Over the breakfast we talked, Tetuanui and Haamoura answering my questions and taking me along the path of my inquiry into far fields of former customs and ancient lore.  They were, as their forefathers, gifted in oral tradition, with retentive memories for their own past and for the facts and legends of the racial history.  We who have for thousands of years put in writing our records cannot grasp the fullness of the system by which the old Polynesian chiefs and priests, totally without letters, or even ideographs, except in Easter Island, kept the archives of the tribe and nation by frequent repetition of memorized annals.  So we got Homer’s Odyssey, and the Song of Solomon.

What Tahiti was like before the white?  That was to me a subject of intense interest, now that I was fully aware of the situation after a hundred and fifty years of exploitation, seventy-five years of French domination, and thirty years of colonialism.  The nature of the people was little changed.  The Tahitian was still naif, hospitable, gentle, indolent except as to needs, valuing friendship above all things, accepting the evangelism of many warring Christian sects as a tumult among jealous gods and priests, and counting sex manifestations free expressions of affection, and of an appetite not more sacred nor more shameful than hunger or thirst.

These were the qualities and rules of conduct ascribed to the Tahitians by the first discoverers, especially by those who were not narrowed in judgment by inexperience and religious fanaticism, as were the British and French missionaries of early days, peasants and apprentices who had forsaken the fields and workshops for the higher sphere of devoteeism and freedom from manual labor.  These clerics, though often self-sacrificing and yearning for martyrdom, attributed all differences from their standards or preachments to inherent wickedness or diabolism.

One of the ablest of them had regretted sorrowfully his having to inform the Tahitians that all their ancestors were in hell.  Some clerics had made wearing bonnets the test of decency, and all had taught that God hated any open ardor of attraction for the opposite sex.  Yet it was almost entirely to them that the far-away student had to turn to learn any of the details of native life undefiled.  The mariners had stayed too brief a time to enter into these, and could not speak Tahitian.

I knew that Tahitian life, political and economic, social and religious, had been utterly changed, but I longed for an understanding of what had been; a panorama of it before my eyes.  I set out to obtain this by constant interrogations of every one I thought might have even a scrap of enlightenment for me.

On rainy days, when Chief Tetuanui did not oversee the making or repair of roads in his district, and always when we were both at leisure, I sat with him, and the elders of the neighborhood, and queried them, or repeated for correction and comment my notes upon their antiquities—­notes founded on reading and my observation.