In the South Seas E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 515

Beschreibung

Classic travelogue/memoir. According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."

Leseprobe

IN THE SOUTH SEAS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

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PART 1: THE MARQUESAS

CHAPTER I - AN ISLAND LANDFALL

CHAPTER II - MAKING FRIENDS

CHAPTER III - THE MAROON

CHAPTER IV - DEATH

CHAPTER V - DEPOPULATION

CHAPTER VI - CHIEFS AND TAPUS

CHAPTER VII - HATIHEU

CHAPTER VIII - THE PORT OF ENTRY

CHAPTER IX - THE HOUSE OF TEMOANA

CHAPTER X - A PORTRAIT AND A STORY

CHAPTER XI - LONG-PIG - A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE

CHAPTER XII - THE STORY OF A PLANTATION

CHAPTER XIII - CHARACTERS

CHAPTER XIV - IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY

CHAPTER XV - THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA

PART II: THE PAUMOTUS

CHAPTER I - THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO - ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE

CHAPTER II - FAKARAVA: AN ATOLL AT HAND

CHAPTER III - A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND

CHAPTER IV - TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS

CHAPTER V - A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL

CHAPTER VI - GRAVEYARD STORIES

PART III: THE GILBERTS

CHAPTER I - BUTARITARI

CHAPTER II - THE FOUR BROTHERS

CHAPTER III - AROUND OUR HOUSE

CHAPTER IV - A TALE OF A TAPU

CHAPTER V - A TALE OF A TAPU - CONTINUED

CHAPTER VI - THE FIVE DAYS' FESTIVAL

CHAPTER VII - HUSBAND AND WIFE

PART IV: THE GILBERTS - APEMAMA

CHAPTER I - THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE ROYAL TRADER

CHAPTER II - THE KING OF APEMAMA: FOUNDATION OF EQUATOR TOWN

CHAPTER III - THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE PALACE OF MANY WOMEN

CHAPTER IV - THE KING OF APEMAMA: EQUATOR TOWN AND THE PALACE

CHAPTER V - KING AND COMMONS

CHAPTER VI - THE KING OF APEMAMA: DEVIL-WORK

CHAPTER VII - THE KING OF APEMAMA

PART 1: THE MARQUESAS

CHAPTER I - AN ISLAND LANDFALL

FOR nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some  while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to  the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to  expect.  It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I  was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a  bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health.  I  chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's schooner yacht, the CASCO,  seventy-four tons register; sailed from San Francisco towards the  end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and was left early  the next year at Honolulu.  Hence, lacking courage to return to my  old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward in a  trading schooner, the EQUATOR, of a little over seventy tons, spent  four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert  group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89.  By that time  gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I  had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had  learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days  in fairyland; and I decided to remain.  I began to prepare these  pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer JANET  NICOLL.  If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I  have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of  my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future  house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts  of the sea.

That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's  hero is less eccentric than appears.  Few men who come to the  islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm  shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps  cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely  made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated.  No part  of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and  the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some  sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and  ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and  language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and  habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.

The first experience can never be repeated.  The first love, the  first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and  touched a virginity of sense.  On the 28th of July 1888 the moon  was an hour down by four in the morning.  In the east a radiating  centre of brightness told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline,  the morning bank was already building, black as ink.  We have all  read of the swiftness of the day's coming and departure in low  latitudes; it is a point on which the scientific and sentimental  tourist are at one, and has inspired some tasteful poetry.  The  period certainly varies with the season; but here is one case  exactly noted.  Although the dawn was thus preparing by four, the  sun was not up till six; and it was half-past five before we could  distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon.   Eight degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming.  The interval  was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary  thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that  we were then approaching.  Slowly they took shape in the  attenuating darkness.  Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit,  appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our  destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the  southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua- pu.  These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the  pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in  the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a  world of wonders.

Not one soul aboard the CASCO had set foot upon the islands, or  knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues;  and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as  thrilled the bosom of discoverers that we drew near these  problematic shores.  The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales;  it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty  modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was  crowned above by opalescent clouds.  The suffusion of vague hues  deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the  articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial  canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass.  There was  no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot.   Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our  haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it - the only  sea-mark given - a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape  Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and distinguished by two  colossal figures, the gross statuary of nature.  These we were to  find; for these we craned and stared, focused glasses, and wrangled  over charts; and the sun was overhead and the land close ahead  before we found them.  To a ship approaching, like the CASCO, from  the north, they proved indeed the least conspicuous features of a  striking coast; the surf flying high above its base; strange,  austere, and feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and Jane,  or Adam and Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the breakers.

Thence we bore away along shore.  On our port beam we might hear  the explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the  prow; there was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or  beast, in all that quarter of the island.  Winged by her own  impetus and the dying breeze, the CASCO skimmed under cliffs,  opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and  flitted by again, bowing to the swell.  The trees, from our  distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have been in  Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the Alps,  and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more  considerable than our Scottish heath.  Again the cliff yawned, but  now with a deeper entry; and the CASCO, hauling her wind, began to  slide into the bay of Anaho.  The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of  vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so  foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and  fringing the steep sides of mountains.  Rude and bare hills  embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the  landward by a bulk of shattered mountains.  In every crevice of  that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there like  birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the  razor edges of the summit.

Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze,  continued to creep in:  the smart creature, when once under way,  appearing motive in herself.  From close aboard arose the bleating  of young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land  and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and,  presently, a house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles  of the hills, and one of these surrounded with what seemed a  garden.  These conspicuous habitations, that patch of culture, had  we but known it, were a mark of the passage of whites; and we might  have approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel.  It  was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the  universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove  of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc  of reef.  For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and  neighbours of the surf.  'The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man  departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so  long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach.  The mark of  anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly  corner of the bay.  Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted;  the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged.  It was a  small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings  whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and  some part of my ship's company, were from that hour the bondslaves  of the isles of Vivien.

Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the  hamlet.  It contained two men:  one white, one brown and tattooed  across the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white  European clothes:  the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native  chief, Taipi-Kikino.  'Captain, is it permitted to come on board?'  were the first words we heard among the islands.  Canoe followed  canoe till the ship swarmed with stalwart, six-foot men in every  stage of undress; some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a  handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and these the more  considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns; some  barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as something  bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange and  spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity -  all talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to  trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island  curios at prices palpably absurd.  There was no word of welcome; no  show of civility; no hand extended save that of the chief and Mr.  Regler.  As we still continued to refuse the proffered articles,  complaint ran high and rude; and one, the jester of the party,  railed upon our meanness amid jeering laughter.  Amongst other  angry pleasantries - 'Here is a mighty fine ship,' said he, 'to  have no money on board!'  I own I was inspired with sensible  repugnance; even with alarm.  The ship was manifestly in their  power; we had women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond  the fact that they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide)  was full of timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence  might else have reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the  usual instigators and accomplices of native outrage?  When he reads  this confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile.

Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was  filled from end to end with Marquesans:  three brown-skinned  generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me  in silence with embarrassing eyes.  The eyes of all Polynesians are  large, luminous, and melting; they are like the eyes of animals and  some Italians.  A kind of despair came over me, to sit there  helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a  corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd:  and a kind of rage to  think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like  furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien  planet.

To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to  cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify  his diet.  But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman  empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose  laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and  preventing.  I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had  never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never  been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.  By the same step I  had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred  languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied; and  my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images.  Methought,  in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I  returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I  should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text.  Nay,  and I even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged;  perhaps they were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent  friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the  rest, for a man of some authority, might leap from his hams with an  ear-splitting signal, the ship be carried at a rush, and the ship's  company butchered for the table.

There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor  anything more groundless.  In my experience of the islands, I had  never again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to- day, I should be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised.  The  majority of Polynesians are easy folk to get in touch with, frank,  fond of notice, greedy of the least affection, like amiable,  fawning dogs; and even with the Marquesans, so recently and so  imperfectly redeemed from a blood-boltered barbarism, all were to  become our intimates, and one, at least, was to mourn sincerely our  departure.

CHAPTER II - MAKING FRIENDS

THE impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over- estimated.  The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though  hard to speak with elegance.  And they are extremely similar, so  that a person who has a tincture of one or two may risk, not  without hope, an attempt upon the others.

And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters  abound.  Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the  bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and  hamlet; and even where these are unserviceable, the natives  themselves have often scraped up a little English, and in the  French zone (though far less commonly) a little French-English, or  an efficient pidgin, what is called to the westward 'Beach-la-Mar,'  comes easy to the Polynesian; it is now taught, besides, in the  schools of Hawaii; and from the multiplicity of British ships, and  the nearness of the States on the one hand and the colonies on the  other, it may be called, and will almost certainly become, the  tongue of the Pacific.  I will instance a few examples.  I met in  Majuro a Marshall Island boy who spoke excellent English; this he  had learned in the German firm in Jaluit, yet did not speak one  word of German.  I heard from a gendarme who had taught school in  Rapa-iti that while the children had the utmost difficulty or  reluctance to learn French, they picked up English on the wayside,  and as if by accident.  On one of the most out-of-the-way atolls in  the Carolines, my friend Mr. Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the  lads playing cricket on the beach and talking English; and it was  in English that the crew of the JANET NICOLL, a set of black boys  from different Melanesian islands, communicated with other natives  throughout the cruise, transmitted orders, and sometimes jested  together on the fore-hatch.  But what struck me perhaps most of all  was a word I heard on the verandah of the Tribunal at Noumea.  A  case had just been heard - a trial for infanticide against an ape- like native woman; and the audience were smoking cigarettes as they  awaited the verdict.  An anxious, amiable French lady, not far from  tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared she would engage the  prisoner to be her children's nurse.  The bystanders exclaimed at  the proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke no  language.  'MAIS, VOUS SAVEZ,' objected the fair sentimentalist;  'ILS APPRENNENT SI VITE L'ANGLAIS!'

But to be able to speak to people is not all.  And in the first  stage of my relations with natives I was helped by two things.  To  begin with, I was the show-man of the CASCO.  She, her fine lines,  tall spars, and snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon,  and the white, the gilt, and the repeating mirrors of the tiny  cabin, brought us a hundred visitors.  The men fathomed out her  dimensions with their arms, as their fathers fathomed out the ships  of Cook; the women declared the cabins more lovely than a church;  bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in the chairs and  contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I have seen  one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and delight,  rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions.  Biscuit, jam,  and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European parlours, the  photograph album went the round.  This sober gallery, their  everyday costumes and physiognomies, had become transformed, in  three weeks' sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign;  alien faces, barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered,  in the swerving cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise.  Her  Majesty was often recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss  her photograph; Captain Speedy - in an Abyssinian war-dress,  supposed to be the uniform of the British army - met with much  acceptance; and the effigies of Mr. Andrew Lang were admired in the  Marquesas.  There is the place for him to go when he shall be weary  of Middlesex and Homer.

It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth  some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands.   Not much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same  convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day.  In  both cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the  chiefs deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of  regarding money as the means and object of existence.  The  commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound to an age of war  abroad and patriarchal communism at home.  In one the cherished  practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume,  proscribed.  In each a main luxury cut off:  beef, driven under  cloud of night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving  Highlander; long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man- eating Kanaka.  The grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and  resentments, the alarms and sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs,  reminded me continually of the days of Lovat and Struan.   Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a touchy punctilio,  are common to both races:  common to both tongues the trick of  dropping medial consonants.  Here is a table of two widespread  Polynesian words:-

               HOUSE.   LOVE.

Tahitian      FARE     AROHA

New Zealand   WHARE

Samoan        FALE     TALOFA

Manihiki      FALE     ALOHA

Hawaiian      HALE     ALOHA

Marquesan     HA'E     KAOHA

 The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan  instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots.   Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called  catch, written with an apostrophe, and often or always the  gravestone of a perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to  this day.  When a Scot pronounces water, better, or bottle - WA'ER,  BE'ER, or BO'LE - the sound is precisely that of the catch; and I  think we may go beyond, and say, that if such a population could be  isolated, and this mispronunciation should become the rule, it  might prove the first stage of transition from T to K, which is the  disease of Polynesian languages.  The tendency of the Marquesans,  however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the very  common letter L, a war of mere extermination.  A hiatus is  agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon  grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will  you find such names as HAAII and PAAAEUA, when each individual  vowel must be separately uttered.

These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of  my own folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not  only inclined me to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but  continually modified my judgment.  A polite Englishman comes to-day  to the Marquesans and is amazed to find the men tattooed; polite  Italians came not long ago to England and found our fathers stained  with woad; and when I paid the return visit as a little boy, I was  highly diverted with the backwardness of Italy:  so insecure, so  much a matter of the day and hour, is the pre-eminence of race.  It  was so that I hit upon a means of communication which I recommend  to travellers.  When I desired any detail of savage custom, or of  superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my fathers, and  fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism:   Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater's head, the second-sight, the  Water Kelpie, - each of these I have found to be a killing bait;  the black bull's head of Stirling procured me the legend of RAHERO;  and what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts,  enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the TEVAS  of Tahiti.  The native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship  grew warmer, and his lips were opened.  It is this sense of kinship  that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content  himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown.  And the  presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk  in clouds of darkness.

The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the  west of the beach and the spring of the impending mountains.  A  grove of palms, perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as  for a triumph) with fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour.   A road runs from end to end of the covert among beds of flowers,  the milliner's shop of the community; and here and there, in the  grateful twilight, in an air filled with a diversity of scents, and  still within hearing of the surf upon the reef, the native houses  stand in scattered neighbourhood.  The same word, as we have seen,  represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a shade of  difference, the abode of man.  But although the word be the same,  the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among  the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most  commodiously lodged.  The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses  of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the  polite Samoan - none of these can be compared with the Marquesan  PAEPAE-HAE, or dwelling platform.  The paepae is an oblong terrace  built without cement or black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty  feet in length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and  accessible by a broad stair.  Along the back of this, and coming to  about half its width, runs the open front of the house, like a  covered gallery:  the interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in  its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an endlong coaming,  some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one  of White's sewing-machines the only marks of civilization.  On the  outside, at one end of the terrace, burns the cooking-fire under a  shed; at the other there is perhaps a pen for pigs; the remainder  is the evening lounge and AL FRESCO banquet-hall of the  inhabitants.  To some houses water is brought down the mountains in  bamboo pipes, perforated for the sake of sweetness.  With the  Highland comparison in my mind, I was struck to remember the  sluttish mounds of turf and stone in which I have sat and been  entertained in the Hebrides and the North Islands.  Two things, I  suppose, explain the contrast.  In Scotland wood is rare, and with  materials so rude as turf and stone the very hope of neatness is  excluded.  And in Scotland it is cold.  Shelter and a hearth are  needs so pressing that a man looks not beyond; he is out all day  after a bare bellyful, and at night when he saith, 'Aha, it is  warm!' he has not appetite for more.  Or if for something else,  then something higher; a fine school of poetry and song arose in  these rough shelters, and an air like 'LOCHABER NO MORE' is an  evidence of refinement more convincing, as well as more  imperishable, than a palace.

To one such dwelling platform a considerable troop of relatives and  dependants resort.  In the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes,  and the scent of the cooked breadfruit fills the air, and perhaps  the lamp glints already between the pillars and the house, you  shall behold them silently assemble to this meal, men, women, and  children; and the dogs and pigs frisk together up the terrace  stairway, switching rival tails.  The strangers from the ship were  soon equally welcome:  welcome to dip their fingers in the wooden  dish, to drink cocoanuts, to share the circulating pipe, and to  hear and hold high debate about the misdeeds of the French, the  Panama Canal, or the geographical position of San Francisco and New  Yo'ko.  In a Highland hamlet, quite out of reach of any tourist, I  have met the same plain and dignified hospitality.

I have mentioned two facts - the distasteful behaviour of our  earliest visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon  the cushions - which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan  manners.  The great majority of Polynesians are excellently  mannered; but the Marquesan stands apart, annoying and attractive,  wild, shy, and refined.  If you make him a present he affects to  forget it, and it must be offered him again at his going:  a pretty  formality I have found nowhere else.  A hint will get rid of any  one or any number; they are so fiercely proud and modest; while  many of the more lovable but blunter islanders crowd upon a  stranger, and can be no more driven off than flies.  A slight or an  insult the Marquesan seems never to forget.  I was one day talking  by the wayside with my friend Hoka, when I perceived his eyes  suddenly to flash and his stature to swell.  A white horseman was  coming down the mountain, and as he passed, and while he paused to  exchange salutations with myself, Hoka was still staring and  ruffling like a gamecock.  It was a Corsican who had years before  called him COCHON SAUVAGE - COCON CHAUVAGE, as Hoka mispronounced  it.  With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be  supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into  offences.  Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding  silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality.   When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly  explained the nature of my offence:  I had asked him to sell cocoa- nuts; and in Hoka's view articles of food were things that a  gentleman should give, not sell; or at least that he should not  sell to any friend.  On another occasion I gave my boat's crew a  luncheon of chocolate and biscuits.  I had sinned, I could never  learn how, against some point of observance; and though I was drily  thanked, my offerings were left upon the beach.  But our worst  mistake was a slight we put on Toma, Hoka's adoptive father, and in  his own eyes the rightful chief of Anaho.  In the first place, we  did not call upon him, as perhaps we should, in his fine new  European house, the only one in the hamlet.  In the second, when we  came ashore upon a visit to his rival, Taipi-Kikino, it was Toma  whom we saw standing at the head of the beach, a magnificent figure  of a man, magnificently tattooed; and it was of Toma that we asked  our question:  'Where is the chief?'  'What chief?' cried Toma, and  turned his back on the blasphemers.  Nor did he forgive us.  Hoka  came and went with us daily; but, alone I believe of all the  countryside, neither Toma nor his wife set foot on board the CASCO.   The temptation resisted it is hard for a European to compute.  The  flying city of Laputa moored for a fortnight in St. James's Park  affords but a pale figure of the CASCO anchored before Anaho; for  the Londoner has still his change of pleasures, but the Marquesan  passes to his grave through an unbroken uniformity of days.

On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a  valedictory party came on board:  nine of our particular friends  equipped with gifts and dressed as for a festival.  Hoka, the chief  dancer and singer, the greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the  handsomest young fellows in the world-sullen, showy, dramatic,  light as a feather and strong as an ox - it would have been hard,  on that occasion, to recognise, as he sat there stooped and silent,  his face heavy and grey.  It was strange to see the lad so much  affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift one of the  curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our friend, so  gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of the  half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival:   strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan,  the last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all  been given to us by their possessors - their chief merchandise, for  which they had sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers,  which they pressed on us for nothing as soon as we were friends.   The last visit was not long protracted.  One after another they  shook hands and got down into their canoe; when Hoka turned his  back immediately upon the ship, so that we saw his face no more.   Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and facing us with  gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis dipped the  ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats.  This was the  farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and  though the CASCO remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not  one returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided  appearing on the beach.  This reserve and dignity is the finest  trait of the Marquesan.

CHAPTER III - THE MAROON

OF the beauties of Anaho books might be written.  I remember waking  about three, to find the air temperate and scented.  The long swell  brimmed into the bay, and seemed to fill it full and then subside.   Gently, deeply, and silently the CASCO rolled; only at times a  block piped like a bird.  Oceanward, the heaven was bright with  stars and the sea with their reflections.  If I looked to that  side, I might have sung with the Hawaiian poet:

 UA MAOMAO KA LANI, UA KAHAEA LUNA, UA PIPI KA MAKA O KA HOKU. (The heavens were fair, they stretched above, Many were the eyes of the stars.)

 And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the  mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped  ten thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that  when the day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern,  and roofs of turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien  speech that should next greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka.

And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts.  I have  watched the morning break in many quarters of the world; it has  been certainly one of the chief joys of my existence, and the dawn  that I saw with most emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho.  The  mountains abruptly overhang the port with every variety of surface  and of inclination, lawn, and cliff, and forest.  Not one of these  but wore its proper tint of saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and  of the rose.  The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter  hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom  appeared on the more dark.  The light itself was the ordinary light  of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of jewels,  pencilled out the least detail of drawing.  Meanwhile, around the  hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red  coals of cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the  awakening business of the day; along the beach men and women, lads  and lasses, were returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and  blue and green, such as we delighted to see in the coloured little  pictures of our childhood; and presently the sun had cleared the  eastern hill, and the glow of the day was over all.

The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part,  ceased before it had begun.  Twice in the day there was a certain  stir of shepherding along the seaward hills.  At times a canoe went  out to fish.  At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in  the cotton patch.  At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of  a house, ringing the changes on its three notes, with an effect  like QUE LE JOUR ME DURE, repeated endlessly.  Or at times, across  a corner of the bay, two natives might communicate in the Marquesan  manner with conventional whistlings.  All else was sleep and  silence.  The surf broke and shone around the shores; a species of  black crane fished in the broken water; the black pigs were  continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might never  have awaked, or they might all be dead.

My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in  a cove under a lianaed cliff.  The beach was lined with palms and a  tree called the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in  growth, and bearing a flower like a great yellow poppy with a  maroon heart.  In places rocks encroached upon the sand; the beach  would be all submerged; and the surf would bubble warmly as high as  to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks as our more homely ocean  plays with wreck and wrack and bottles.  As the reflux drew down,  marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet; which I  would grasp at, miss, or seize:  now to find them what they  promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady's  finger; now to catch only MAYA of coloured sand, pounded fragments  and pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and  homely as the flints upon a garden path.  I have toiled at this  childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my  incurable ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed.   Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be  fluting in the thickets overhead.

A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in  the bottom of a den, thence spilling down a stair of rock into the  sea.  The draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very  bottom of the den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness.  In  front it stood open on the blue bay and the CASCO lying there under  her awning and her cheerful colours.  Overhead was a thatch of  puraos, and over these again palms brandished their bright fans, as  I have seen a conjurer make himself a halo out of naked swords.   For in this spot, over a neck of low land at the foot of the  mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a flood of  almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly coolness.

It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove, with Mrs.  Stevenson and the ship's cook.  Except for the CASCO lying outside,  and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the  world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock- still, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing.  On  a sudden, the trade-wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck  and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in  two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol and  watching us, you would have said, without a wink.  The next moment  the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone.  This discovery of human  presences latent over-head in a place where we had supposed  ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the  thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised,  struck us with a chill.  Talk languished on the beach.  As for the  cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot  on shore, and twice, when the CASCO appeared to be driving on the  rocks, it was amusing to observe that man's alacrity; death, he was  persuaded, awaiting him upon the beach.  It was more than a year  later, in the Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself.   The natives were drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law;  and when the wind thus suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless  more troubled than ourselves.

At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man  of the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin.  He was a native of Oahu, in  the Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the  American whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his  English, his down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent  life.  For one captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to  Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals.  The motive  for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were  thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of the New  Bedford owners.  And the act itself was simply murder.  Tari's life  must have hung in the beginning by a hair.  In the grief and terror  of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which  he was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to  him and ordained him to be spared.  He escaped at least alive,  married in the island, and when I knew him was a widower with a  married son and a granddaughter.  But the thought of Oahu haunted  him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking  back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and dance; and in his  dreams I daresay he revisits it with joy.  I wonder what he would  think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town  of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and  the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms and  outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown  faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land  sold, for planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or  perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the  surf and the cliffs on Molokai?  So simply, even in South Sea  Islands, and so sadly, the changes come.

Tari was poor, and poorly lodged.  His house was a wooden frame,  run up by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari  was the shepherd of the promontory sheep.  I can give a perfect  inventory of its contents:  three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron  saucepan, several cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles,  probably containing oil; while the clothes of the family and a few  mats were thrown across the open rafters.  Upon my first meeting  with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island  friendships, had given me nuts to drink, and carried me up the den  'to see my house' - the only entertainment that he had to offer.   He liked the 'Amelican,' he said, and the 'Inglisman,' but the  'Flessman' was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that  if he had thought us 'Fless,' we should have had none of his nuts,  and never a sight of his house.  His distaste for the French I can  partly understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo- Saxon.  The next day he brought me a pig, and some days later one  of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second.  We  were still strange to the islands; we were pained by the poor man's  generosity, which he could ill afford, and, by a natural enough but  quite unpardonable blunder, we refused the pig.  Had Tari been a  Marquesan we should have seen him no more; being what he was, the  most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a  hundred times more painful.  Scarce had the canoe with the nine  villagers put off from their farewell before the CASCO was boarded  from the other side.  It was Tari; coming thus late because he had  no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming  thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a  stranger in the land, and the dreariest of company.  The rest of my  family basely fled from the encounter.  I must receive our injured  friend alone; and the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour,  for he was loath to tear himself away.  'You go 'way.  I see you no  more - no, sir!' he lamented; and then looking about him with  rueful admiration, 'This goodee ship - no, sir! - goodee ship!' he  would exclaim:  the 'no, sir,' thrown out sharply through the nose  upon a rising inflection, an echo from New Bedford and the  fallacious whaler.  From these expressions of grief and praise, he  would return continually to the case of the rejected pig.  'I like  give present all 'e same you,' he complained; 'only got pig:  you  no take him!'  He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had  only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it.  I have rarely been  more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so  poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to  appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so  innocently dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech  is vain.

Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of  sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most  Anaho women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a  mite of a creature at the breast.  I went up the den one day when  Tari was from home, and found the son making a cotton sack, and  madame suckling mademoiselle.  When I had sat down with them on the  floor, the girl began to question me about England; which I tried  to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells one upon another  to represent the houses, and explaining, as best I was able, and by  word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the  perpetual toil.  'PAS DE COCOTIERS? PAS DO POPOI?' she asked.  I  told her it was too cold, and went through an elaborate  performance, shutting out draughts, and crouching over an imaginary  fire, to make sure she understood.  But she understood right well;  remarked it must be bad for the health, and sat a while gravely  reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows.  I am sure it  roused her pity, for it struck in her another thought always  uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling  sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the  decease of her own people.  'ICI PAS DE KANAQUES,' said she; and  taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both  her hands.  'TENEZ - a little baby like this; then dead.  All the  Kanaques die.  Then no more.'  The smile, and this instancing by  the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me  strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.  Meanwhile the  husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled  to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had  just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw  their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day  already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more  of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary  works and no more readers.

CHAPTER IV - DEATH

THE thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the  Marquesan.  It would be strange if it were otherwise.  The race is  perhaps the handsomest extant.  Six feet is about the middle height  of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in  action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and  duller, are still comely animals.  To judge by the eye, there is no  race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands.  When  Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the  inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the  same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual  natives.  Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman  Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar.  There are but  two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both  Americans:  Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the  christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must  have been neglected:  'He shall be able to see,' 'He shall be able  to tell,' 'He shall be able to charm,' said the friendly  godmothers; 'But he shall not be able to hear,' exclaimed the last.   The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred, when  the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth.  Six months  later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread  like a fire about the valley, and in less than a year two  survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created solitude.   A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the  tragic residue of Britain.  When I first heard this story the date  staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible.  Early in  the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first  case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and  by the month of August, when the tale was told me, one soul  survived, and that was a boy who had been absent at his schooling.   And depopulation works both ways, the doors of death being set wide  open, and the door of birth almost closed.  Thus, in the half-year  ending July 1888 there were twelve deaths and but one birth in the  district of the Hatiheu.  Seven or eight more deaths were to be  looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel, the observant  gendarme, knew of but one likely birth.  At this rate it is no  matter of surprise if the population in that part should have  declined in forty years from six thousand to less than four  hundred; which are, once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the  estimated figures.  And the rate of decline must have even  accelerated towards the end.

A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from  Anaho to Hatiheu on the adjacent bay.  The road is good travelling,  but cruelly steep.  We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted  house which stands highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily  down upon its roof; the CASCO well out in the bay, and rolling for  a wager, shrank visibly; and presently through the gap of Tari's  isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang cloudlike on the horizon.  Over  the summit, where the wind blew really chill, and whistled in the  reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of the pandanus, we  stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale and bay of  Hatiheu.  A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides.  On the  fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to  seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one  practicable breach of the blue bay.  The interior of this vessel is  crowded with lovely and valuable trees, - orange, breadfruit,  mummy-apple, cocoa, the island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine  and the banana.  Four perennial streams water and keep it green;  and along the dell, first of one, then of another, of these, the  road, for a considerable distance, descends into this fortunate  valley.  The song of the waters and the familiar disarray of  boulders gave us a strong sense of home, which the exotic foliage,  the daft-like growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of the  banyan, the black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture  of the native houses dissipated ere it could be enjoyed.

The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more  melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes.  When a native habitation is  deserted, the superstructure - pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable  tropical timber - speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the  wind.  Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin,  cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern  appearance of antiquity.  We must have passed from six to eight of  these now houseless platforms.  On the main road of the island,  where it crosses the valley of Taipi, Mr. Osbourne tells me they  are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the roads have been made  long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their desertion, and  must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through the bush,  the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these  survivals:  the gravestones of whole families.  Such ruins are tapu  in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have  become outposts of the kingdom of the grave.  It might appear a  natural and pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the  rearguard of perished thousands, that their feet should leave  untrod these hearthstones of their fathers.  I believe, in fact,  the custom rests on different and more grim conceptions.  But the  house, the grave, and even the body of the dead, have been always  particularly honoured by Marquesans.  Until recently the corpse was  sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and sunned, until, by  gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of mummy.   Offerings are still laid upon the grave.  In Traitor's Bay, Mr.  Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son's.  And  the sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly  ruffled in the laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient  in the native hatred for the French.

The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his  race.  The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises  with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of  mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension  that he greets the reality with relief.  He does not even seek to  support a disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his  fleeting and communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge  in the grave.  Hanging is now the fashion.  I heard of three who  had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first  half of 1888; but though this be a common form of suicide in other  parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will continue popular in  the Marquesas.  Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old  form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which offers to the  native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time for  those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such  remarkable importance.  The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs  killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house;  and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of  achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like Caesar's)  adjusted for the final act.  Praise not any man till he is dead,  said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners,  might be the Marquesan parody.  The coffin, though of late  introduction, strangely engages their attention.  It is to the  mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy.  For  ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the  other day, they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the  woman's soul is at rest.  I was told a droll instance of the force  of this preoccupation.  The Polynesians are subject to a disease  seemingly rather of the will than of the body.  I was told the  Tahitians have a word for it, ERIMATUA, but cannot find it in my  dictionary.  A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to  succumb to this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their  houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two  days has seen them cured.  But this other remedy is more original:   a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement - perhaps I should rather  say this acquiescence - has been known, at the fulfilment of his  crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his  coffin - to revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be  restored for years to his occupations - carving tikis (idols), let  us say, or braiding old men's beards.  From all this it may be  conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches naturally.   I heard one example, grim and picturesque.  In the time of the  small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had  no thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived  in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the  passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for  himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.

This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar  to the Marquesan.  What is peculiar is the widespread depression  and acceptance of the national end.  Pleasures are neglected, the  dance languishes, the songs are forgotten.  It is true that some,  and perhaps too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if  there were spirit to support or to revive them.  At the last feast  of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the  inanimate performance of the dancers.  When the people sang for us  in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.   They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the  old that knew the songs.  The whole body of Marquesan poetry and  music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited  generation.  The full import is apparent only to one acquainted  with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh  song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for  instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve  keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song  following another without pause.  In like manner, the Marquesan,  never industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production.   The exports of the group decline out of all proportion even with  the death-rate of the islanders.  'The coral waxes, the palm grows,  and man departs,' says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands.  And  surely this is nature.  Fond as it may appear, we labour and  refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid  eye upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one  is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt  whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue.  It  is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse  the Marquesan from his lethargy.  Over all the landward shore of  Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to  pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the  trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was  near full.  So long as the circus was there, so long as the CASCO  was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his  visit; and to this end every woman must have a new dress, and every  man a shirt and trousers.  Never before, in Mr. Regler's  experience, had they displayed so much activity.