I had seen the preparation of namu, which is very simple.  The native mounts the tree and makes incisions in the flowers, of which each palm bears from three to six.  He attaches a calabash under them and lets the juice drip all day and night.  The process is slow, as the juice falls drop by drop.  This operation may be repeated indefinitely with no injury to the tree.  In countries where the liquor is gathered to sell in large quantities, the natives tie bamboo poles from tree to tree, so that an agile man will run through the forest tending the calabashes, emptying them into larger receptacles, and lowering these to the ground, all without descending from his lofty height.

The namu when stale causes the Marquesans to revert to wickedest savagery, and has incited many murders.  Under the eye of the gendarme its making ceases, but a hundred valleys have no white policemen, and the half score of people remaining amid their hundreds of ruined paepaes give themselves over to intoxication.  I have seen a valley immersed in it, men and women madly dancing the ancient nude dances in indescribable orgies of abandonment and bestiality.

Namu enata means literally “man booze.”  The Persian-Arabic word, nam, or narm-keffi, means “the liquid from the palm flower.”  From this one might think that Asia had taught the Marquesans the art of making namu during their prehistoric pilgrimage to the islands, but the discoverers and early white residents in Polynesia saw no drunkenness save that of the kava-drinking.  It was the European, or the Asiatic brought by the white, who introduced comparatively recently the more vicious cocoanut-brandy, as well as rum and opium, and it is these drinks that have been a potent factor in killing the natives.

It has ever been thus with men of other races subjugated by the whites.  Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography tells that when he was a commissioner to the Indians at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he and his fellow-commissioners agreed that they would allow the Indians no rum until the treaty they earnestly sought was concluded, and that then they should have plenty.

He pictures an all-night debauch of the red men after they had signed the treaty, and concludes:  “And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means.  It has annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.”

It was not for me to speculate upon the designs of Providence with respect to the Marquesans. Kava had been the drink ordained by the old gods before the white men came.  Its making was now almost a lost art; I knew no white man who had ever drunk from the kava-bowl.  So it was with some eagerness that I followed Kivi down the trail.

Broken Plate, a sturdy savage in English cloth cap and whale’s-teeth earrings, stood waiting for us in the road below the House of the Golden Bed, and together the three of us went in search of the kava bush.  While we followed the narrow trail up the mountain-side, peering through masses of tangled vines and shrubs for the large, heart-shaped leaves and jointed stalks we sought, Kivi spoke with passion of the degenerate days in which he lived.