132 EASTER ISLAND. 



and harried the Pacific. It is equally well known that his career of vic- 

 tory came to its end off Valparaiso, when he was forced into an unequal 

 fight with H. B. M. Cherub and was obliged to strike his flag. Yet in 

 the course of this dashing campaign he visited the Marquesas and per- 

 formed an act of sovereignty for which the United States were long 

 years removed from being ready. In the bay of Taiohae in the island of 

 Nukahiva he hoisted the American flag and formally annexed the Mar- 

 quesas to the United States remote islands of a distant sea to a young 

 republic which at that time had scarcely crossed the Alleghanies and 

 whose statesmen had not even in dreams the idea of a country bounded 

 by two oceans or of a new waterway to join these seas. This was done 

 on October 19, 1813, a generation before the United States reached the 

 Pacific Ocean, almost three generations before we found it necessary to 

 acquire a chain of dependencies set like stepping-stones across that sea 

 to a foothold almost on the foreshore of Asia. Possession of the Mar- 

 quesas, at least temporary possession, was needed by Porter. He had 

 pushed out into the Pacific with but one small ship ; his prizes created 

 for him a squadron worthy of any commodore's broad pennant. He 

 could easily have held the islands against any force which the British 

 then could array against him. But he had the instinct of prevision. 

 He did what the greater strategy of to-day would prescribe if it were 

 now possible : he seized upon the point which best covers the mouth of 

 the Panama Canal. It was not an empty form, the mere hoisting of a 

 flag, the vain salvo of artillery. At the head of Taiohae, to which he 

 gave the new name of Massachusetts Bay, he built a fort, Fort Madison, 

 its walls pierced for 16 guns and four pieces mounted ; he built Madison- 

 ville with six suitable houses, a ropewalk, a bakery, and other fit shops ; 

 he assigned to Nukahiva, in yet further admiring iteration of his loved 

 President, the new designation of Madison Island, and for the dual 

 archipelago he revived and extended the earlier designation of the Wash- 

 ington Islands. At his coming he found war raging in desultory fury 

 on Madison Island. That would never do in this newest America; 

 peace must reign, even though it should entail the stiffest fighting, and 

 Porter's dove had spurs. He found no mean antagonists; more than 

 once the issue was, temporarily at least, in no little doubt, but at last all 

 the fighters had been fought into submission. Porter's premature act 

 received in Washington not so much recognition as might serve to dis- 

 avow it ; the archives of the government contain not so much as a mem- 

 orandum of the interesting event; we owe our acquaintance therewith 

 solely to the commodore's own memoirs. When he sailed away from 

 Massachusetts BayMadisonville reverted to savagery; of Fort Madison 

 nothing remains but the trace in the thick undergrowth on a slight bluff 

 overlooking the bay ; the closest search has failed to bring to light the 

 buried bottle in which he placed a copy of his proclamation of annexa- 

 tion together with certain coins of American money. In the collation 



