parade their drunken
sovereign on the forehatch of a wrecked vessel, king and commons howling
and singing as they went. At a word from Nakaeia's mouth the revel
ended; Makin became once more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and
on the morrow all the population must be on the roads or in the
taro-patches toiling under his bloodshot eye.

The fear of Nakaeia filled the land. No regularity of justice was
affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it
seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault and
midnight murder were the forms of process. The king himself would play
the executioner; and his blows were dealt by stealth, and with the help
and countenance of none but his own wives. These were his oarswomen; one
that caught a crab, he slew incontinently with the tiller; thus
disciplined, they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance,
which he would then execute alone and return well pleased with his
connubial crew. The inmates of the harem held a station hard for us to
conceive. Beasts of draught, and driven by the fear of death, they were
yet implicitly trusted with their sovereign's life; they were still
wives and queens, and it was supposed that no man should behold their
faces. They killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of
those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of
Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms, which commanded
the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper
with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing
palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same
moment looking up, their eyes encountered. Instant flight preserved the
involuntary criminal. But during the remainder of that reign he must
lurk and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted
him without remission, although still in vain; and the palms,
accessories to the fact, were ruthlessly cut down. Such was the ideal of
wifely purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise.
And yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia's well-guarded harem. He was
at that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a
pleasure-house, lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one
day he summoned a new wife. She was one that had been sealed to him;
that is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the
husband of an elder siste