usable as a mole.  It is alongside this that sailing vessels lie, the wharf being the only land mooring with a roof for the housing of products.  A dozen schooners, small and large, point their noses out to the sea, their backs against the coral quay, and their hawsers made fast to old cannon, brought here to war against the natives, and now binding the messengers of the nations and of commerce to this shore.  Where there are no embankments, the water comes up to the roots of the trees, and a carpet of grass, moss, and tropical vegetation grows from the salt tide to the roadway.

Following the contour of the beach, runs a fairly broad road, and facing this original thoroughfare and the sea are the principal shops of the traders and a few residences.  French are some of these merchants, but most are Australasian, German, American and Chinese.  France is ten thousand miles away, and the French unequal in the struggle for gain.  Some of the stores occupy blocks, and in them one will find a limited assortment of tobacco, anchors, needles, music-boxes, candles, bicycles, rum, novels, and silks or calicos.  Here in this spot was the first settlement of the preachers of the gospel, of the conquering forces of France, and of the roaring blades who brought the culture of the world to a powerful and spellbound people.  Here swarmed the crews of fifty whalers in the days when “There she blows!” was heard from crows’-nests all over the broad Pacific.  These rough adventurers, fighters, revelers, passionate bachelors, stamped Tahiti with its first strong imprint of the white man’s modes and vices, contending with the missionaries for supremacy of ideal.  They brought gin and a new lecherousness and deadly ills and novel superstitions, and found a people ready for their wares.  An old American woman has told me she has seen a thousand whalemen at one time ashore off ships in the harbor make night and day a Saturnalia of Occidental pleasure, a hundred fights in twenty-four hours.

As more of Europe and America came and brought lumber to build houses, or used the hard woods of the mountains, the settlement pushed back from the beach.  Trails that later widened into streets were cut through the brush to reach these homes of whites, and the thatched huts of the aborigines were replaced by the ugly, but more convenient, cottages of the new-comers.  The French, when once they had seized the island, made roads, gradually and not too well, but far surpassing those of most outlying possessions, and contrasting advantageously with the neglect of the Spanish, who in three hundred years in the Philippines left all undone the most important step in civilization.  One can drive almost completely around Tahiti on ninety miles of a highway passable at most times of the year, and bridging a hundred times the streams which rush and purl and wind from the heights to the ocean.

The streets of Papeete have no plan.  They go where they list and in curves and angles, and only once in a mile in short, straight stretches.  They twist and stray north and south and nor’nor’west and eastsou’east, as if each new-comer had cleft a walk of his own, caring naught for any one else, and further dwellers had smoothed it on for themselves.