CHAPTER VI. 



THE MARQUESAS IN THE FAIRWAY TO HAWAII. 



Church twice, twice State each has essayed the Marquesas and each 

 has left its record of double failure, record and echo record. Yet where 

 failure, complete and utter loss of effort, has attended the touch of the 

 solemn facts of such life as is known to us, romance has found success. 

 The unclothed truth has blushed to find herself in company of a race 

 whose painfully assumed tracery of tattooing has always seemed suffi- 

 cient garb. But fiction with its better truth of the comprehending eye 

 has given life to the Marquesas, a life that will far outlast the fast-dying 

 race. 



Here we have something that is interesting in detail; we shall find 

 some pleasure in looking back to these several efforts, five digits where- 

 with we may clasp these remote islands of the sea into some measure of 

 comprehension. 



The Marquesas, the islands of the Marquis, they are. Who was this 

 Marquis whose title should serve as sufficient designation of islands in a 

 remote sea, should endure when the honesty of newer geographical 

 nomenclature has shaken the Georgian glory from Tahiti and the fame 

 of a petty Earl of Sandwich from Hawaii? It was Mendoza, marquis of 

 Canete and grandee of Spain, greater than grandee, the great viceroy of 

 Peru in the days of its glory. His admiral it was, Alvaro Mendafia de 

 Neira, who conferred this name upon these rugged and savage lands. 

 It was on Mendafia's second and fatal voyage. After eight-and-twenty 

 years of belief that far in the west of the great and unknown sea he had 

 discovered the Ophir land of Solomon whence came the gold in ships of 

 Tarshish, the great admiral had secured sanction for a voyage of col- 

 onization. His cabins and holds were filled with a scurvy lot of settlers 

 of the new lands, the sweepings of the streets from Panama to Lima, four 

 hundred outcasts. In the early days of the voyage toward a hope that 

 could never be fulfilled Mendafia discovered new land, the southern 

 group of the islands of our study in this chapter, sighted them late in the 

 afternoon of July 21, 1 595 . Drawn by the lure of gold at the other edge 

 of the sea whose wastes he had scarcely begun as yet to cross, the 

 admiral could not halt for long at these islands of new discovery. He 

 skirted each as it rose upon his view, gave them collectively the name of 

 his viceregal patron, landed on one that he might take possession in the 

 name of Spain and the Church. The proper names of his narrative 

 read like a passage from the Acta Sanctorum. The four ships of his 

 fleet were four saints by name, Jerome and Philip in one pair, and on the 

 side of distaff sanctity Isabella and Catharine. To each new island, as 



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