House of Vae Kahn, Chieftess of the Marquesas at Tae-o-hoe.
old Tahiti was to wither in a lingering decline. Fair as Tahiti was and Paradise as the French regarded it, they were the first to curse it with that infliction which "civilization" has for centuries brought upon the "savage." Sad Tahiti, land of mountain mist, and murmuring stream, of coral reef and tropic palm, and smiling skies was to be henceforth a pest-house for the simple race that knew her for their home.
From a native point of view the situation is well described in the "Memoirs of Ariitaimai" of the great Papara family of Tahiti; who says:
For forty generations these people (the Polynesians) had been isolated in this ocean, as though they were in a modern sanatorium, protected from contact with new forms of disease, and living on vegetables and fish. The virulent diseases which had been developed among the struggling masses of Asia and Europe found a rich field for destruction when they were brought to the South Seas.
For this perhaps the foreigners were not wholly responsible, although their civilization certainly was; but for the political misery the foreigner was wholly to blame, and for the social and moral degradation he was the active cause. No doubt the ancient society of Tahiti had plenty of vices, and was a sort of Paris in its refinedness of wickedness; but these had not prevented the islanders from leading as happy lives as had ever been known among men. They were like children in their morality and their thoughtlessness, but they flourished and multiplied. The European came and not only upset all their moral ideas, but also their whole political system.
But to return to our narrative. Captain James Cook, upon the first of his famous voyages visited Tahiti in the man-of-war Endeavour,
