, and counting sex manifestations free
expressions of affection, and of an appetite not more sacred nor more
shameful than hunger or thirst.

These were the qualities and rules of conduct ascribed to the
Tahitians by the first discoverers, especially by those who were
not narrowed in judgment by inexperience and religious fanaticism,
as were the British and French missionaries of early days, peasants
and apprentices who had forsaken the fields and workshops for the
higher sphere of devoteeism and freedom from manual labor. These
clerics, though often self-sacrificing and yearning for martyrdom,
attributed all differences from their standards or preachments to
inherent wickedness or diabolism.

One of the ablest of them had regretted sorrowfully his having to
inform the Tahitians that all their ancestors were in hell. Some
clerics had made wearing bonnets the test of decency, and all had
taught that God hated any open ardor of attraction for the opposite
sex. Yet it was almost entirely to them that the far-away student
had to turn to learn any of the details of native life undefiled. The
mariners had stayed too brief a time to enter into these, and could
not speak Tahitian.

I knew that Tahitian life, political and economic, social and
religious, had been utterly changed, but I longed for an understanding
of what had been; a panorama of it before my eyes. I set out to
obtain this by constant interrogations of every one I thought might
have even a scrap of enlightenment for me.

On rainy days, when Chief Tetuanui did not oversee the making or
repair of roads in his district, and always when we were both at
leisure, I sat with him, and the elders of the neighborhood, and
queried them, or repeated for correction and comment my notes upon
their antiquities--notes founded on reading and my observation.

Whence had come these Polynesians or Maoris who peopled the ocean
islands from Hawaii to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to the
eastern Fijis? A race set apart by its isolation for thousands of years
from all the rest of the world, distinguished in all its habitats--
Hawaii, Samoa, the Marquesas, Tonga, the Paumotus, and the Society
archipelago, and New Zealand--by beauty of form, tint and uniformity
of color, height, and soft expression--an expression they vainly
sought to make terrible by tattooing?

The legends and chants of the race unfolded much of the mystery;
its language's relation to others, more. These Ta