“With the Marquesas Islands taken, the French warships came to Tahiti.  French Catholic priests had been deported from here because the Protestants were already in possession, and objected to competition, saying that the priests were children of Beelzebub, and taught false doctrines and morals.  The Queen of Tahiti, whose dynasty the Protestant missionaries had created, advised the pope’s men to seek a heathen people not already worshiping the true God.  The zealous priests who had come with explicit commands to found a mission in Tahiti, launched the curse of Rome upon the king, the Protestant ministers, and especially upon Mr. Pritchard, the British consul and the queen’s physician and spiritual adviser.

“Pritchard had the interests of England and the Lord at heart, and his whispers in the queen’s ear sent the earnest priests aboard a ship bound for a distant port.  They complained, and the French admiral then arrived and pointed his guns at the palace and the Protestant mission, and demanded thirty thousand dollars for the insult to the French flag; and for the jibe at the pope, the matching of every Protestant church in the islands, by a Catholic edifice.  The queen had a panic and fled to Moorea in a canoe.  The admiral then put Consul Pritchard in jail for ten days, and after chastening his mood, put him on an English ship at sea homeward bound.  France and England were showing their teeth at each other over more important differences, which ended in a revolution in Paris and a change of kings, so that the admiral had his way.  The queen came back, the priests established their mission and their churches, and the Tahitians with any blood in them went to war again.  The French built forts about the island, and killed off with their guns all the natives they could get sight of.  Then they took all the other islands around here that England didn’t have, declared Tahiti had to be a protectorate in 1843, and in 1880 gave King Pomare Fifth twelve thousand dollars a year to let them annex his kingdom.  You see, after all, his crown was made by the British puritans, and taken from him by the French or Romish Church.”

The aged Russian laughed in his huge whiskers.  He fished in the rear of his frock and produced the stump of a cigar, for which I yielded a match.

“I found that on the steps of the Roman Catholic bishop’s carriage, which was standing near here an hour ago,” he said.  “They’ll tell you that you will burn in hell; but they smoke here, and good Havana tobacco.”

“I think it’s a pity the Tahitians weren’t left alone,” I asserted.

He gave me a look such as Diogenes might have given the man who stood in his sunlight.  He lit his cigar-end, puffed it diligently for a minute, and then said arbitrarily: