THE MARQUESAS TODAY

It is a strange anomaly that the Marquesan, by long odds the fastest disappearing of the Polynesian races, is made up of individuals of incomparably finer physique than those of any other of the islands of the South Pacific. Of a dozen natives picked at random from the beach of Taio-haie, there would probably be not over three or four who would not show more or less of his dark head above the end of a six-foot tape, and the breadth and muscling of each would be in proportion. The women are likewise of good size and figure, and, when undisfigured with tattooing, of considerable beauty as well. Both sexes accomplish prodigious feats of walking, swimming and rowing, and both invariably bear up remarkably under hardship and privation such as that incident to being cast away to sea for weeks in an open boat.

As a matter of fact, the startling decrease in the population of the Marquesan group, except for occasional epidemics, is due to scarcity of births and a lack of vitality in the children rather than to an abnormal number of deaths among the adults. This condition is largely traceable to the existence of a number of more or less active forms of blood disease introduced by the whites of the Pacific whaling fleet of half a century ago, and to certain vicious practices in connection with the prevention of child-bearing prevalent in the over-populous days of the group. Cannibalism and intertribal wars have frequently been assigned as potent factors in the decimation, but it is notable that neither has had such effect in the Solomon or New Hebridean groups, where both are prevalent today.

The early explorers estimated the population of the island of Nukahiva at from 30,000 to 40,000. In 1804 there was believed to be not over 18,000 on the island, and in 1836 but 8,000. A French census in 1856 enumerated but 2,960, which number had fallen to 800 by 1880. In 1889 Stevenson found Taio-haie a lively village with a club, barracks, hotel, numerous stores and a considerable colony of French officials; Hatiheu and Anaho were villages of upwards of a hundred natives each. At the time of our visit in the Lurline there remained in Taio-haie but three French officials, a single German trader, three or four missionaries and a native population just short of ninety. The villages of Hatiheu and Anaho had but a few over a hundred inhabitants between them.

In the veins of the Nukahivan of today course two strains of foreign blood of widely diverse origin. During the latter part of the 16th, and for most of the 17th century, the island was a rendezvous for a large colony of buccaneers who had chosen that location for the advantages it gave them in preying upon the Spanish galleons plying between Peru and the Isthmus of Panama, as well as in raiding settlements on the intervening coast of South America. These pirates, after some years of fighting, brought the natives of the Taio-haie and Hatiheu districts into a state of complete subjection, while their relations with the tribes of the interior appeared to have been in the nature of an armed neutrality. The subject natives were employed at sea as sailors and boatmen, and on land as gardeners and herdsmen. The cattle, pigs and goats brought to the island by the freebooters must have been the progenitors of the wild animals of these species which abound there today. With the natives of the interior some trading for food was carried on at times when the drought on the coast made short crops of coconuts, breadfruit and bananas.

When the streams of Incan gold from Peru began to run low and buccaneering became unprofitable as a consequence, the Nukahivan pirate colonies gradually changed back to native villages. After the last of the strangers had died, their descendants, through intermarriage with pure-blooded natives, reverted little by little to the predominating type, until the evidences of the blood of white men in their veins survived only in straighter hair and features, harder eyes, a sharper and more uncertain temper and an increased arrogance. They were a handsomer people physically, and a keener one mentally than the original Marquesan, but withal a race whose morals were in rags and tatters.

For some decades in the middle of the last century Nukahiva was the main base of a large portion of the Pacific whaling fleet. Ships spent months at a time at Taio-haie, refitting and reprovisioning, and the island gained many new and undesirable inhabitants through desertions from their crews. The worst epidemic of smallpox ever recorded in the South Pacific was started in Nukahiva by a maroon from a whaler, and the present-day prevalence of blood and skin disease is directly traceable to similar sources. The women were carried off to the ends of the earth on the whalers and few indeed of them ever found their way back; for the good of future generations it would have been better had none of them done so.

The moral laxity of the Marquesan of the present day is undoubtedly a legacy of these two occupations of the principal island by the lowest of the sea's riff-raff, pirates and whalers. In Nukahiva chastity is quite unknown to any class, and a century of work on the part of the French missionaries has left little mark upon the morals of the people. They are prone to throw themselves at every opportunity into the most unlicensed debauchery, and they know no law save that of the appetites. The feasts of the present generation of Nukahivans—aside from cannibalism, which is still practised whenever the chances for escaping detection are favourable—are howling orgies of two and three days' duration, their riotous excesses uninterrupted even by intervals of singing and dancing, as in Samoa, Tahiti and Fiji. The song and the dance, which represent to the Polynesian about all that religion, music and the drama combined do to us, have died out in the Marquesas even faster than the people.

The Marquesans of a century ago were the most completely and artistically tattooed people in the Pacific, and the practice is carried on among them to a certain extent even today. The really fine pieces of work, however, such as the famous right leg of the late Queen Vaekehu over which Stevenson waxed so enthusiastic, are confined entirely to the very old, and, what with wrinkles, deformities and the wear and tear of time, these have lost most of their original sharpness of colour and outline. None of the new generation appears to have the fortitude to endure the exquisite pain incident to having a whole limb picked out in a network of geometric design or the face barred and circled like a coarse spider's web.

Women are rarely tattooed at all now, and most of the young men are satisfied with a broad band of solid black—not unlike a highwayman's mask in effect—which reaches across the face from ear to ear, giving to their never overly-mild countenances an expression of amazing ferocity. That the art, and a certain pride connected with it, are not yet lost to the Marquesans, however, was amusingly shown by an incident which occurred the day after Lurline's arrival in Taio-haie. On this occasion, in testing some newly-opened shells, we fired ten or a dozen shots in rapid succession from the yacht's brass signal cannon. At the first report a bevy of Marquesan damsels, who had come off to sell sandalwood and shark-tooth necklaces, stampeded to their canoes and could not be induced to return until all activity in the firing line had ceased.

Then they all clambered gleefully aboard again, and one of them so far forgot herself as to sit down on the deck and lean languidly back with her plump brown shoulder against the sizzling hot breech of the signal gun. That was the last languid movement she made for some time. Came the sharp hiss of singed flesh and then, with the scream of a frightened wildcat, the girl cleared the low rail as though thrown from a catapult, swam half a hundred feet under water, to go lunging straight off for the shore the instant her head rose above the surface.

Now it chanced that across the breech of our little cannon was engraved the name "LURLINE," picked out in ornamental scrolleries, and beneath it, in rich reposÉ, the figure of a puffy dolphin in the act of gulping down a buxom mermaid. Such of this bas-relief as had come in contact with the fair Marquesienne's shoulder left its mark, which striking design was no sooner seen by the tribal tattooist than he needs must perpetuate what he feared, no doubt, was but an ephemeral impression.

So fishbone needles and black gum were hastily brought into play, and several days later, when the inflammation had subsided sufficiently to enable her to be about, the proud and grateful young beauty brought the decoration off for us to see. "RLINE" we read in wobbly reversed letters, and beneath, floundering desperately across a shoulder blade, a stub-tailed mermaid could be discerned in the act of disappearing into the impressionistic but unmistakable head of a dolphin. A half dozen of the now distinguished young person's girl friends accompanied her, and every one of the envious minxes persisted in embracing, leaning against and sitting upon that now cool but still ornamental signal-gun breech in anxious endeavours to get patterns of their own to take back to the village tattooist.

But the cunningest picture ever executed upon the body of any Marquesan, living or dead, pales to insignificance when compared to the amazing hieroglyphic record depicted upon the skin of a living Marqueso-American, John Hilyard. Readers of Stevenson may recall the tattooed man, who was the first resident of Taio-haie to discover the appearance of the strange schooner in the introductory chapter of "The Wreckers." A bit of the history of that strange character is also hinted at, I believe, but, according to the present-day gossip of the "beach" of Taio-haie, it is all wrong. For the real story I am indebted to our friend, McGrath, the trader of Hatiheu, who once nursed Hilyard through a spell of fever and attained to more of that queer outcast's confidence than any one else on the island. From Hilyard himself—now a man of about seventy, with his grotesquely figured body fully clothed and as much as possible of his face obscured with a bushy beard,—absolutely nothing can be learned, and I was considered to have done remarkably well in holding him during a ten-minute discussion of shark baits. I will outline here in a single paragraph a story which, measured in pangs of soul and body, would tax the compass of a modern novel adequately to depict.

Deserting from the American whaler, Nancy Dawson, when that ship was careened at Anaho in the 60's for calking, was a raw youth of twenty, who had run away from his home in a California mining camp and signed on in San Francisco. White men were scarce in the Marquesas, and after working for a while in a trading store in Taio-haie, he shortly became supercargo on a trading schooner, and at length the owner of a concession and boats of his own. It was at the height of his prosperity that he met and fell captive to the charms of Mariva, who was reputed beautiful and undoubtedly was coquettish, as the sequel shows. She accepted Hilyard's presents, but told him that, while she liked his personality well enough, she detested the sight of his white skin. Let the village tattooer remedy that and perhaps—The love lorn wretch was off to put himself under the needle before she had finished. Mariva dropped in occasionally upon the session of torture which followed and, now by criticism, now by approval, urged on the flagging artists to renewed effort. When geometric whorls and bands and parallelograms were exhausted, Mariva herself dipped a dainty forefinger in the black kuki-soot gum and began improvising designs. "That broad chest was made by nature to support a clump of bananas." "What could be daintier than some fat pigs gorging on mangoes in the hollow of that back?" She and an invited bevy of friends sang himines to drown Hilyard's groans while he was conscious, and when he fainted with the pain and lay in a stupor they seized spare needles and tried their own hands at tattooing. At the end of the second day, with designs two and three deep all over the body of the unconscious trader, they desisted, less from exhaustion than from a lack of further skin that would take an impression. Hilyard lay in a swoon all night, and in the morning was carried to the mission house with a raging fever. That night the faithless Mariva eloped with a half-caste missionary preacher, took possession of one of Hilyard's schooners, sailed it to the Paumotos, where they ultimately set up in trading on their own account and, as far as any one knows, lived happily ever afterwards. That Hilyard did not die from blood-poisoning was miraculous. As it was he hovered between life and death for a month, finally to pass from the kindly care of the missionaries so broken in mind and body that he was never again able to return to his trading business. The honest French Residente disposed of Hilyard's interests for a sum sufficient, when placed in a bank at Tahiti, to give the unlucky victim of love's madness enough to live comfortably upon, and for the last forty years he has done just that and nothing more, just existed—an object of scorn to the natives and of pity to the whites—upon the "beach" of Taio-haie.

Scenically the Marquesas are incomparably more beautiful than any of the other island groups of the Pacific, Hawaii not excepted. It is usual to hear the traveller who has covered Polynesia by the steamer route speak in similar terms of the Society Islands—especially Moorea and Tahiti—Samoa and Fiji, whichever may have chanced to tickle his fancy, quite losing sight of the fact that the route of his boat has been laid out along the lines of commerce irrespective of scenery. Not one steamer—save an occasional gunboat—goes to the Marquesas in a decade, the mail of the islands being carried to and from Tahiti every three or four months in a trading schooner. In the last twenty years scarce that number of strangers have visited the group, and a dozen or more of these came on the only three yachts that have ever found their way there. How little, therefore, the average South Sea tourist really knows of these islands may readily be seen.

The rock walls and cliffs of Moorea would be lost in the shadows of the great 4,000-foot spires that tower above the bay of Hatiheu; the 600-foot fall of Faatua, in Tahiti, might be shut from sight in the spray of the 2,000-foot fall of the Typee in Nukahiva; and the great cliff of Bora-Bora, the creeper-tapestried walls of the bay of Pago-Pago and the great gorge of the upper Rewa, in Fiji, could be hidden away in corners of the stupendous Atouna valley of Hiva-oa so effectually that they would pass unnoticed.

In the matter of riotous tropical growth, the Marquesas, being nearer the Line than any other of the South Sea islands that may lay claim to scenic beauty, have also all the best of the comparison. Nukahiva is an almost impenetrable jungle of lantana, burao, acacia, banana, guava and scores of other trees and bushes, nearly all of them flowering and fruit bearing. Indigenous to the island is the cassi plant, a thick shrub which covers patches of the lower hills in dense masses and which blossoms out in tiny yellow balls of almost solid pollen. The latter has a perfume of most penetrating sweetness, and in flowering time is blown by the Trades many leagues to the leeward of the island. This is the odour which I mentioned that we noted in the air while the yacht was still a hundred miles or more from land. Beating into the incomparable bay of Hatiheu at night with this perfumed breeze sweeping the deck, the wake a comet of golden-green light and the surf bursting in vivid spurts of phosphorescence along the silver-bright band of the beach, is to anticipate the approach to the mystical Islands of the Blest.

At a number of widely-separated points in the South Pacific—notably at Easter Island, Tahiti and Kusaie, of the Caroline group—are to be found great images of stone, the ruins of huge temples and other evidences of the existence of prehistoric races who, at least as builders, were far in advance of the Polynesian of today. French scientists had noted that in the Marquesas some of the abandoned house-foundations or pai-pais, contained far larger blocks of stone than any of those of later construction, but not until very recently was it known that there were works in the group not unworthy of comparison with the stone gods of Easter Island.

Just previous to our visit to Nukahiva, our friend McGrath, the trader of Hatiheu, while following up a wounded boar in the Typee Valley, chanced on an ancient Marquesan "Olympus," containing nine large stone images in a comparatively good state of preservation. Though this most interesting discovery lies within 300 yards of the main trail up the Typee Valley, no native on the island, either by actual knowledge or through tradition, has been able to shed light on its origin, purpose or probable age.

McGrath conducted our party to his "Goddery," as he facetiously called it, when we were crossing the island to pay a visit to the Queen of Hatiheu, and the several films which I exposed in a driving rainstorm resulted in what are undoubtedly the first photographs of these strange Marquesan images. The ancient shrine—for such it must have been—is situated on a terrace in the steeply-sloping side hill, and though the underbrush thins out somewhat in its immediate vicinity, the overarching bows of maupÉ and hau trees form so dense a screen that the heavens are completely obscured. Though it was full noonday when we visited the place, the light—partly, no doubt, on account of the rain—was as dim as that of an old cathedral, and my films, which were exposed four minutes each, would have turned out much better with ten.

The images, which had been set at regular intervals around an open stone-paved court, were from six to eight feet in height and averaged about three feet in thickness. We estimated each to contain from forty to sixty cubic feet of hard basaltic stone, the weight of which must have been several tons. As raising so great a weight up the sixty or seventy per cent. incline from the valley would have been almost impossible, and as no outcroppings of stone of similar nature appeared nearby, we were forced to the conclusion that the material for the images must have been quarried out at some point higher up the mountain and laboriously lowered to the terrace prepared for them.

"All of the images were covered with moss"

"A hardened old offender who preferred white man to
native meat"

All of the images were covered with an inch or more of solid moss, and on one which I photographed it was necessary to scrape some of this away to bring out the features. The figures were much alike in design, and, in a general way, of a not unremote resemblance to the Buddhas of the ancient Javan temples. Eleven of them were still in their original positions; one was blocked half way in its fall by the trunk of a hau tree, and one was prostrate and overgrown with moss and creepers. A search will undoubtedly reveal others now entirely covered with earth and undergrowth, as there are several unoccupied niches still remaining.

That this shrine is of considerable age is evidenced by the fact that a hau tree, three feet in diameter, has forced apart the heavy paving stones and is growing in the middle of the court. Trees of even greater size are growing out of the ruins of a small nearby building, which might once have been the foundation of the domicile of the attendant priests. Some of the roughly squared rocks in the foundation of the shrine are approximately three by three by ten feet in dimension, and must have taken a small army of men to move and set in place.

The Marquesas are the only islands of the eastern groups of the South Pacific where cannibalism has not long since ceased. This does not mean that one is likely to be pounced on and eaten as soon as he sets foot ashore—as I must frankly admit we all feared when we first heard of the fate of the late pilots of Taio-haie—but only that under certain favourable conditions, when there is small chance of its being brought to the attention of the French authorities, this barbarity is still resorted to. The French and the missionaries have been active in suppressing cannibalism and its attendant rites, but, principally on account of certain religious significances which appear to attach to it, the practice persists in bobbing up perennially. The dead in their tribal fights are still eaten when the opportunity offers, but only one white man and a Chinaman (the two pilots were half-castes) are known to have been eaten in the last decade.

Accuse a Marquesan of being a cannibal, and he will ordinarily deny the soft impeachment much after the manner of a school girl taxed with being a flirt. Some will brazen it out, however, and of such was a hardened old offender who explained to the Lurline forecastle one night that, of the various classes of "long-pig," he preferred white man to native because the meat of the latter was saltier and of a more pronounced flavour. Chinaman he had never eaten, he said, but—and here he cast an appraising look to where our recently shipped cook was shuddering at the door of the galley—he was going to try one at his first opportunity. The terrified Si-ah would not even go ashore to do the marketing during the remainder of our stay in Taio-haie.

The practice of cannibalism undoubtedly originated in the over-populated days of the island when, in the seasons of famine, the bodies of those killed in the intertribal raids were eaten by the survivors to escape starvation. Its survival into a period when the islands produce food a thousand-fold in excess of consumption, and in the face of the active opposition of the French, can be due only to certain superstitious attributes, such as the belief that the strength of a dead foe enters into the body of him who eats the flesh.

Human flesh is eaten in the Marquesas today only when the conditions are such that the chances of detection are the slightest, and never under any circumstances with the ceremonies which attended the rites of three or four decades ago. The "long-pig"—the polite euphemism by which man-meat is designated—may be quietly cut up and distributed among a hundred families in a half dozen different villages, each of which will partake of its precious tidbit in private and strictest secrecy. Again, the body may be buried after only a small portion has been reserved for eating. Just previous to our arrival in Nukahiva a body from which only the hands were missing was washed ashore at Anaho during a heavy southwester. Investigation showed it to be that of one Teona, a resident of Hatiheu, a native who, three days previously, had, according to the story of his companions, fallen from their canoe and been drowned. The latter, after four days' confinement in a dark cell at Taio-haie—the extremest torture to which the superstitious Marquesan may be subjected—confessed that they had killed Teona during a coconut wine debauch, and after cutting off his hands and eating them, had weighted the body with stones and dropped it out to sea. They were given the extreme penalty—two weeks' confinement in the dark, to be followed by a year of weed-cutting on the village street. One died of hysteria before the first week was out, and the other, at the end of ten days, killed himself by gashing his wrist on a jagged corner of the sheet iron wall of his prison.

The Marquesan's terror of the dark is so extreme that it is not a rare thing for men, women and children to die of fright during eclipses. In view of this, there seems some ground for the contention that the French practice of confining convicted, and occasionally suspected, murderers and cannibals in windowless sheet iron cells is scarcely less barbarous than the crimes for which punishment is being meted out.

The great cannibal feast grounds of Nukahiva and Hiva-oa are not only not used at the present time, but are even so strictly tabu that no native can be found who will venture within their forbidden confines. Stevenson writes of visiting the Hatiheu "high-place" in company with a French priest and a native boy; but on the occasion of our visit we held out every conceivable inducement in an endeavour to secure native guides to the same feast-ground, and quite in vain. Not even among the converts of the Catholic fathers could be found one who held the tabu lightly enough to dare to violate it. The best we could do was to persuade several of them to accompany us to the line of the tabu, and there to await our return, while we went over the ruins with McGrath. The following description is from notes taken by Claribel on this occasion, and subsequently amplified under the direction of McGrath, who, in the fifteen years he has maintained a trading store at Hatiheu, has missed no opportunity to push enquiries amongst the older natives regarding what is unquestionably the most interesting ruin of its kind in the South Pacific:

"On the seaward side of a spur of the mountain a level space, oval in general shape, had been partly excavated, partly built up, so that there was a smooth floor about 300 feet long by 200 feet wide. In a semi-circle, with the chief's house in the centre, were the little 'feast-houses' of the court dignitaries and the special guests. Beneath the posts of each house excavations have disclosed a number of human bones which bear witness to the sacrifice which accompanied the setting of every pillar. In these little booths the guests remained during the feasts, some of which, when food was plenty or some especially great event was to be celebrated, lasted over a week. Each guest brought some contribution to the feast, and when it was over he was privileged to gather up and carry home any fragments that he liked.

"The 'dining-room' was the space in front of the houses, and there, spread on the huge leaves of the banana and taro, the feast was laid. Meat was handled with big four-tined forks of wood; poi and other soft dishes in calabashes of coco shell and shallow wooden platters. The drinking cups, in which were served a fiery wine made from the juice of the tender shoots of the coconut, were the hollow shells of nuts. The food, in addition to human flesh or 'long-pig,' included the meat of the wild cattle, goats and pigs, roasted, boiled, fried and salted raw, and served with miti-hari, a most piquant sauce still in use and which is composed of a mixture of lime juice and the pressed-out milk of grated coconuts. Bananas and plantains, cooked and uncooked, were served; also taro in balls which looked like mud and tasted like sago and brown sugar; breadfruit, avocados, seaweed, squid, prawns and shrimps and an endless variety of indigenous tropical fruits.

"The general plan of the place was, roughly, as follows: Beginning at the right and running in a seaward direction, there was first the private stairway for an official who might be designated as the Captain of the Guard, a curving four-foot passage, the steps of which were cut into the earth and faced with stones. This stairway led up to the box where the Captain presided during the festivities, and was for his private use. Next came the main approach to the feast level, a stairway two paces in width, terminating between two round towers in which soldiers with clubs were stationed to welcome bona fide guests and intercept intruders. A functionary who stood at the head of the stairs greeted each guest on his arrival with a loud shout of welcome and a blast from a pao or conch trumpet, announcing him immediately afterwards to the company with a flowery recital of his personal career.

"Farther on was the stairway for the cooks, provision bearers and the human victims. This led to the 'kitchen,' where the firestones and chopping blocks were located. The firestones lined a circular depression in the earth, and after this had been thoroughly heated, the meat and fruit, all wrapped in ti leaves, were laid sociably together to cook. The blackened stones of this old cannibal oven are still in place, and a half-hour's work with an ax and cutlass would put it in shape for service.

The best surviving example of Marquesan tattooing

"Into it were thrown the bones of the victims after
the feast was over"

"Back of the kitchen was the 'larder,' a round, deep hole where the 'long-pig' was kept until ready for the oven. Directly over the mouth of this hole, and about forty feet above it, was the horizontally projecting limb of the sacred banyan, the only tree, by the way, which was permitted to grow within the walls. Over this limb hung a stout rope braided of the fibrous bark of the hau tree. When the call for more meat came from the 'kitchen,' the noosed end of this rope was lowered over the head of the victim next in order, and he was pushed over the brink of the hole, the fall usually breaking his neck. Dismemberment, according to prescribed rules, followed, the choice bits, such as the hands and eyes and ears, being laid aside for the chiefs.

"Beyond the oven, and not far from the chief's house, was what might be called the 'bone-hole,' a rock-lined, well-like sort of an affair about nine feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. Into it were thrown the bones of the victims after the feast was over, and above these gruesome remnants the priests performed certain ceremonies calculated to protect the living from the spirits of the outraged dead. Cutting around the rim of this hole with our cutlasses, we managed, after an hour of tugging and hauling, to dislodge and remove a great mass of creepers, disclosing a huge pile of human bones. A couple of pieces of mahogany, which must have been taken from some ship, were lying near the top of the heap, and led us to wonder how many of the bones mouldering in the pile beneath were those of white men.

"After the keen edges of their appetites had worn off, the feasters adjourned to the 'dance hall,' a rectangular subterranean chamber of about thirty by fifty feet. The most of this great room was a natural cave which pierced the mountain immediately under the feast ground, but to seaward a considerable extension of masonry had been added to give more space. The latter had been destroyed in a freshet and hurricane which occurred about two years previous to our visit, but the cave portion was still in a fair state of preservation. This had been roughly squared with walls of fitted boulders, and off from it opened numerous little retiring rooms which connected with private stairways with the group of guest-houses above. The floor of this chamber was covered with a cement made of coral lime and a puttylike clay, and still remains as smooth and hard as concrete.

"The hall was lighted with torches of kukui nuts, the sooty stains of which on the walls the seepages of years have not entirely effaced. Fantastic indeed must have been the barbaric assemblage as revealed in their flickering light: the hideously tattooed dancers in head-dresses fashioned in imitation of the forms of birds and animals and fishes; the musicians drumming on the hollow trunks of burao and hau, shaking shell and bone rattles, tooting conches and blowing shrill cane whistles; the packed ranks of the spectators, shouting and clapping encouragement and tossing off epu after epu of the fiery coconut wine. Hour after hour the dancers reeled in the delirious abandon of the Marquesan hula; now gliding, with a sinuous, snaky motion, their oil-glistening bodies bent almost to the floor; now leaping wildly into the air, with shouts and shrill screams, lunging with their war clubs at imaginary foes; now seated on long woven mats of pandanus fibre before the dais where royalty reclined, bending and swaying their supple forms in a series of graceful, rhythmic motions, accompanied only by a song, the clappings of hands or the beating of the wooden drums. The boom of the drums, the shrilling of the whistles, the shouts of the spectators, the shrieks of the dancers and the swishings of their bare feet upon the floor—how it all must have stirred and amazed even those roistering old pirate and whaling captains when it struck upon their ears for the first time!"