le, 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