houses. Frere Fesal
started the mission here and built that little church. There were
plenty of people to work among. But now, after thirty years I have
been here, they are nearly finished. They have no courage to go on,
that is all. _C'est un pays sans l'avenir._ The family of the dying
never weep. They gather to eat the feast of the dead, and the crying
is a rite, no more. These people are tired of life."

It was Stevenson who though that "the ending of the most healthful,
if not the most humane, of field sports--hedge warfare--" had much
to do with depopulation. Either horn of the dilemma is dangerous to
touch. It is unthinkable, perhaps, that white conquerors should have
allowed the Marquesans to follow their own customs of warfare. But
changes in the customs of every race must come from within that race
or they will destroy it. The essence of life is freedom.

Any one who has read their past and knows them now must admit that
the Marquesans have not been improved in morality by their contact
with the whites. Alien customs have been forced upon them. And they
are dying for lack of expression, nationally and individually.
Disease, of course, is the weapon that kills them, but it finds its
victims unguarded by hope or desire to live, willing to meet death
half way, the grave a haven.

[Illustration: Beach at Oomoa]

[Illustration: Putting the canoe in the water]

In the old days this island of Fatu-hiva was the art center of the
Marquesas. The fame of its tattooers, carvers in wood and stone,
makers of canoes, paddles, and war-clubs, had resounded through the
archipelago for centuries. Now it is one of the few places where
even a feeble survival of those industries give the newcomers a
glimpse of their methods and ideals now sinking, like their
originators, in the mire of wretchedness.

Outside the mission gates, in the edge of the jungle, Pere Olivier
and I came upon two old women making _tapa_ cloth. Shrunken with age,
toothless, decrepit, their only covering the ragged and faded
_pareus_ that spoke of poverty, they sat in the shade of a
banian-tree, beating the fibrous inner bark of the breadfruit-tree.
Over the hollow log that resounded with the blows of their wooden
mallets the cloth moved slowly, doubling on the ground into a heap
of silken texture, firm, thin, and soft.

This paper-cloth was once made throughout all the South Sea Islands.
Breadfruit, banian, mulberry, and other barks furnished the fib