In the valley of Vaitahu—With Vanquished Often and Seventh Man He Is So Angry He wallows in the Mire—Worship of beauty in the South Seas—Like the ancient Greeks—Care of the body—Preparations for a belle’s dÉbut—Massage as a cure for ills.

ACROSS the Bordelaise Channel from Atuona, many hours of sailing in an outrigger canoe, lay the island of Tahuata. Its principal settlement was Vaitahu, and there I went with Exploding Eggs, my adopted brother of fourteen, to stay awhile in the house of the chief, Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire, as Neo Efitu, his short name, meant. Atuona personified the brooding spirit of melancholy that possessed the race, the shadow of the white upon the Marquesan spirit, but Vaihatu had as genus loci a blithe and domestic sprite, which had kept the tiny village—formerly of thousands—in the habits and moods of the old ways. Waited on as an honored guest by the chief, his wife, and his niece, Vanquished Often, the friend and playmate of the few score inhabitants, I had happy weeks of simple pleasures, and of intense interest in searching into the past of the Marquesans, and especially into their customs and manners in relation to esthetics.

The only foreigner in the valley, by my earnest wish and laughable example, life resumed for a time much of the old Marquesan method and appearance. The mission church, the first Christian edifice within a thousand miles, was rejoining the wilderness. Without clergy or adherent, its walls were fast falling into decay, and its precisely-planned garden was jungle. The artist-schoolmaster, Le Moine, who had taught Vaitahu’s children to say, “La France est le plus bon pays du monde,” was gone to seek other models for painting as ravishing as Vanquished Often, or men as majestic as Kahuiti, the cannibal of Taaoa. Existence, almost as devoid of invention and artificiality as before the white came, I was able to rebuild in my mind the structure of Marquesan taste, and to view in imagination the attractive aspect of Vaitahu in its idyllic days of old. We brought out of the chests the native garments of tapa, and we lived as much as possible—like children playing Indians—a perspective of the past.

I looked from my mat upon the paepae of Seventh Man Who Wallows to see Vanquished Often by the Vai Puna, the spring of Vaitahu. She had taken off her ahu or tunic of pink muslin and bent over to receive the full stream of cool water from the hills which flowed through the bamboo pipes. Her beautiful body, the blood mantling under her silken skin, perfect in development at thirteen years, glowed in the dazzling light and under the silvery cascade, and her long, unconfined hair shone red-gold in the sunbeams. My mind reverted to the descriptions of the women, the men, and the scenes described by these who voyaged here decades ago.

Not any people in all the world, ancient or modern, ranked human beauty higher in the list of life’s gifts than did the people of these islands. In the star-scattered archipelagos of the Pacific tropics a dozen tawny races or breeds of superb physical endowment made their bodies wondrous temples for their free souls. The loveliness and grace of women, the symmetry and strength of men, were, before the white came to destroy them, the fascinating labor of their days, their vivid religion, and the expression of their joy of living.

They brought the culture of beauty and the rhythm of motion to an unequaled perfection, and in the adornment of their bodies and development of their natural attractions reached a pitch of splendor and artistry which, though seeming savage to us of this period, struck beholders, even of our kind, as entrancing and marvelous.

While all over Polynesia these conditions obtained when the first Anglo-Saxons threw down the anchors of their ships in the enchanting harbors of these tropics, they remained longest in the Marquesas Archipelago.

In their simple dress, their practice of manipulation in the development of their bodies, their use of scents, unguents, and lotions, their wearing of flowers and ornaments, their singular and astounding art of the story-teller, the dance and the pantomime, and the exquisite tattooing of their persons, they showed a delicacy of feeling and an understanding of elegance unsurpassed in the records of the nations of the earth.

As I sat under the pandanus thatch of Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire, I recalled what that eminent moralizer, Lecky, had said:

The intense esthetic enthusiasm that prevailed was eminently fitted to raise the most beautiful to honor. In a land and beneath a sky where natural beauty developed to the highest point, supreme physical perfection was crowned by an assembled people. In no other period of the world’s history was the admiration of beauty in all its forms so passionate or so universal. It colored the whole moral teaching of the time, and led the chief moralists to regard virtue simply as the highest kind of supersensual beauty. It led the wife to pray, before all other prayers, for the beauty of her children. The courtesan was often the queen of beauty.

Lecky wrote that of ancient Greece to contrast it with the morals of the Europe of his day, but I considered the striking likeness between the condition he described and the attitude of the ancient Marquesans. Here in these tiny islands, separated by ten thousand miles of billow from the land of Pericles and Aspasia, a people whose origin was only guessed at by science, erected the same goal of attainment, and like standards of harmony of form and movement. Doubtless at that very day these Greeks of the tropics, considering their environment, most distant from the birthplace of humanity and from the example of other peoples, were comparable in brilliancy of person and ease of motion to the Homeric figures.

The American sea-fighter, Captain David Porter, who ran up the Stars and Stripes in the breadfruit groves of these islands, said:

The men of the Marquesas are remarkably handsome, of large stature and well-proportioned; they possess every variety of countenance and feature, and a great difference is observable in the color of the skin, which for the most part is of a copper color. But some are as fair as the generality of working people much exposed to the sun of a warm climate.

The young girls were handsome and well-formed; their skins were remarkably soft and smooth and their complexions no darker than many brunettes in America, celebrated for their beauty. Their modesty was more evident than that of the women of any place we had visited since leaving our own country; and if they suffered themselves (though with apparent timidity and reluctance) to be presented naked to strangers, may it not be in compliance with a custom which taught them to sacrifice to hospitality all that is most estimable?

Why, and how had this strange race, so far from others’ strivings, attained so singular a state of natural beauty that discoverer after discoverer and diarist after diarist, from the bloody Spaniard, MendaÑa, to the gentle Louis Stevenson, set it down as the “handsomest on earth?”

One must guess at the beginnings of the Marquesans. Scientists make explorations to find the route of the Caucasian people who thousands of years ago—maybe, before the Hebrews deserted Jehovah for Baal-Peor—migrated through the unknown and fearsome wastes of ocean toward these misty islands of the far south. What equipment of body and soul they brought with them we do not know, but they were or became the masters of their seas, and in their frail canoes dared even the long voyage to New Zealand and to Hawaii, when Europeans and Asiatics in keeled ships crept carefully about their own coasts, or crossed the Mediterranean Sea only within the threatening Pillars of Hercules.

During the thousands of years the Marquesans were separated from Europe they developed a policy of government, a paternalistic democracy, or communism, which was perfectly adapted to their nature and surroundings. A very large part of it was concerned with beauty, manners, and entertainment, with personal decoration, carving of stone and wood, building of temples and houses, oratory, dances, and chants. All of these were carefully regulated by cults, gilds, and tapus. They must have been an extremely prolonged growth, for they had come to a fixed standard of detail and exactness, and an acme of art, bizarre and exotic as it was, that could have been but the minute accretion of many centuries. When the first explorers came into the uncharted spaces of these warm seas, they found a culture totally beyond the understanding of most of them, and abhorrent to state and church, but which a few fine souls glimpsed as an astonishing revelation of the natural development of the human, and, by foil, of the decadence of civilization. They found health and high spirits abounding to a degree utterly strange to them, the hardiest and most adventurous of Europeans and Americans, and they were provoked by the innocence, radiance, and naturalness of the women.

This Edenic condition astounded the Yankee Porter, who went to sea at sixteen, and who slew scores of Marquesans, for he put in his log:

The Hawaiians, Tahitians, and New Zealanders had by residence among whites become corrupt; they had fallen into their vices and ate the same food. They were no longer in a state of nature; they had, like us, become corrupt, and while the honest, guileless faces of the Marquesans shone with benevolence, good nature and intelligence, the downcast eye and sullen look of the others marked their inferiority and degeneracy. Guilt, of which by intercourse with us they had become sensible, had already marked their countenances. Every emanation of their souls could not be perceived upon their countenances as with those of the naked Marquesans.

War, murder, mutiny, desertion, and horrible orgies marked the reaction of these forecastle denizens, scourings of slums and dull villages, to the spontaneity, ease, and liberty they found here, in contrast with their ugly and restricted lives aboard ship or in the hard climes and rough grooves of their homes. The sight of such intense individual happiness, glowing vitality, and exquisite bodies, of a coÖperative existence without kings or commoners, business or money, palaces or hovels, disease or dirt, prudery or prostitutes, shocked them by the abrupt differences from their own countries. They wrote the Marquesans down as barbarians, as the Greeks did the Romans; and church, government, and trade made haste to hack down their achievement, and to make over the pieces as the wretched patchwork of their own hands. They hated it, subconsciously, for its giving the lie to their own boasted institutions. They ended it that it might not mock the degradation and futility of their own conduct and the opposition between their decalogue and their deeds. The merchant condemned and altered it to make a market for what it did not then need or desire.

The first approach to change after subjugation and conversion was through clothing, because the most obvious difference between the whites and the browns was that the latter largely exposed their bodies. The missionary paved the way for the dealer who had cottons to sell by saying that God abhorred nakedness. Livingston himself acted likewise. The Marquesans, in truth, had a small variety of clothing. Much of the time both sexes wore only the single garment, the pareu or loin-cloth. Their clothes of Tapa or bark were, except mattings, the only stuffs made by the Marquesans. They were of a remarkable texture and coloring, considering the materials available. The inner barks of the banian, breadfruit, and particularly the mulberry trees were used. The outer rind was scraped off with a shell, and the inner slightly beaten and allowed to ferment. It was then beaten over wooden forms with clubs of ironwood about eighteen inches long, grooved coarsely on one side and finely on the reverse, a process that united so closely the fibers that in the finished cloth one could not guess the processes of its making. Bleached in the sun on the beaches to a dazzling white, this fabric was either dyed black or brown, yellow or red, or fashioned as it was into the few varieties of garments they affected. All wore the pareu about the loins; a strip two yards or more in length, and a yard wide, which is passed twice about the waist and tucked in for holding, as the sarong of the Malay. It hangs above the knees, and like the fundoshi of Japan, worn by royalty and beggar, is capable, for strenuous movements, such as swimming, of being gathered up to form a diaper or breech-cloth.

The cahu or ahu, a long and flowing piece of tapa, was worn by the females, hanging from the shoulders, knotted about or covering one or both breasts at the whim of the wearer. For the coloring of this and the pareu, rich and alluring dyes were found in the plants and trees and even the sea-animals of the beaches. The outlines of the hibiscus flowers and carven objects were imprinted upon these tapas, and astronomical, mystic, or tribal signs or records drawn upon them in fantastic but artistic design.

The method of wearing the cahu for hiding or disclosing the charms of the female was as varied as the toilettes of Parisian fashion. The conceit of the girl or woman, the occasion, and the weather decided its being draped in any one of a score of manners. A belle might think it ungenerous to cover too much, and an old or homely woman find the entire surface too scant. When human nature has freest fling, prudery is the fig-leaf of ugliness, here, as in the salon of Mayfair, or behind the footlights of Broadway.

For the men, while the pareu, always as now, was the common apparel, they had a hundred ornaments, in a diversity more numerable than those of the females. Whenever man has not sacrificed his masculine craving for adornment to religious or economic pressure, he is the gaudier of the sexes. From the fiddler-crab with his rampant claw to the mandrill with his crimson and lilac callosities, nature has so ordained it, and man rejoiced in his privilege. Not until European man felt the iron hand of the machine age, when the rifle displaced the bow and the pistol the sword, the factory the home loom, and the foundry the smithy; not until money became the chief pursuit of all ranks, and puritanism a general blight upon brilliancy of costume, did the white man relinquish his gewgaws to the parasitic woman. Then he made it a vicarious pride by decorating her with his riches and making her the vehicle of his pomp in ornature, and the advertisement of his prosperity.

The Marquesans, struck by the glitter of brass buttons and gold braid, of broadcloth and fur, unfamiliar with metal, and admiring everything foreign, fell facile victims to vestures, and when the new-fangled religions that followed hot upon the discoverers, enforced covering by dogma and even by punishment, they clothed themselves and sweated in fashion and sanctity. But clothes irk the Marquesans as they do all people living close to a kindly nature. Our own babes resent even the swaddles which bind them in the cradle. The first years of childhood are a continuing struggle against garments, until, having lost plasticity and the instant response of muscle to mind that distinguishes the Marquesans, the result is rationalized by adolescents into modesty and convention. After youth, clothing is welcomed by us to enhance imperfect charms and to hide defects, to screen our unhandsome and puny bodies. The lean shanks, protuberant abdomens, and anatomical grotesqueries in a public bath bear witness to our sacrifice. Marriage is often a disclosure of unguessed flaws.

“The gods are naked and in the open,” said Seneca.

Pigalle sculptured the frail old Voltaire in the nude, yet attained dignity. Even Broadway smiles at frocked heroes in bronze, and must have its ideals in marble or bronze undraped.

How often, when I lived at the spacious home of my friend, Ariioehau Ameroearao, the chief at Mataiea in Tahiti, I have seen him, chevalier of the Legion of Honor, come in from the highway in stiff white linen or in religious black, and in a twinkling reduce his garb to a loin-cloth!

His walls were hung with portraits of princes and distinguished travelers, guests of his in the past score of years, and none was more distinguished, though in brilliant uniform and gorgeously decorated, than the old chief in his strip of cotton print.

“Three kings naked have I seen, and never a sign of royalty,” said the cynical Bismarck.

Plato understood very well the spirit in which the Polynesians were clothed by the whites, the crass prurience that pointed out to them the wickedness of nudity, that hid their beautiful bodies under tunics and pantaloons, that laughed at their simplicity.

In the “Republic” he says:

Not long since it was thought discreditable and ridiculous among the Greeks, as it is now among most barbarian nations, for men to be seen naked. And when the Cretans first, and after them the LacedÆmonians, began the practice of gymnastic exercises, the wits of the time had it in their power to make sport of those novelties. But when experience has shown that it was better to strip than to cover up the body and when the ridiculous effect that this plan had to the eye had given way before the arguments establishing its superiority, it was at the same time, as I imagine, demonstrated that he is a fool who thinks anything ridiculous but that which is evil, and who attempts to raise a laugh by assuming any object to be ridiculous but that which is unwise and evil.

The Marquesans, perfect animals, had their senses extraordinarily attuned to the faintest vibrations of value to their survival or delight. They heard sounds plainly that I, with rather better than ordinary civilized hearing, did not catch. I was with Vanquished Often when she spoke to Exploding Eggs two hundred feet away in a conversational tone. I tested them, and found they could talk with each other intelligibly when I heard but an indistinct whisper from the farthest. So with smell. Ghost Girl and Mouth of God, my neighbor at Atuona, could detect any intimates by their odor in pitch darkness at twenty feet, though Marquesans, because they have little bodily hair and are the cleanest people I know, have less personal odor than we. They enjoyed life through scent infinitely more than do we. They had no kisses but rubbed noses and smelled each other with indrawings of their breath. Odoriferous herbs, flowers, and seeds were continually about their necks, both men and women, tucked behind their ears, or in their hair, and their bodies after bathings were anointed with the hinano-scented cocoanut-oil. Their noses were sources of sensuous enjoyment to them beyond my capability. They inhaled emanations from flowers too subtle to touch my olfactory nerves.

The Marquesan woman has ever been an arch-coquette, paying infinite attention to her appearance, and enduring pain and ennui to improve her beauty. Her complexion was as much a pride as with a fashionable American woman to-day. The beauty parlors of our cities were matched by the steam baths, the use of saffron, of oils, and of massage, and by weeks or even months of preparation before some great festival. To burst upon the assembled clan, white as the sea-foam, with skin as smooth as a polished calabash, hair oiled and wreathed, and body rounded from dancing practice and much sleep, and to set beating wildly the pulses of the young men, so that, strive as they might to remain mute, they would be forced to yield mad plaudits, was a result worth months of effort. To be the belle of the ball was a distinction a woman remembered a lifetime. It was an honor comparable to the warrior’s wounds, or possession of the heads of the enemies. Parents felt keenly the success of their daughters. Titihuti and others have told me of their triumphs, as Bernhardt or Patti might recite of packed houses and a score of encores.

A curious secrecy or modesty was attached to the making of the toilet and the enhancement of the natural charms. No Marquesan or Tahitian or Hawaiian would ever have looked at herself in a portable mirror—if she had one—as do many of our females, and the whitening and reddening of cheeks and lips in public places would have caused a blush of shame for her sex to suffuse the face of a Marquesan, to whom such intimate gestures were for the privacy of her home or the bank of the limpid stream in a grove dedicated to the Marquesan Venus.

Near Tahiti was the atoll of Tetuaroa where for hundreds of years the belles of Tahiti resorted to lose their sunburn in the bowered groves and to spend a season in beautification by banting, special foods, dancing, swimming, massage, baths, oils, and lotions.

Here in the Marquesas, as in all Polynesia, a period of voluntary seclusion preceded the dÉbut of the maiden, or the preparation for a special pas seul by a noted beauty.

Seclusion of the girl was practiced at the time of puberty. It has a curious analogy in such far separated places as Torres Straits and British Columbia, one Australasia and the other North America. The girls of a tribe in Torres Straits are hidden for three months behind a circle of bushes in their parent’s house at the first signs of womanhood. No sun must reach them, and no man, even though he be the father, enter the house, nor must they feed themselves. The Nootkas of British Columbia also conceal their nubile virgins, and insist that they touch their own bodies for a period only with a comb or a bone, never laying their hands upon it.

It would seem that all this mystery had the same purpose, that of adding to the attractiveness of the girls and heightening the romance of their new condition. Our coming-out parties parallel the goal of these strange peoples, announcements, formal introductions, as brilliant as possible, being considered desirable both among savages and ourselves to give notice of a marriageable state. Our dÉbuts have not departed far from aboriginal ideas.

The Junoesque wife of Seventh Man Who Wallows had just come from the via puna in her accustomed bathing attire, and, still dripping, seated herself in the sun near me to dry. She had added a jasmine blossom to the heavy gold hoops in her ears and had lit her pipe, and her handsome, large face was twisted between smiles and frowns as she tried to put in understandable words and gestures her recital of these customs:

“Our girls, daughters of chiefs, such as I am, were kept hidden for months before we appeared for the first time in public in the tribal dance. The tapu was strict. We were secret in our mother’s house and inclosure, without supposedly even being seen by any one but our relatives and their retainers. It was death to gaze upon us. We were tapu tapu. If we had cause to go out, our official guardian blew a conch-shell to warn all from the neighborhood. Not until the day of the dance or marriage ceremony, not until the feast was spread and the accepted suitor present to claim us, or the drums booming for the dance, were we shown to the multitude; we had had months of omi omi, and would be in perfect condition and most beautiful.”

It was this omi omi, or massage, that many of the earlier chroniclers of the South Seas believed to be the cause of the chiefs and headmen of all these islands being much bigger and handsomer than the common people. The hakaiki, or chiefs, men and women, throughout Polynesia astonished the voyagers and missionaries by their huge size. Often they were from four to six inches above six feet tall, and framed in proportion. Hardly a writing sailor or visitor to Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, or the Marquesas but remarks this striking fact. Many thought these headmen a different race than the others, but scientists know that family, food, and the curious effect of the strenuous massage from infancy account for the differences. The omi omi of these islands, the tarumi of Tahiti, and the lomi lomi of the Hawaiians all have a relation to the momi-ryoji, practiced by the tens of thousands of whistling blind itinerants throughout Japan.

I had a remarkable illustration of the curative merits of omi omi when, having bruised my back by awkwardness in sliding down a rocky waterfall into a once tabooed pool with Vanquished Often and Exploding Eggs, I submitted myself to the ministrations of Juno and Vanquished Often. They would have me in the glare of the early morning sun on Seventh Man’s paepae, and there were gales of laughter as they shouted out my physical differences from the Marquesans, my excellences, and my blemishes. On one side and on the other, both squatted, they handled me as if they understood the locations of each muscle and nerve. They pinched and pulled, pressed and hammered, and otherwise took hold of and struck me, but all with a most remarkable skill and seeming exact knowledge of their method and its results. I was in agony over their treatment of me, but after a day as well as ever.

Before I was given the omi omi, I was bathed by the two ladies with a care and nicety not to be bought at our best hammams. A tiny penthouse was made quickly of cocoanut-leaves, and in this was placed a great wooden trencher of water in which white hot stones were dropped. On a tiny stool I sat in the resulting steam, the delicious odor of kakaa leaves thrown into the boiling water aiding the vapor in effect on skin and nerves. Quite ten minutes I was compelled to remain in the penthouse, my fair jailers remaining obdurate outside despite my imploring cries to be released, my protestations that I was being dissolved and would emerge a thing of shreds and patches. When I could not have stood it another second, my lungs bursting with restraint, and my body hot enough to hurt my nervously caressing hands, I was suddenly let out and hurried to the beach, where Vanquished Often rushed with me into the beating surf.

The sea seemed cold as an Adirondack lake, and I was for swimming beyond the breakers in fullest enjoyment of the relief, but my doctors would not allow me another minute and hand in hand rushed me to the chief’s paepae, now my own, for my lenitive kneading. The bruises I had got in my awkward essay to emulate the agility of Exploding Eggs and Vanquished Often were deep and painful, but after half an hour of their pounding I fell asleep and remained unconscious six hours. I was to myself a celestial musical instrument, a human xylophone, from which houris struck notes that made the stars whirl, and to the music of which Vanquished Often danced in the purple moonlight upon a milky cloud. Their cessation of the omi omi woke me. It was past noon when I joined them and the whole merry populace of Vaitahu in the warm ocean waves. I was without pain or stiffness, and reborn to a childhood I had forgotten.