America might have been responsible for the death of the Marquesan race had not the young nation been engaged in a deadly struggle with Great Britain when an American naval captain, David Porter, seized Nuka-hiva.  A hundred years ago the Stars and Stripes floated over the little hill above the bay, and American cannon upon it commanded the village of Tai-o-hae.  Beneath the verdure is still buried the proclamation of Porter, with coins of the young republic, unless the natives dug up the bottle after the destruction of the last of Porter’s forces.  They witnessed the ceremony of its planting, which must have appeared to them a ritual to please the powerful gods of the whites.  Unless respect for the tapu placed on the bottle by “Opotee” restrained them, they probably brought it to the light and examined the magic under its cork.

The adventures of Porter here were as strange and romantic as those of any of the hundreds of the gypsies of the sea who sailed this tropic and spilled the blood of a people unused to their ways and ignorant of their inventions and weapons of power.

Porter had left the United States in command of the frigate Essex, to destroy British shipping, capture British ships, and British sailors.  Porter, son and nephew of American naval officers, destined to be foster-father of Farragut, the first American admiral, and father of the great Admiral Porter, was then in his early thirties and loved a fight.  He harried the British in the Atlantic, doubled Cape Horn without orders, and did them evil on the high seas, and at last, with many prisoners and with prize crews aboard his captures, he made for the Marquesas to refresh his men, repair his ships, and get water, food, and wood for the voyage home.

In Tai-o-hae Bay he moored his fleet, and was met by flocks of friendly canoes and great numbers of the beautiful island women, who swam out to meet the strangers.  Among them he found Wilson, an Englishman who had long been here and who was tattooed from head to foot.  On first seeing this man Porter was strongly prejudiced against him, but found him extremely useful as an interpreter, and concluded that he was an inoffensive fellow whose only failing was a strong attachment to rum.  With Wilson’s eagerly offered help, Porter made friends with the people of Tai-o-hae, established a camp on shore, and set about revictualing his fleet.

The tribes of Tai-o-hae, or Tieuhoy, as Porter called it, were annoyed by the combative Hapaa tribe, or collection of tribes, which dwelt in a nearby valley, and these doughty warriors came within half a mile of the American camp, cut down the breadfruit trees, and made hideous gestures of derision at the white men.  In response, Porter landed a six-pound gun, tremendously heavy, and said that if the Tai-o-hae tribe would carry it to the top of a high mountain overlooking the Hapaa valley, he would drive the Hapaas from the hills where they stood and threatened to descend.