OF THE SOUTH SEAS 835 



Atimaono stretched to Mataiea. It had been planted 

 in the sixties, when British demands for cotton, and the 

 blockade and laying waste of the South in the American 

 Civil War caused a thousand such speculations all over 

 the world. 



It was for this plantation, the most celebrated in 

 Tahiti, that Chinese were imported, and a thousand had 

 their shanties where now is brush. Those were the 

 times that the Marquesas had their cotton boom, and 

 lapsed, too. Upon a hill of this plantation the English 

 manager, a former cavalry officer, had built himself a 

 palatial mansion, and lived like a feudal lord, the most 

 powerful resident of Tahiti. Travelers from all the 

 world were his guests. Fair ladies danced the night 

 away upon his broad verandas and drank the choicest 

 wines of France. Scandal wove a dozen strange stories 

 of intrigues, of a high official who sold his wife to him, 

 of Arioian orgies, and all the associations of semi-regal 

 rule and accountability to none. Cotton prices de- 

 clined, the bubble burst in bankruptcy, the miserable 

 death of the aristocrat, and the fury of cheated English 

 investors. 



The plantation was now owned by a storekeeper of 

 Tahiti, prosy and disliked, who had fattened b.y ability 

 to outwit the natives; but the glory had departed, and 

 the place languished, ruins and jungle, the prey of 

 guava and lantana. The neighborhood was known as 

 Ati-Maono, "The Clan of Maon." 



The lines between village and country were not rigid, 

 and often the hamlet straggled along the road for much 

 of the district. Every kilometer there was a stone 

 marking the distance from Papeete. One knew the vil- 



