386 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1924 



of this ancient crater, while birds of many kinds — parrots, para- 

 keets, sun birds, Fiji "robins," honeyeaters, fantails, pigeons, doves, 

 hawks— gave additional color to the landscape and lent musical 

 notes to the loud babbling of a brook that ran past the house on its 

 w^ay to the ocean. As if to perfect this Fijian paradise, the white 

 blossoms of several frangipane trees blew their strong fragrance 

 through our rooms day and night. 



Unless I was too fatigued from tramping over hill and dale 

 through the rather difficult jungle, I rose an hour before daybreak 

 that I might refresh myself by drinking in the glories of the star- 

 light sky, much of which I had seen in 1923 for the first time. Stand- 

 ing well within the bowl of the long-inactive crater, the oncoming 

 dawn was an entirely new experience. As the eastern heavens 

 lightened, the shadows of the valley beneath appeared to deepen, but 

 at last the honeyeaters began their earliest notes, and with these 

 matin songs the outlines of cocoa palms, breadfruit trees, mangoes, 

 bananas, and other plants assumed individuality until over the edges 

 of the green-rimmed hills streamed the first rays of the morning sun. 

 They fell upon the opposite slopes, bringing with them a perfumed 

 atmosphere redolent of the ever-flowering trees, shrubs, and vines 

 that clothed the green hillsides to their very tops. Of course, the 

 wonders of rosy-fingered dawn have been celebrated in song, verse, 

 and prose many times these thousand years, but my contention is 

 that when dark night rolls back into the ocean around wild Kandavu 

 it does so in a fashion all its own. Other sunrises may be as im- 

 pressive and as beautiful, but when viewed from the Korolevu crater 

 they have charms inherent in their environment — charms due to just 

 those every-day surroundings that are tropical life. 



What is true of the scenery, the flora, the fauna, and the meteor- 

 ology of Polynesia is also true of its human element. I am quite 

 sure that while writers of Oceanic fiction often draw upon their 

 boundless stories of pasteboard heroes and heroines for tales that 

 are largely products of an excited imagination, there are many lives 

 at this moment being lived on the islands of the South Seas that prop- 

 erly belong either to a century in advance or several hundred years 

 behind our own times. I wish I had the space and the permission 

 to relate the intimate histories of some waifs and strays as well as 

 of some idealists w^hose acquaintance I made during my sojourn in 

 central Polynesia. The objection of publishing the recitals would 

 be the raising of doubts as to their reality, whether such individuals 

 live within the realms of fact or fiction. So, I would say, nothing 

 any South Sea romancer may write is likely to transcend the limits 

 of the possible so long as he deals whh. human beings. 



