on the west, and from the sea on the north to half a mile inland. It
is the gradual increment of garden and house upon an aboriginal
village, the slow response of a century to the demand of official and
trading white, of religious group and ambitious Tahitian, of sailor
and tourist. Here flow all the channels of business and finance,
of plotting and robbery, of pleasure and profit, of literature and
art and good living, in the eastern Pacific. Papeete is the London
and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, dispensing the styles
and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making
the laws and enforcing or compromising them, giving justice and
injustice to litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity
to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the archipelagoes
in these seas.

The French, who have domination in these waters of a hundred islands
and atolls between 8º and 27º south latitude, and between 137º and 154º
west longitude, a stretch of about twelve hundred miles each way,
make them all tributary to Papeete; and thus it is the metropolis
of a province of salt water, over which come its couriers and its
freighters, its governors and its soldiers, its pleasure-seekers and
its idlers. From it an age ago went the Maoris to people Hawaii and
New Zealand.

Papeete has a central position in the Pacific. The capitals of Hawaii,
Australia, New Zealand, and California are from two and a half to
three and a half thousand miles away. No other such group of whites,
or place approaching its urbanity, is to be found in a vast extent
of latitude or longitude. It is without peer or competitor in endless
leagues of waves.