One hundred and eighty years passed, and Captain Cook again discovered the islands, and a Frenchman, Etienne Marchand, discovered the northern group.  The fires of liberty were blazing high in his home land, and Marchand named his group the Isles of the Revolution, in celebration of the victories of the French people.  A year earlier an American, Ingraham, had sighted this same group and given it the name of his own beloved hero, Washington.

Had not Captain Porter failed to establish American rule in 1813 in the island of Nuka-hiva, which he called Madison, the Marquesas might have been American.  Porter’s name, like that of Mendana, is linked with deeds of cruelty.  The Spaniard was without pity; the American may plead that his killings were reprisals or measures of safety for himself.  Murder of Polynesians was little thought of.  Schooners trained their guns on islands for pleasure or practice, and destroyed villages with all their inhabitants.

“To put the fear of God in the nigger’s hearts,” were the words of many a sanguinary captain and crew.  They did not, of course, mean that literally.  They meant the fear of themselves, and of all whites.  They used the name of God in vain, for after a century and more of such intermittent effort the Polynesians have small fear or faith for the God of Christians, despite continuous labors of missionaries.  God seems to have forgotten them.

The French made the islands their political possessions with little difficulty.  The Marquesans had no king or single chief.  There were many tribes and clans, and it was easy to persuade or compel petty chiefs to sign declarations and treaties.  But it was not easy to kill the independence of the people, and France virtually abandoned and retook the islands several times, her rule fluctuating with political conditions at home.

There were wars, horrible, bloody scenes, when the clansmen slew the whites and ate them, and the bones of many a gallant French officer and sea-captain have moldered where they were heaped after the orgy following victory.  But, as always, the white slew his hundreds to the natives’ one, and in time he drove the devil of liberty and defense of native land from the heart of the Marquesan.

Before the French achieved this, however, the white had sowed a crop of deadly evils among the Marquesans that cut them down faster than war, and left them desolate, dying, passing to extinction.

As I looked from the deck of the Morning Star I was struck by the fittingness of the scene.  Fatu-hiva had been left behind and Hiva-oa, our destination, was before us, bleak and threatening.  To my eyes it appeared as it had been in the eyes of the gentler Polynesians of old time, the abode of demons and of a race of terrible warriors.  Hence descended the Marquesans, Vikings of the Pacific, in giant canoes, and sprang upon the fighting men of the Tahitians, the Raiateans and the Paumotans, slaughtering their hundreds and carrying away scores to feast upon in the High Places.