had met the man before this in the village, and detested him on sight; there was something indescribably raffish in his looks and ways that raised my gorge; and when man-eating was referred to, and he laughed a low, cruel laugh, part boastful, part bashful, like one reminded of some dashing peccadillo, my repugnance was mingled with nausea.  This is no very human attitude, nor one at all becoming in a traveller.  And, seen more privately, the man improved.  Something negroid in character and face was still displeasing; but his ugly mouth became attractive when he smiled, his figure and bearing were certainly noble, and his eyes superb.  In his appreciation of jams and pickles, in is delight in the reverberating mirrors of the dining cabin, and consequent endless repetition of Moipus and Mata-Galahis, he showed himself engagingly a child.  And yet I am not sure; and what seemed childishness may have been rather courtly art.  His manners struck me as beyond the mark; they were refined and caressing to the point of grossness, and when I think of the serene absent-mindedness with which he first strolled in upon our party, and then recall him running on hands and knees along the cabin sofas, pawing the velvet, dipping into the beds, and bleating commendatory ‘
mitais
’ with exaggerated emphasis, like some enormous over-mannered ape, I feel the more sure that both must have been calculated.  And I sometimes wonder next, if Moipu were quite alone in this polite duplicity, and ask myself whether the
Casco
were quite so much admired in the Marquesas as our visitors desired us to suppose.

I will complete this sketch of an incurable cannibal grandee with two incongruous traits.  His favourite morsel was the human hand, of which he speaks to-day with an ill-favoured lustfulness.  And when he said good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in the falsetto of Marquesan high society, he wrote upon her mind a sentimental impression which I try in vain to share.

PART II: THE PAUMOTUS

CHAPTER I - THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO - ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE

In the early morning of 4th September a whale-boat manned by natives dragged us down the green lane of the anchorage and round the spouting promontory.  On the shore level it was a hot, breathless, and yet crystal morning; but high overhead the hills of Atuona were all cowled in cloud, and the ocean-river of the trades streamed without pause.  As we crawled from under the immediate shelter of the land, we reached at last the limit of their influence.  The wind fell upon our sails in puffs, which strengthened and grew more continuous; presently the
Casco
heeled down to her day’s work; the whale-boat, quite outstripped, clung for a noisy moment to her quarter; the stipulated bread, rum, and tobacco were passed in; a moment more and the boat was in our wake, and our late pilots were cheering our departure.

This was the more inspiriting as we were bound for scenes so different, and though on a brief voyage, yet for a new province of creation.  That wide field of ocean, called loosely the South Seas, extends from tropic to tropic, and from perhaps 123 degrees W. to 150 degrees E., a parallelogram of one hundred degrees by forty-seven, where degrees are the most spacious.  Much of it lies vacant, much is closely sown with isles, and the isles are of two sorts.  No distinction is so continually dwelt upon in South Sea talk as that between the ‘low’ and the ‘high’ island, and there is none more broadly marked in nature.  The Himalayas are not more different from the Sahara.  On the one hand, and chiefly in groups of from eight to a dozen, volcanic islands rise above the sea; few reach an altitude of less than 4000 feet; one exceeds 13,000; their tops are often obscured in cloud, they are all clothed with various forests, all abound in food, and are all remarkable for picturesque and solemn scenery.  On the other hand, we have the atoll; a thing of problematic origin and history, the reputed creature of an insect apparently unidentified; rudely annular in shape; enclosing a lagoon; rarely extending beyond a quarter of a mile at its chief width; often rising at its highest point to less than the stature of a man - man himself, the rat and the land crab, its chief inhabitants; not more variously supplied with plants; and offering to the eye, even when perfect, only a ring of glittering beach and verdant foliage, enclosing and enclosed by the blue sea.

In no quarter are the atolls so thickly congregated, in none are they so varied in size from the greatest to the least, and in none is navigation so beset with perils, as in that archipelago that we were now to thread.  The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs, the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known.  The currents are, besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser.  The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without misgiving that my captain risked the
Casco
in such waters.  I believe, indeed, it is almost understood that yachts are to avoid this baffling archipelago; and it required all my instances - and all Mr. Otis’s private taste for adventure - to deflect our course across its midst.

For a few days we sailed with a steady trade, and a steady westerly current setting us to leeward; and toward sundown of the seventh it was supposed we should have sighted Takaroa, one of Cook’s so-called King George Islands.  The sun set; yet a while longer the old moon - semi-brilliant herself, and with a silver belly, which was her successor - sailed among gathering clouds; she, too, deserted us; stars of every degree of sheen, and clouds of every variety of form disputed the sub-lustrous night; and still we gazed in vain for Takaroa.  The mate stood on the bowsprit, his tall grey figure slashing up and down against the stars, and still

‘nihil astra praeter

Vidit et undas.

The rest of us were grouped at the port anchor davit, staring with no less assiduity, but with far less hope on the obscure horizon.  Islands we beheld in plenty, but they were of ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’ and vanished at a wink, only to appear in other places; and by and by not only islands, but refulgent and revolving lights began to stud the darkness; lighthouses of the mind or of the wearied optic nerve, solemnly shining and winking as we passed.  At length the mate himself despaired, scrambled on board again from his unrestful perch, and announced that we had missed our destination.  He was the only man of practice in these waters, our sole pilot, shipped for that end at Tai-o-hae.  If he declared we had missed Takaroa, it was not for us to quarrel with the fact, but, if we could, to explain it.  We had certainly run down our southing.  Our canted wake upon the sea and our somewhat drunken-looking course upon the chart both testified with no less certainty to an impetuous westward current.  We had no choice but to conclude we were again set down to leeward; and the best we could do was to bring the
Casco
to the wind, keep a good watch, and expect morning.