Perilous navigation—Curious green sky—Arrival at Anaa—Religion and the movies—Character of Paumotuans.

A CURRENT set against us all night. Now I understood fully the alarms and misgivings that had caused the first and following discoverers of the “Pernicious Islands” to curse them by the titles they gave them. Our current was of the mischievous sort that upset logarithms and dead reckoning, and put ships ashore.

“This group is a graveyard of vessels,” said McHenry, “and there’d be ten times as many wrecked, if they come here. Wait till you see the County of Roxburgh at Takaroa! I’ve been cruisin’ round here more’n twenty years, and I never saw the current the same. The Frog Government at Papeete is always talkin’ about puttin’ lighthouses on a half dozen of these atolls, but does nothin’. Maybe the chief or a trader hangs a lantern on top of his house when he expects a cargo for him, but you can’t trust those lights, and you can’t see them in time to keep from hittin’ the reef. There’s no leeway to run from a wind past beating. It’s lee shore in some bloody direction all the time.

“There’s a foot or two between high and low, and it’s low in the lagoon when the moon is full. It’s high when the moon rises and when it sets. In atolls where there’s a pass into the lagoon, there’s a hell of a current in the lagoon at the lowerin’ tide, and in the sea near the lagoon when the tide is risin’. We’re goin’ to beat those tides with engines. In five years every schooner in the group will have an auxiliary. There’s only one now, the Fetia Taiao, and she’s brand new. It used to be canoes, and then whale-boats, and then cutters here, and purty soon it’ll be gasolene schooners.”

Then will the cry arise that romance has perished of artificiality. But the heart of man is always the same, and nothing kills romance but sloth.

We battled with the current and a fresh wind during the long, dark hours, Jean Moet never leaving the deck, and I keeping him company. Below on a settee Virginie said her beads or slept. I could see her by the smudgy cabin lamp, and hear her call to her husband two or three times, hours apart, “Ça va bien?” Jean would answer in Tahitian, as to a sailor, “Maitai,” and invariably would follow his mechanical reply, with “Et toi, dors-tu?”

Ever light-hearted, currents nor squalls could burden his Gascon spirit. He looked at the stars, and he looked at the water, he consulted with the mate, and gave orders to the steersman.

“Eh b’en,” he said to me, “moi, I am comme monsieur ze gouverneur ov ze Paumotu who live een Favarava, over zere.” He pointed into the darkness. “’E ’as a leetle schoonaire an’ ’e keep ze court and ze calaboose, bot mos’ly ’e lis’en to ze musique an’ make ze dance. La vie est triste; viva la bagatelle! Maybee we pick op Anaa in ze morning. Eef not, amigo mio, Virginie she weel pray for nous both.”

Anaa, or Chain Island, as Captain Cook named it because of its eleven motus or islets, strung like emeralds and pearls in a rosary, was not visible at daybreak, but as I studied the horizon the sky turned to a brilliant green. I thought some dream of that Tir-na’n-Og spoken of by TomÉ in Niau obsessed me. I turned my back and waited for my eyes to right themselves. One sees green in the rainbow and green in the sunset, but never had I known a morning sky to be of such a hue. McHenry came on deck in his pajamas, and looked about.

“Erin go bragh!” he remarked. “Ireland is castin’ a shadow on the bloody heaven. There,” he pointed, “is the sight o’ the bleedin’ world. You’ve never seen it before an’ you won’t see it again, unless you come to Anaa in the mornin’ or evenin’ of a purty clear day. It’s the shinin’ of the lagoon of Anaa in the sky, an’ it’s nowhere else on the ball. There’s many a Kanaka in ’is canoe outa sight o’ land has said a prayer to his god when he seen that green. He knew he was near Anaa. You can see that shine thirty or thirty-five miles away, hours before you raise the atoll.”

Some curious relation of the lagoon to the sky had painted this hazy lawn on high. It was like a great field of luscious grass, at times filmy, paling to the color of absinthe touched with water, and again a true aquamarine, as I have seen the bay of Todos Santos, at EnseÑada of Lower California. Probably it is the shallowness of the waters, which in this lagoon are strangely different from most of the inland basins of the South Sea Isles. To these mariners, who moved their little boats between them, the mirage was famed; and the natives had many a legend of its origin and cause, and of their kind being saved from starvation or thirst by its kindly glint.

McHenry called down the companionway, “Hey, monster, you can see the grass on Anaa. Vite-vite!”

Moet, who was below, drinking a cup of coffee, leaped up the companionway. He called out swift orders to go over on the other tack, and headed straight for the mirage. The schooner heeled to the breeze, now freshening as the sun became hotter, and we reeled off six or seven knots with all canvas drawing. In an hour the celestial plot of green had vanished, fading out slowly as we advanced, and we began to glimpse the cocoanuts on the beach, though few trees showed on the sky-line, and they were twisted as in travail.

Anaa, as others of these islands and Tahiti, too, had suffered terribly by a cyclone a few years ago. More than any other island of this group Anaa had felt the devastating force of the matai rorofai, the “wind that kills”—the wind that slew Lovaina’s son and made her cut her hair in mourning. Hikueru lost more people, because there were many there; but Anaa was mangled and torn as a picador’s horse by the horns of the angry bull. A half-mile away we could plainly see the havoc of wind and wave. The reef itself had been broken away in places, and coral rocks as big as houses hurled upon the beach.

“I was there just after the cyclone,” said McHenry. “It was a bloomin’ garden before then, Anaa. It was the only island in the Paumotus in which they grew most of the fruits as in Tahiti, the breadfruit, the banana, the orange, lime, mango, and others. It may be an older island than the others or more protected usually from the wind; but, anyhow, it had the richest soil. The Anaa people were just like children, happy and singin’ all the time. That damned storm knocked them galley-west. It tore a hole in the island, as you can see, killed a hundred people, and ended their prosperity. There was a Catholic church of coral, old and bloody fine, and when I got here a week after the cyclone I couldn’t find the spot where the foundations had been. I came with the vessels the Government sent to help the people. You never seen such a sight. The most of the dead were blown into the lagoon or lay under big hunks of coral. People with crushed heads and broken legs and arms and ribs were strewn all around. The bare reef is where the village was, and the people who went into the church to be safe were swept out to sea with it.”

As at Niau, the schooner lay off the shore, and the long-boat was lowered. In it were placed the cargo, and with Moet, McHenry, and me, men, women, and children passengers, four oarsmen and the boat-steerer, it was completely filled, we sitting again on the boxes.

Once more the Flying Fish towed the boat very near to the beach, and at the cry of “Let go!” flung away the rope’s end and left us to the oars. The passage through the reef of Anaa was not like that of Niau. There was no pit, but a mere depression in the rocks, and it took the nicest manoeuvering to send the boat in the exact spot. As we approached, the huge boulders lowered upon us, threatening to smash us to pieces, and we backed water and waited for the psychological moment. The surf was strong, rolling seven or eight feet high, and crashing on the stone with a menacing roar, but the boat-steerer wore a smile as he shouted, “Tamau te paina!”

The oars lurched forward in the water, the boat rose on the wave, and onward we surged; over the reef, scraping a little, avoiding the great rocks by inches almost, and into milder water. The sailors leaped out, and with the next wave pulled the boat against the smoother strand; but it was all coral, all rough and all dangerous, and I considered well the situation before leaving the boat. I got out in two feet of water and raced the next breaker to the higher beach, my camera tied on my head.

There was no beach, as we know the word—only a jumbled mass of coral humps, millions of shells, some whole, most of them broken into bits, and the rest mere coarse sand. On this were scattered enormous masses of coral, these pieces of the primitive foundation upheaved and divided by the breakers when the cyclone blew. The hand of a Titan had crushed them into shapeless heaps and thrown them hundreds of feet toward the interior, the waves washing away the soil, destroying all vegetation, and laying bare the crude floor of the island. From the water’s edge I walked over this waste, gleaming white or milky, for a hundred yards before I reached the copra shed of Lacour, a French trader, and sat down to rest. The sailors bore the women and children on their shoulders to safety, and then commenced the landing of the merchandise for Lacour. Flour and soap, sugar, biscuit, canned goods, lamps, piece goods; gauds and gewgaws, cheap jewelry, beads, straw for making hats, perfumes and shawls.

Lacour, pale beneath his deep tan, black-haired and slender, greeted us at the shed with the dead-and-alive manner of many of these island exiles, born of torrid heat, long silences, and weariness of the driven flesh. A cluster of women lounged under a tohonu tree, the only shade near-by, and they smiled at me and said, “Ia ora na oe!”

I strolled inland. It was an isle of desolation, ravaged years ago, but prostrated still, swept as by a gigantic flail. Everywhere I beheld the results of the cataclysm.

Picking up shells and bits of coral at haphazard, I came upon the bone of a child, the forearm, bleached by wind and rain. Few of the bodies of the drowned had been interred with prayer, but found a last resting-place under the coral dÉbris or in the maws of the sharks that rode upon the cyclone’s back in search of prey.

It was very hot. These low atolls were always excessively warm, but not humid. It was a dry heat. The reflection of the sunlight on the blocks of coral and the white sand made a glare that was painful to whites, and made colored glasses necessary to shield their eyes. Temporary blindness was common among new-comers, thus unprotected.

I walked miles and never lost the evidence of violence and loss. There was an old man by a coral pen, in which were three thin, measly pigs, a grayish yellow in color. He showed me to a small, wooden church.

“There are four Catholic churches in Anaa,” he said, “with one priest, and there are three hundred souls all told in this island. The priest goes about to the different churches, but money is scarce. This New Year the contribution was so trifling, the priest, who knew the bishop in Papeete would demand an accounting, sent word to know why—and what do you think he got back? That Lacour, the trader, with his accursed cinematograph, had taken all the money. He charged twenty-five cocoanuts to see the views in his copra shed, and they are wonderful; but the churches are empty. We are all Katorika.”

“Katorika?” I queried. “That is Popay?”

The old man frowned.

“Popay! That is what the Porotetani [Protestants] call the Katorika. I am the priest’s right hand. But we are poor, and Lacour, with his store and now with his machine that sets the people wild over cowaboyas, and shows them the Farani [French] and the Amariti [Americans] in their own islands—there is no money for the church.”

I interrupted the jeremiad of the ancient acolyte.

“Was there nothing left of the old church?” I asked.

The hater of cinematographs took me into the humble wooden structure, and there were a bronze crucifix and silver candlesticks that had been in the coral edifice.

“I saved them,” he said proudly. “When I saw the wind was too great, when the church began to rock, I took them and buried them in a hole I dug. I did this before I climbed the tree which saved me from the big wave. Ah, that was a real cathedral. The people of Anna are changed. The best died in the storm. They want now to know what is going on in Papeete, the great world.”

A hundred years ago the people of Anaa erected three temples to the god of the Christians. For a century they have had the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Anaa had witnessed a bitter struggle between contending churches to win adherents. When France took hold, France was Catholic, and the priests had every opportunity and assistance to do their pious work. The schools were taught by Catholic nuns. Their governmental subsidy made it difficult for the English Protestants to proselytize, and with grief they saw their flocks going to Rome. Only the most zealous Protestant missionaries were unshaken by the change. When the anti-clerical feeling in France triumphed, the Concordat was broken, and the schools laicized, the priests and nuns in these colonies were ousted from the schools; the Catholic church was not only not favored, but, in many instances, was hindered by officials who were of anti-clerical feelings. The Protestant sects took heart again, and made great headway. The Mormons returned, the Seventh Day Adventists became active, and many nominal Catholics fell away. The fact was that it was not easy to keep Polynesians at any heat of religion. They wanted entertainment and amusement, and if a performance of a religious rite, a sermon, revival, conference, or other solace or diversion was not offered, they inclined to seek relaxation and even pleasure where it might be had. Monotony was the substance of their days, and relief welcomed in the most trifling incident or change.

Lacour’s wife, granddaughter of a Welshman but all native in appearance, sat with the other women under the tohonu tree when I returned. I had seen thousands of fallen cocoanut-trees rotting in the swamps, and had climbed over the coral fields for several miles. There was no earth, only coral and shells and white shell-sand. Chickens evidently picked up something to eat, for I saw a dozen of them. In the lagoon, fish darted to and fro.

Lacour’s wife had a yellowish baby in her lap, and she wore earrings, a wedding-ring, and a necklace and bracelets.

The boat was plying from the schooner to the shore, and I watched its progress. Piri a Tuahine held the steering oar, laughing, calling to his fellows to pull or not to pull, as I could see through a glass. A current affected the surf, increasing or decreasing its force at intervals, and it was now at its height. The boat entered the passage on a crest, but a following wave struck it hard, turned it broadside, and all but over. A flood entered the boat, but the men leaped out and, though up to their shoulders in the water, held it firm, and finally drew it close to the beach. The flour and the boxes and beds of native passengers were wetted, but they ran to the boat and carried their belongings near to the copra shed, and spread them to dry. Lacour cursed the boat and the sailors.

Near Lacour’s store was a house, in which lived Captain Nimau, owner of a small schooner. Nimau invited me to sleep there and see the moving pictures. We had brought Lacour a reel or so, and in anticipation, the people of Anaa had been gathering cocoanuts for a week. The films were old ones that Tahiti had wearied of, and Lacour got them for a trifle. The theater was his copra house, and there were no seats nor need of them.

He set the hour of seven for the show, and I alone stayed ashore for it. By six o’clock the residents began flocking to the shed with their entrance-fees. Each bore upon his back twenty-five cocoanuts, some in bags and others with the nuts tied on a pole by their husk. Fathers carried double or even triple quantities for their little ones, and each, as he arrived at Lacour’s, counted the nuts before the trader.

The women brought their own admission tickets. The acolyte, who had inveighed against the cinematograph, was second in line, and secured the best squatting space. His own cocoanuts were in Lacour’s bin.

When the screen was erected and the first picture flashed upon it, few of the people of Anaa were absent, and Lacour’s copra heap was piled high. There were a hundred and sixty people present, and four thousand nuts in the box-office.

The first film was concerned with the doings of Nick Winter, an English detective in France, a burlesque of Sherlock Holmes, and other criminal literatures. The spectators could not make a head nor tail of it, but they enjoyed the scenes hugely and were intensely mystified by many pictures. An automobile, which, by the trickery of the camera, was made to appear to climb the face of a sky-scraper, raised cries of astonishment and assertions of diablerie. The devil was a very real power to South Sea Islanders, whether they were Christians or not, and they had fashioned a composite devil of our horned and cloven-hoofed chap and their own demons, who was made responsible for most trouble and disaster that came to them, and whose machinations explained sleight of hand, and even the vagaries of moving pictures.

What pleased them most were cow-boy pictures, the melodramatic life of the Wild West of America, with bucking bronchos, flying lassos, painted Indians whom they thought tattooed, and dashes of vaqueros, border sheriffs, and maidens who rode cayuses like Comanches. Tahiti was daft over cow-boys, and had adopted that word into the language, and these Anaans were vastly taken by the same life. Lacour explained the pictures as they unrolled, shouting any meanings he thought might pass; and I doubted if he himself knew much about them, for later he asked me if all cow-boys were not Spaniards.

This was the first moving picture machine in these islands. Lacour had only had it a few weeks. He purposed taking it through the Group on a cutter that would transport the cocoanut receipts. Lacour, Nimau, and I sat up late. These Frenchmen save for a few exceptions were as courteous as at home. Peasants or sailors in France, they brought and improved with their position that striking cosmopolitan spirit which distinguishes the Gaul, be he ever so uneducated. The English and American trader was suspicious, sullen or blatant, vulgar and often brutal in manner. The Frenchman had bonhomie, politeness. England and America in the South Seas considered this a weakness, and aimed at the contrary. Manners, of course, originated in France.

“This island is on the French map as La ChaÎne,” said Captain Nimau, “but we who traverse these seas always use the native names. Those old admirals who took word to their king that they had discovered new islands always said, too, that they had named them after the king or some saint. A Spaniard selected a nice name like the Blessed Sacrament or the Holy Mother of God, or some Spanish saint, while a Frenchman chose something to show the shape or color of the land. The Englishman usually named his find after some place at home, like New England, New Britain, and so on. But we don’t give a sacrÉ for those names. How could we? All those fellows claimed to have been here first, and so all islands have two or three European names. We who have to pick them up in the night, or escape from them in a storm, want the native name as we need the native knowledge of them. The landmarks, the clouds, the smells, the currents, the passes, the depths—those are the items that save or lose us our lives and vessels. Let those vieux capitaines fight it out below for the honor of their nomenclature and precedence of discovery!”

What recriminations in Hades between Columbus and Vespucci!

“Take this whole archipelago!” continued Nimau. “The Tahitians named it the Poumotu or pillar islands, because to them the atolls seemed to rise like white trees from the sea. But the name sounded to the people here like Paumotu, which means conquered or destroyed islands, and so, after a few petitions or requests by proud chiefs, the French in 1852 officially named them Tuamotu, distant, out of view, or below the horizon. That was more than a half century ago, but we still call them the Paumotu. There’s nothing harder to change than the old names of places. You can change a man’s or a whole island’s religion much easier.”

Near the little hut in which we were, Nimau’s house, a bevy of girls smoked cigarettes and talked about me. They had learned that I was not a sailor, not one of the crew of the Marara, and not a trader. What could I be, then, but a missionary, as I was not an official, because not French? But I was not a Catholic missionary, for they wore black gowns; and I could not be Mormoni nor Konito, because there in public I was with the Frenchmen, drinking beer. Two, who were handsome, brown, with teeth as brilliant as the heart of the nacre, and eyes and hair like the husks of the ripe cocoanut, came into the house and questioned Lacour.

“They want to know what you are doing here,” interpreted Lacour.

“I am not here to make money nor to preach the Gospel,” I replied.

The younger came to me and put her arms about me, and said: “Ei aha e reva a noho io nei!” And that meant, “Stay here always and rest with me!”

After a while the acolyte joined us, and I put them all many questions.

The Paumotuans were a quiet people, dour, or at least serious and contemplative. They were not like the Tahitians, laugh-loving, light-hearted, frenzied dancers, orators, music worshipers, feasters. The Tahitians had the joy of living, though with the melancholy strain that permeated all Polynesia. The folk of the Dangerous Archipelago were silent, brooding, and religious. The perils they faced in their general vocation of diving, and from cyclones, which annihilated entire populations of atolls, had made them intensely susceptible to fears of hell-fire and to hopes of heaven. The rather Moslem paradise of Mormonism made strong appeal, but was offset by the tortures of the damned, limned by other earnest clerics who preached the old Wesley-Spurgeon everlasting suffering for all not of their sect.

Had religion never affected the Paumotuans, their food would have made them a distinct and a restrained people. We all are creatures of our nourishment. The Tahitians had a plentitude of varied and delicious food, a green and sympathetic landscape, a hundred waterfalls and gentle rills. The inhabitants of these low isles had cocoanut and fish as staples, and often their only sustenance for years. No streams meander these stony beds, but rain-water must be caught, or dependence placed on the brackish pools and shallow wells in the porous rocks or compressed sand, which ebbed and flowed with the tides.

To a Tahitian his brooks were his club, where often he sat or lay in the laughing water, his head crowned with flowers, dreaming of a life of serene idleness. Once or twice a day he must bathe thoroughly. He was clean; his skin was aglow with the effect of air and water. No European could teach him hygiene. He was a perfect animal, untainted and unsoiled, accustomed to laving and massage, to steam, fresh, and salt baths, when Europeans, kings, courts, and commoners went unwashed from autumn to summer; when in the “Lois de la Galanterie,” written for beaux and dandies in 1640, it was enjoined that “every day one should take pains to wash one’s hands, and one should wash one’s face almost as often.”

Environment, purling rivulets under embowering trees, the most enchanting climate between pole and pole, a simple diet but little clothing, made the Tahitian and Marquesan the handsomest and cleanest races in the world. Clothes and cold are an iron barrier to cleanliness, except where wealth affords comfort and privacy. Michelangelo wore a pair of socks many years without removing them. Our grandfathers counted a habit of frequent bathing a sign of weakness. In old New England many baths were thought conducive to immorality, by some line of logic akin to that of my austere aunt, who warned me that oysters led to dancing.

The Paumotuan, before the white man made him a mere machine for gathering copra and pearl-shell and pearls, had a very distinct culture, savage though it was. He was the fabric of his food and the actions induced in him by necessity. Ellis, the interesting missionary diarist of Tahiti and Hawaii, recorded that in 1817, when at Afareaitu, on Moorea, he was printing for the first time the Bible in Tahitian “among the various parties in Afareaitu ... were a number of natives of the Paumotu, or Pearl Islands, which lie to the northwest of Tahiti and constitute what is called the Dangerous Archipelago. These numerous islands, like those of Tetuaroa to the north, are of coralline formation, and the most elevated parts of them are seldom more than two or three feet above high-water mark. The principal, and almost only, edible vegetable they produce is the fruit of the cocoanut. On these, with the numerous kinds of fishes resorting to their shores or among the coral reefs, the inhabitants entirely subsist. They appear a hardy and industrious race, capable of enduring great privations. The Tahitians believe them to be cannibals.... They are in general firm and muscular, but of a more spare habit of body than the Tahitians. Their limbs are well formed, their stature generally tall. The expression of their countenance, and the outline of their features, greatly resemble those of the Society Islanders; their manners are, however, more rude and uncourteous. The greater part of the body is tattooed, sometimes in broad stripes, at others in large masses of black, and always without any of the taste and elegance frequently exhibited in the figures marked on the persons of the Tahitians.”

One who traveled much in the isolated parts of the world was often struck by the unfitness of certain populated places to support in any comfort and safety the people who generation after generation persisted in living in them. For thousands of years the slopes of Vesuvius have been cultivated despite the imminent horror of the volcano above. The burning Paumotu atolls are as undesirable for residences as the desert of Sahara. Yet the hot sands are peopled, and have been for ages, and in the recesses of the frozen North the processes of birth and death, of love and greed, are as absorbing as in the Edens of the earth. Hateful as a lengthy enforced stay in the Paumotus might be to any of us, I have seen two Paumotuan youths dwelling abroad for the first time in their lives, eating delicious food and hardly working at all, weep hours upon hours from homesickness, a continuous longing for their atoll of Puka-ruhu, where they had half starved since birth, and where the equatorial typhoon had raped time and again. Nature, in her insistence that mankind shall continue, implanted that instinct of home in us as one of the most powerful agents of survival of the species. Enduring terrible privation, even, we learned to love the scenes of our sufferings. Never was that better exemplified than in these melancholy and maddening-atolls of the half-browned Archipelago.