8 Bcrnice P. Bishop Museum — BuUctin 



The olw'au tiki, together with a sleeping house and a cook house, 

 which were placed on a stone paepae near a me'ae (sacred place), or a 

 tohua (public place), was erected for the first-born or adopted boy 

 (matahiapo), other sons usually being ka'ioi and achieving their tattooing 

 piecemeal and gratis in the oho'au of the opou. This house, which be- 

 longed with all its appurtenances to the opou and not to the ka'ioi who 

 built it — although they slept in it during the period of the operation — was 

 carefully built, though it was lashed with the coarse strips of hibiscus bark 

 rather than with the finely braided pu'ukaha or coconut fiber cord usual 

 in other dwellings. Melville might seem to suggest a different custom 

 in Hiva Oa from that of Nuku Hiva in the description of the tattooing's be- 

 ing performed in large houses belonging to the tuhuna themselves (12, 

 p. 48-49) ; but all modern recollection in Hiva Oa is of the similar custom 

 of building the special oho'au for the opou. It may be said in passing 

 that neither Melville's descriptions of the spacious houses of the tuhuna 

 with their numerous small apartments set apart by screens of tapa for 

 private patients and of the small tents of coarse tapa erected by itinerant 

 tuhuna for patients at the times of religious festivals, nor Langsdorff's 

 account of the operation for persons in middling station being performed 

 in houses erected for the purpose by the tattooers and tabooed by authority 

 (10, p. 120), are corroborated in the information gathered last year in 

 the Marquesas. The Russian says further that the women were not, like 

 the men, shut up in a tabooed house during the operation, but that 

 it was performed without ceremony in their own houses or in those of 

 relatives. This is corroborated today, particularly on Nuku Hiva; though 

 sometimes, we are told, a small house called the fa'e po'a (po'a, coconut 

 thatching^ was built alongside the family dwelling for the tattooing of a 

 girl and in it lived the whole family during the entire period of the 

 operation, the main house being tapu, though the fa'e po'a was not. 



The oho'au tiki, itself, which we must take as the usual scene of the 

 operation, was very tapu to outsiders. Those who entered it could have 

 nothing to do with women, who were spoken of at this time as vehine 

 pu'atea (pu'atea, a kind of tree with soft wood). Indeed these men must 

 hide if a woman were even sighted at a distance, and it was necessary for 

 them to cook for themselves. The men who held the legs and arms of 

 the opou, and who fanned flies during the work, were especially tapu 

 and had to be served with special food. There seems to have been no 

 regular food tapu for the patients during the period of the operation, 

 though according to early visitors, there were dietary restrictions ap- 

 parently for the sake of health. Garcia says the patients were forbidden 

 for several days to take certain kinds of nourishment, such as pig and 



