“Make smaller noise!  Nobody is asleep!”

At two in the morning the gendarmes advised the last revelers to retire, and the Tiare became quiet.  But Atupu slept in a little alcove by the bar, and any one in her favor had but to enter her chamber and pull her shapely leg to be served in case of dire need.

The incidents of the departure of the Noa-Noa that day for San Francisco will live in the annals of Papeete.  Its calamitous happenings are “in the archives.”  I have the word of the secretary-general of the Etablissments Francais de l’Oceanie for that, and in the saloons and coffee-houses they talked loudly of the “bataille entre les cochons Anglais et les heros les Francais et les Tahitiens.”

It was a battle that would have rejoiced the heart of Don Quixote, and that redoubtable knight had his prototype here in the van of it, the second in command of the police of Papeete, M. Lontane, the mimic of the Tiare celebration.

The Noa-Noa’s amateur crew of wretched beach-combers, farm laborers, and impossible firemen, stokers, and stewards, a pitiable set, were about the waterfront all day, dirty, dressed in hot woolen clothes, bedraggled and as drunk as their money would allow.  The ship was down to leave at three-thirty o’clock, but it was four when the last bag of copra was aboard.  There were few passengers, and those who booked here were dismayed at the condition of the passageways, the cabins, and the decks.  The crowd of “scabs,” untrained white sailors, and coal passers was supplemented by Raratonga natives, lounging about the gangway and sitting on the rails.  On the wharf hundreds of people had gathered as usual to see the liner off.  Lovaina was there in a pink lace dress, seated in her carriage, with Vava at the horse’s head.  Prince Hinoe had gathered about him a group of pretty girls, to whom he was promising a feast in the country.  All the tourists, the loafers, the merchants, and the schooner crews were there, too, and the iron-roofed shed in which it is forbidden to smoke was filled with them.  The Noa-Noa blew and blew her whistle, but still she did not go.  The lines to the wharf were loosened, the captain was on the bridge, the last farewells were being called and waved, but there was delay.  Word was spread that some of the crew were missing, and as at the best the vessel was short-handed, it had to tarry.

At last came three of the missing men.  They, too, had welcomed the New Year, and their gait was as at sea when the ship rises and falls on the huge waves.  They wheeled in a barrow a mate whose mispoise made self-locomotion impossible.  The trio danced on the wharf, sang a chantey about “whisky being the life of man,” and declared they would stay all their lives in Tahiti; that the “bloody hooker could bleedin’ well” go without them.  They were ordered on board by M. Lontane, with two strapping Tahitian gendarmes at his back.

If there are any foreigners the average British roustabout hates it is French gendarmes, and the ruffians were of a mind to “beat them up.”  They raised their fists in attitudes of combat, and suddenly what had been a joyous row became a troublesome incident.