334 MYSTIC ISLES 



lation, with great dignity and success. He had been 

 the leading American of his generation in the South 

 Seas, and had left no children, 



Tati said that when the church was dedicated — it was 

 a box-like structure of wood and coral, whitewashed and 

 red-roofed — three thousand Tahitians had feasted in a 

 thatched house erected for the arearea. The himene- 

 chorus was made up of singers from every district in 

 Tahiti and Moorea. Tati had presided. 



"We ate for three days," he related to me. "More 

 than two hundred and fifty swine, fifteen hundred 

 chickens, and enough fish to equal the miraculous 

 draft on the shores of Galilee. We Polynesians were 

 always that way, Gargantuan eaters at times, but able 

 to go fifty miles at top speed on a cocoanut in war." 



Tati would have me stay indefinitely his guest, but I 

 had written to Mataiea of my intended arrival there, 

 and though there were insistent cries that I return soon, 

 I said farewell. 



Tati himself walked with me to the bridge over the 

 Taharuu River, one of the hundred and fifty streams I 

 crossed in a circuit of Tahiti. 



"My ancestor, the old chief Tati," he told me, "cut 

 down the sacred trees of our clan marae near by, the 

 aitos; tamanus, and miros. He had become a Christian, 

 as was fashionable, and at the instigation of the English 

 missionaries destroyed many beautiful and ancient 

 trees, statues, carvings, and buildings. The Tahitians 

 who mourned his iconoclasm had a chant which said that 

 the Taharuu River ran blood when their gods were dis- 

 honored." 



From the stream the vast domain of the plantation of 



