At dusk the wind died, and we put out the oars.  Hour after hour the rowers pulled, chanting at times ancient lays of the war-canoes, of the fierce fights of their fathers when hundreds fed the sharks after the destruction of their vessels by the conquerors, and of the old gods who had reigned before the white men came.  Pere Victorien listened musingly.

“They should be singing of the Blessed Mother or of Joan,” he said with sorrow.  “But when they pull so well I cannot deny them a thread of that old pagan warp.  Those devils whom they once worshipped wait about incessantly for a word of praise.  They hate the idea that we are hurrying to the mission, and they would like well to delay us.”

Whatever the desires of those devils, they were balked, for the wind came fair during the second night, and when the second dawning came we were in the bay of Tai-o-hae.

It was a basin of motionless green water, held in the curve of a shore shaped like a horseshoe, with two huge headlands of rock for the calks.  The beach was a rim of white between the azure of the water and the dark green of the hills that rose steeply from it.  Above them the clouds hung in varying shapes, here lit by the sun to snowy fleece, there black and lowering.  On the lower slopes a few houses peeped from the embowering parau trees, and on a small hill, near the dismantled fort, the flag of France drooped above the gendarme’s cabin.

By eight o’clock in the morning, when we reached the shore, the beach was shimmering in the sunlight, the sand gleaming under the intense rays as if reflecting the beams of gigantic mirrors.  Heat-waves quivered in the moist air.

This was the beach that had witnessed the strange career of John Howard, a Yankee sailor who had fled a Yankee ship fifty years before and made his bed for good and all in the Marquesas.  Lying Bill Pincher had told me the story.  Howard, known to the natives as T’yonny, had been welcomed by them in their generous way, and the tahuna had decorated him from head to foot in the very highest style of the period.  In a few years, what with this tattooing and with sunburn, one would have sworn him to be a Polynesian.  He was ambitious, and by alliances acquired an entire valley, which he left to his son, T’yonny Junior.  Mr. Howard, senior, garbed himself like the natives and was like them in many ways, but he retained a deep love for his country and its flag, and when he saw an American man-of-war entering the harbor, he went aboard with his many tawny relatives-in-law.

The captain was amazed to hear him talking with the sailors.

“’E was blooming well knocked off ’is pins,” said Lying Bill.  “‘Blow me!’ ’e sez, ’if that blooming cannibal don’t talk the King’s English as if ‘e was born in New York!’ ’E ’ad ’im down in the cabin to ’ave a drink, thinking ’e was a big chief.  ’Oward took a cigar and smoked it and drank ’is whiskey with a gulp and a wry face like all Americans.