who traded here, could tell me anything about the Marquesas. These
men had only the vague, exaggerated ideas of the sailor, who goes
ashore once or twice a year and knows nothing of the native life.

Seven hundred and fifty miles as the frigate flies separates these
islands from Tahiti, but no distance can measure the difference
between the happiness of Tahiti, the sparkling, brilliant loveliness
of that flower-decked island, and the stern, forbidding aspect of the
Marquesas lifting from the sea as we neared them. Gone were the
laughing vales, the pale-green hills, the luring, feminine guise of
nature, the soft-lapping waves upon a peaceful, shining shore. The
spirit that rides the thunder had claimed these bleak and desolate
islands for his own.

While the schooner made her way cautiously past the grim and rocky
headlands of Fatu-hiva I was overwhelmed with a feeling of solemnity,
of sadness; such a feeling as I have known to sweep over an army the
night before a battle, when letters are written to loved ones and
comrades entrusted with messages.

That gaunt, dark shore itself recalls that the history of the
Marquesas is written in blood, a black spot on the white race. It is
a history of evil wrought by civilization, of curses heaped on a
strange, simple people by men who sought to exploit them or to mold
them to another pattern, who destroyed their customs and their
happiness and left them to die, apathetic, wretched, hardly knowing
their own miserable plight.

The French have had their flag over the Marquesas since 1842. In
1521 Magellan must have passed between the Marquesas and Paumotas,