religious doctrines, or the celebration of any religious worship, opposed to that true gospel of old propagated in Tahiti by the missionaries from Britain; that is, these forty years past."

This breach of international courtesy brought Captain Laplace on the Artémise out to Tahiti "to obtain satisfaction from the Lutheran evangelists who had forced themselves on a simple and docile people." As the Artémise was off the coast, on April 22, 1839, she struck on a coral reef: an accident that resulted in the officers and crew being lodged on shore for two months. These two months must have given the brethren bitter fruit for reflection upon the ease with which their years of unselfish striving could be obliterated. According to the account of Louis Reybaud of the Artémise: "From the first, the most perfect harmony prevailed between the ship's company and the natives. Each of the latter chose his tayo,— that is, another self-among the sailors. Between tayos everything is common. At night, the tayos, French and Tahitian, went together to the common hut. Every sailor has thus a house, a wife, a complete domestic establishment. As jealousy is a passion unknown to these islanders, it may be imagined what resources and pleasures such an arrangement afforded our crew. The natives were delighted with the character of our people; they had never met with such gaiety, expansiveness, and kindness in any other foreigners. The beach presented the aspect of a continual holiday, to the great scandal of the missionaries. We have seen how the men managed, and what friends they found. The officers were not less fortunate. The island that Bougainville called the New Cytherea does not belie its name. When the evening set in, every tree along the coast shaded an impassioned pair; and the waters of the river afforded an asylum to a swarm of copper-coloured nymphs, who came to enjoy themselves with the young midshipmen. Wherever you walked you might hear the oui! oui! oui! the word that all the women have learnt with marvellous facility. It would have been far more difficult to teach them to say non!"

Among these relaxations, Captain Laplace found time publicly to declare to the islanders "how shameful and even dan

gerous it was to violate the faith of treaties, and how unjust and barbarous was intolerance." Before his sailing, Captain Laplace commanded Pomare to come aboard the Artémise to sign a treaty guaranteeing no discrimination against the French. Pomare's despondency at the beginning of the proceedings was solaced by champagne and brandy. Casimir Henricy, who accompanied the Artémise throughout her circumnavigatory voyage, says: "When the spirits of the party were sufficiently elevated to find everything good, and while the hands were yet sufficiently steady not to let the pen drop, the treaty was produced as the crowning act of the festivity. M. Laplace thought he had gained a great victory over Polynesian diplomacy; and, certainly, never was a political horizon more bright in flowers and bottles."

While Tahiti was the theatre of these religious and political cabals, more important and decisive measures occupied the mighty minds of Europe. The captains who had punished and conventionalised Pomare and her people had made their reports in person to their sovereign in Paris, and to the ministers of state, who had indicated their instructions. Honours and titles were awarded to the successful officers, and on their showing it was resolved that the Marquesas should first be taken possession of, and then Tahiti. Rear-Admiral Du Petit-Thouars was commissioned to execute the seizure. On board the Reine Blanche, accompanied by three frigates and three corvettes, he touched Fatu-Heva, the southernmost of the Marquesas, on April 26, 1842, and culminated his triumphant progress through the group in the bay of Tyohee at Nukuheva on May 31.

The Acushnet arrived at Nukuheva at a memorable time. "It was in the summer of 1842 that we arrived at the islands," says Melville; "the French had then held possession of them for several weeks."

CHAPTER X

MAN-EATING EPICURES THE MARQUESAS

""Why, they are cannibals !' said Toby on one occasion when I eulogised the tribe. 'Granted,' I replied, but a more humane, gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not probably exist in the Pacific.""

-Herman MELVILLE: Typee.

It was sunset when the Acushnet came within sight of the loom of the mountains of the Marquesas. Innumerable seafowls, screaming and whirling in spiral tracts had, for some days previous, been following the vessel as harbingers from land. As the ship drew nearer to green earth, several of manof-war's-hawks, with their blood-red bills and raven plumage, had circled round the ship in diminishing circles until Melville was able distinctly to mark the strange flashing of their eyes; and then, as if satisfied by their observations, they would sail up into the air as if to carry sinister warning on ahead. Then,-driftwood on the oily swells; and finally had come the glad announcement from aloft-given with that peculiar prolongation of sound that a sailor loves-"Land ho!"

In

After running all night with a light breeze straight for the island, the Acushnet was in easy distance of the shore by morning. But as the Acushnet had approached the island from the side opposite to Tyohee-christened by Captain Porter, Melville remembered, Massachusetts Bay,-they were obliged to sail some distance along the shore. Melville was surprised not to find "enamelled and softly swelling plains, shaded over by delicious groves, and watered by purling brooks." stead he found himself cruising along a bold rock-bound coast, dashed high against by the beating surf, and broken here and there into deep inlets that offered sudden glimpses of blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls and waving groves. As the ship sailed by the projecting and rocky headlands with their short inland vistas of new and startling beauty, one of the sailors exclaimed to Melville, pointing with his hand in the di

rection of the treacherous valley: "There-there's Typee. Oh, the bloody cannibals, what a meal they'd make of us if we were to take it into our heads to land! but they say they don't like sailors' flesh, it's too salt. I say, matey, how should you like to be shoved ashore there, eh?" Melville shuddered at the question, he says, little thinking that within the space of a few weeks he would actually be a captive in that self-same valley.

Towards noon they swung abreast of their harbour. No description can do justice to its beauty, Melville tells us. But its beauty was to him not an immediate discovery. All that he saw was the tri-coloured flag of France trailing over the stern of six vessels, whose black hulls and bristling broadsides floated incongruously in that tranquil bay.

The first emissary from the shore to welcome the Acushnet was a visitor in that interesting state of intoxication when a man is amiable and helpless: a south-sea vagabond, once a lieutenant in the English navy, recently appointed pilot to the harbour by the invincible French. He was aided by some benevolent person out of his whale-boat into the Acushnet, and though utterly unable to stand erect or navigate his own body, he magnanimously proffered to steer the ship to a good anchorage: a feat Captain Pease did for himself, despite the amazing volubility of the visitor in contrary commands.

This renegade from Christendom and humanity was of a type not infrequently met with in accounts of the South Seas. At Hannamanoo, Melville came across another such-a white man in the South Sea girdle, and tattooed on the face, living among a tribe of savages and apparently settled for life, so perfectly satisfied seemed he with his circumstances. This man was an Englishman,-Lem Hardy he called himself,-who had deserted from a trading brig touching at Hannamanoo for wood and water some ten years previous. Aboard the Acushnet he told his history. "Thrown upon the world a foundling, his paternal origin was as much a mystery to him as the genealogy of Odin; and scorned by everybody, he fled the parish workhouse when a boy, and launched upon the sea. He had followed it for several years, a dog before the mast, and now

he had thrown it up forever." He had gone ashore as a sovereign power, armed with a musket and a bag of ammunition, and soon became, what he was when Melville found him, military leader of the tribe, war-god of the entire island, living under the sacred protection of an express edict of the taboo, his person inviolable forever. In Iles Marquises, ou NoukaHiva, Histoire, Géographie, Mœurs et Considérations Générales (Paris, 1843) by Vincendon-Dumoulin and Desgraz is to be found (pages 356-359) a history of two more of these vagabonds: one Joseph Cabri, a Frenchman, and one E. Roberts, an Englishman. Cabri returned to Europe, for a time, to find the novelty of his tattooing both an embarrassment and a source of livelihood. He was examined by grave learned societies, was presented before several crowned heads, and submitted his person to intimate examination to any one who would pay his fee. In 1818 he died in obscurity and poverty in Valenciennes, his birth place. His historians regret that his precious person was not preserved in alcohol to delight the inquiring mind of later generations. The Pacific, it would appear, was early a place of refuge for men with an insurmountable homesickness for the mud. Melville soon came to believe that the gifts of civilisation to the South Seas were without exception very doubtful blessings; he came to be a special pleader for the barbaric virtues; when these virtues were practised by legitimate barbarians; but the spectacle of such men as Hardy fell beyond the pale of his unusually broad sympathies. Though he was despairingly alert to the vices of Christendom, never was he betrayed into a corrupt hankering to recapitulate into savagery. Though he excused the cannibalism of the Marquesans as an amiable weakness, he gazed upon Hardy "with a feeling akin to horror." Hardy's tattooing was to Melville the outward and visible sign of the lowest degradation to which a mortal, nurtured in a civilisation that had for thousands of years a pathetically imperfect struggle striven to some significance above the beast, could possibly descend. "What an impress!" Melville exclaimed in superlative loathing. "Far worse than Cain's-his was perhaps a wrinkle, or a freckle, which some of our modern cos