CHAPTER V. 



THE DOMINANCE OF TAHITI OVER THE PROVINCE. 



We shall lose the value of these studies if we fall into the way of 

 regarding all these words mere dead counters and pawns to be moved in 

 a checkered game of tabulations and classifications. It is essential to 

 the method that many pages must be given up to arid lines of figures, 

 mere indices of the matter which we pass under review ; but the method 

 has seemed the most simple and the most accurate to employ in drawing 

 the threads out from a mass of vocabularies. 



Arrange them as we may find it necessary, the words can never be 

 dead. The word never dies, it is only the language that becomes dead. 

 The word is never mute, its essence is that it speaks, speaks for ever and 

 yet for ever, speaks to the utmost limit of bounding space. It is pleas- 

 ant to recall the first word entered of record in the very beginning of a 

 Tahiti- English vocabulary, the word taio, friend. This was the very 

 first idea which smiling Tahiti sought to communicate to its discoverer. 

 It matters not whether Tahiti, on its soft sands beneath the diadem of 

 its emerald peaks, by this word taio meant itself or the stranger, for 

 friendship is reciprocation, action and reaction in the heart equal 

 and, in twisted conformity to a law which violates the laws of mere 

 mechanics, in the same direction. 



I have not been at pains to see if Wallis was the first to record this 

 initial word. It is enough to read its spirit in the sad story of that mid- 

 shipman of the Bounty, Peter Heywood, who suffered all the tortures of 

 the "Pandora's box" and narrowly escaped the halter because Bligh's 

 malignity refused him the proof of his innocence. We find that this 

 poor lad improved the hours, while awaiting his disgrace at Execution 

 Dock, by writing a vocabulary of Tahiti, the first ever recorded, mem- 

 ories in the bitterness of condemnation which composed his mind with 

 the recollections of a pleasant place. This is the note which the kindly 

 Barrow has set down, for the practice of lexicography under the dan- 

 gling shadow of the whip already ordered at the yard arm is surely to 

 be numbered among the romances of philology:* 



Indeed so perfectly calm was this young man under his dreadful calamity 

 that in a very few days after his condemnation his brother says : 



"While I write this Peter is sitting by me making an Otaheitan vocabulary 

 and so happy and intent upon it that I have scarcely an opportunity of saying 

 a word to him ; he is in excellent spirits, and I am convinced they are better and 

 better every day." 



*John Barrow, "A Description of Pitcairn's Island and its Inhabitants, with an Authentic 

 Account of the Mutiny of the Ship Bounty and oi the Subsequent Fortunes of the Mutineers," 

 chapter 7. 



107 

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