t
paternal kinship. It is not possible to give details; suffice it that
their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and
vicious children, and their debauches persevered in until energy,
reason, and almost life itself are in abeyance.

CHAPTER VI

CHIEFS AND TAPUS

We used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the chief
called Taipi-Kikino. An elegant guest at table, skilled in the use of
knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun and started for
the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable, always ingratiating
and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he found his cheerfulness. He
had enough to sober him, I thought, in his official budget. His
expenses--for he was always seen attired in virgin white--must have by
far exceeded his income of six dollars in the year, or say two shillings
a month. And he was himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest
in the village. It was currently supposed that his elder brother,
Kauanui, must have helped him out. But how comes it that the elder
brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy commoner,
and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in Anaho? That the
one should be wealthy and the other almost indigent is probably to be
explained by some adoption; for comparatively few children are brought
up in the house or succeed to the estates of their natural begetters.
That the one should be chief instead of the other must be explained (in
a very Irish fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at
all.

Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been
deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed. We have seen, in the same
house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such extruded
island Bourbons, men, whose word a few years ago was life and death,
now sunk to be peasants like their neighbours. So when the French
overthrew hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the Marquesas
freeborn citizens of the republic, and endowed them with a vote for a
_conseiller-general_ at Tahiti, they probably conceived themselves upon
the path to popularity; and so far from that, they were revolting public
sentiment. The deposition of the chiefs was perhaps sometimes needful;
the appointment of others may have been needful also; it was at least a
delicate business. The Government of George II. exiled many Highland
magnates. It never occurred to them to manufacture subs