NARRATIVE OF THE CRUISE 167 



Paul went ashore to secure volunteers for his studies of racial 

 metabolism, never suspecting that half the stay in the island 

 would be spent in finding an Easter Islander! So hopelessl}^ 

 mixed are the races here that only one old woman about eighty 

 years old had any reasonable proof that she was of pure native 

 stock. This old woman made a beautiful "kete" basket for Paul 

 from the rushes which grow in the crater-lake of Rano Kao. She 

 was the only one who remembered the ancient art of weaving 

 these rushes. 



Speaking of his visit to the home of this old lady Captain Ault 

 writes : 



"In one small hut, consisting of one room with a dirt 

 floor, lived a family of four women. There was a pile 

 of sticks in one corner, a small pile of corn in another, a 

 raised platform with some bedding in a third corner, 

 and in the fourth corner a more elaborately-equipped 

 single bed, about five feet above the floor. A few maga- 

 zine illustrations were tacked to the wall, some straw was 

 scattered about the floor, otherwise there was no furni- 

 ture and the walls and ceiling were full of cracks through 

 which the rain doubtless entered freely. This white- 

 covered bed, elevated above the dirt, gave the startling 

 effect of a shrine amidst squalor, of a white rose amidst a 

 patch of cockle-burrs, of a best room or parlor in the 

 middle of the kitchen. 



"And here lived the old grandmother, one of the few 

 surviving natives of the old days, a real Paquensa, who 

 spoke only a few words of Spanish, and was proud to 

 speak them all at once as we entered the hut where she 

 was squatting in front of a small fire of corn-cobs in the 

 middle of the floor, with a battered old kettle resting on 

 an oddment of bricks, boiling a few grains of corn for the 

 family dinner. 



"Her daughter is the mother of two girls, one very 

 dark, about 18 years old, with a native father, and the 

 other a very fair girl about 16 years old, who could easily 

 pass as a white girl. Her father was a white man, a sea- 

 faring man, here today and gone tomorrow. And this 

 fine bed is for this girl, the jewel and treasure of the 

 family, the rose born to bloom unseen." 



