MYSTIC ISLES 19 



wept when he sailed. That was to him of inestimable 

 value in appraising them. 



About the beginning of the nineteenth century the 

 first English missionaries in the South Seas thanked 

 God for a safe passage from their homes to Tahiti, and 

 for a virgin soil and an affrightingly wicked people to 

 labor with. The English, however, did not seize the 

 island, but left it for the French to do that, who first 

 declared it a protectorate, and made it a colony of 

 France, in the unjust way of the mighty, before the 

 last king died. They had come ten thousand miles to 

 do a wretched act that never profited them, but had 

 killed a people. 



All this discovery and suzerainty did not interest me 

 much, but what the great captains, and Loti, Melville, 

 Becke, and Stoddard, had written had been for years 

 my intense delight. Now I was to realize the dream of 

 childhood. I could hardly live during the days of the 

 voyage. 



I remembered that Europe had been set afire emo- 

 tionally by the first reports, the logs of the first cap- 

 tains of England and France who visited Tahiti. In 

 that eighteenth centur}^ for decades the return to na- 

 ture had been the rallying cry of those who attacked 

 the artificial and degraded state of society. The pub- 

 lished and oral statements of the adventurers in Tahiti, 

 their descriptions of the unrivaled beauty of the verdure, 

 of reefs and palm, of the majestic stature of the men 

 and the passionate charm of the women, the boundless 

 health and simple happiness in which they dwelt, the 

 climate, the limpid streams, the diving, swimming, 

 games, and rarest food — all these had stirred the de- 



