“Begin their eating by sucking a cold one,” once said a bon vivant to me.  “Only when accustomed to them should you dare them hot and in numbers.”

Flying-fish are sold, many of them delicate in taste and shapely.

One may buy favorite sauces for fish, and some of the women offered them to me.  One is taiaro, made of the hard meat of the cocoanut, with pounded shrimp, and allowed to ferment slightly.  It is put up in bamboo tubes, three inches in diameter, and four or five feet long, tied at the opening with a pandanus-leaf for a seal.  It is delicious on raw fish.  I have seen a native take his fish by the tail and devour it as one would a banana; but the Tahitians cut up the fish, and, after soaking it in lime-juice, eat it with the taiaro.  It is as tasty as Blue Points and tabasco.

There are two other epicurean sauces, one made of the omotu, the soft cocoanut, which is split, the meat dug out and put in the hue, the calabash, mixed with a little salt water, lime-juice, and the juice of the rea, the saffron, and allowed to ferment.  This is the mitihue, a piquant and fetid, puante sauce that seasons all Tahitian meals.  The calabash is left in the sun, and when the sauce dries up, water is poured on the dry ingredients, a perpetual saucebox.

In the arrangement of vegetables our own hucksters could learn.  Every piece is scraped and cleansed.  String beans are tied together in bundles like cigars or asparagus, and lettuce of several varieties, romaine and endive, parsnips, carrots, beets, turnips, and even potatoes, sweet and white, are shown in immaculate condition.  The tomatoes do not rival ours, but Tahiti being seventeen degrees below the equator, one cannot expect such tropical regions to produce temperate-zone plants to perfection.  That they are provided at all is due to the Chinese, those patient, acute Cantonese and Amoyans.  The Tahitian has no competence in intensive cultivation or the will to toil.  Were it not for the Chinese, white residents in many countries would have to forego vegetables.  It is so in Mexico and Hawaii and the Philippines, although Japanese in the first two compete with them.

The main food of the Tahitians is feis, as is bread to us, or rice to the Asiatic.  It is not so in the Marquesas, eight hundred miles north, where breadfruit is the staff, nor in Hawaii, where fermented taro (poi) is the chief reliance of the kanaka.  The feis, gigantic bananas of coarse fiber, which must be cooked, are about a foot in length, and three inches in diameter, and grow in immense, heavy bunches in the mountains, so that obtaining them is great labor.  They are wild creatures of heights, and love the spots most difficult of access.  Only barefooted men can reach them.  These feis are a separate species.  The market-place is filled with them, and hardly a Tahitian but buys his quota for the day.  The fei-gatherers are men of giant strength, naked save for the pareu about the loins, and often their feet from climbing and holding on to rocks and roots are curiously deformed, the toes spread an inch apart, and sometimes the big toe is opposed to the others, like a thumb.  There are besides many kinds of bananas here for eating raw; some are as small as a man’s finger, and as sweet as honey.