rms bound backward round a barrel; and it is the
universal report that every gendarme in the South Seas is equipped with
something in the nature of a thumb-screw. I do not know this. I never
had the face to ask any of the gendarmes--pleasant, intelligent, and
kindly fellows--with whom I have been intimate, and whose hospitality I
have enjoyed; and perhaps the tale reposes (as I hope it does) on a
misconstruction of that ingenious cat's-cradle with which the French
agent of police so readily secures a prisoner. But whether physical or
moral, torture is certainly employed; and by a barbarous injustice, the
state of accusation (in which a man may very well be innocently placed)
is positively painful; the state of conviction (in which all are
supposed guilty) is comparatively free, and positively pleasant. Perhaps
worse still,--not only the accused, but sometimes his wife, his
mistress, or his friend, is subjected to the same hardships. I was
admiring, in the tapu system, the ingenuity of native methods of
detection; there is not much to admire in those of the French, and to
lock up a timid child in a dark room, and, if he prove obstinate, lock
up his sister in the next, is neither novel nor humane.

The main occasion of these thefts is the new vice of opium-eating. "Here
nobody ever works, and all eat opium," said a gendarme; and Ah Fu knew a
woman who ate a dollar's worth in a day. The successful thief will give
a handful of money to each of his friends, a dress to a woman, pass an
evening in one of the taverns of Tai-o-hae, during which he treats all
comers, produce a big lump of opium, and retire to the bush to eat and
sleep it off. A trader, who did not sell opium, confessed to me that he
was at his wit's end. "I do not sell it, but others do," said he. "The
natives only work to buy it; if they walk over to me to sell their
cotton, they have just to walk over to some one else to buy their opium
with my money. And why should they be at the bother of two walks? There
is no use talking," he added--"opium is the currency of this country."

The man under prevention during my stay at Tai-o-hae lost patience while
the Chinese opium-seller was being examined in his presence. "Of course
he sold me opium!" he broke out; "all the Chinese here sell opium. It
was only to buy opium that I stole; it is only to buy opium that anybody
steals. And what you ought to do is to let no opium come here, and no
Chinamen." This is precisely wha