The two Paumotan youths, Tennonoku and Kedeko-lio, lay motionless on the floor of the veranda twenty feet away.  They had been sold to Grelet for a small sum by Begole, captain of a trading-schooner.  In passing the Paumotan Islands, many hundred miles to the south, Begole had forgotten to leave at Pukatuhu, a small atoll, a few bags of flour he had promised to bring the chief on his next voyage, and the chief, seeing the schooner a mile away, had ordered these boys to swim to it and remind the skipper of his promise.  Begole meanwhile had caught a wind, and the first he knew of the message was when the boys climbed aboard the schooner many miles to sea.  He did not trouble to land them, but brought them on to the Marquesas and sold them to Grelet.

They spoke no Marquesan, and Grelet had difficulty in making them understand that they must labor for him, and in enforcing his orders, which they could not comprehend.  There was little copra being made in the rainy weather, and they lay about the veranda or squatted on the paepae of the laborers’ cookhouse, making a fire of cocoanut-husks twice a day to roast their breadfruit.  Their savage hearts were ever in their own atoll, the home to which the native clings so passionately, and their eyes were dark with hopeless longing.  No doubt they would die soon, as so many do when exiled, but Grelet’s copra crop would profit first.

The dire lack of labor for copra-making, tree-planting, or any form of profitable activity is lamented by all white men in these depopulated islands.  Average wages were sixty cents a day, but even a dollar failed to bring adequate relief.  The Marquesan detests labor, which to him has ever been an unprofitable expenditure of life and did not gain in his eyes even when his toil might enrich white owners of plantations.  Since every man had a piece of land that yielded copra enough for his simple needs, and breadfruit and fish were his for the taking, he could not be forced to work except for the government in payment for taxes.

The white men in the islands, like exploiters of weaker races everywhere in the world, were unwilling to share their profits with the native.  They were reduced to pleading with or intoxicating the Marquesan to procure a modicum of labor.  They saw fortunes to be made if they could but whip a multitude of backs to bending for them, but they either could not or would not perceive the situation from the native’s point of view.

In America I often heard men who were out of employment, particularly in bad seasons, in big cities or in mining camps, argue the right to work.  They could not enforce this alleged natural right, and in their misery talked of the duty of society or the state in this direction.  But they were obliged to content themselves with the thin alleviation of soup-kitchens, charity wood-yards, and other easers of hard times, and with threats of sabotage or other violence.

Here in the islands, where work is offered to unwilling natives, the employers curse their lack of power to drive them to the copra forests, the kilns and boats.  Thus, as in highly civilized countries we maintain that a man has no inherent or legal right to work, in these islands the employer has no weapon by which to enforce toil.  But had the whites the power to order all to do their bidding, they would create a system of peonage as in Mexico.