Native License. — French official Tyranny. 237 



adjoining island, and the Queen compelled herself to abro- 

 gate the ordinance. A somewhat similar affair had occurred 

 a few weeks before at the village of Papaoa, near which Queen 

 Pomdre possesses a country-house, in which some of the royal 

 family were implicated. Some native feasts, which in Taliiti 

 are always accompanied witli the wildest Bacchanalian 

 license, had excited the crowd to an unusual degree. A few 

 of the Tahitian nationality-mongers drank death to the 

 whites, and pretty openly declared their hostility to a foreign 

 yoke. The excess of a couple of drunken patriots was mag- 

 nified by the excited fancy of the French officers into the 

 dimensions of a political emeute, and seemed to present the 

 long-coveted opportunity of showing their authority, and of 

 acquiring with little trouble the credit of having nipped in 

 the bud a formidable insurrection. As soon as the news of 

 these seditious speeches and exclamations reached head- 

 quarters, the Governor marched in the night with 150 well- 

 armed soldiers to Papaoa, distant about an hour's march from 

 the capital. Pomdre and her family were just assembled to 

 evening prayers, when the Governor made his appearance, 

 and ordered her forthwith to accompany him to Papeete. An 

 Englishman resident in the harbour was ordered to convey 

 the Queen to her town residence in his small one-horse wag- 

 gon. Her two sons, however, were escorted to Papeete as 

 prisoners on foot, and their hands bound behind their backs, 

 their ears saluted by the oft-repeated threat of the soldiers 

 that their lives should answer for any intentional injury 



