For their caps they made remarkably fine textures, open-meshed, filmy as gauze, which confined their abundant black hair, and to which were added flowers, either natural or beautifully preserved in wax.  Their principal garment, the cahu, was a long and flowing piece of the paper-cloth, of firmer texture, dyed in brilliant colors, or of white adorned with tasteful patterns.  This hung from the shoulders, where it was knotted on one shoulder, leaving one arm and part of the breast exposed.  Much individual taste was expressed in the wearing of this garment; sometimes the knot was on one shoulder, sometimes on the other, or it might be brought low on the chest, leaving the shoulders and arms bare, or thrown behind to expose the charms of a well-formed back or a slender waist.  Beneath it they wore a pareu, which passed twice around the waist and hung to the calves of the legs.

Clean and neat as these garments always were, shining in the sun, leaving the body free to know the joys of sun and air and swift, easy motion, it would be difficult to imagine a more graceful, beautiful, modest, and comfortable manner of dressing.

For dyeing these garments in all the hues that fancy dictated, the women used the juices of herb and tree.  Candlenut-bark gave a rich chocolate hue; scarlet was obtained from the mati-berries mixed with the leaves of the tou.  Yellow came from the inner bark of the root of the morinda citrifolia.  Hibiscus flowers or delicate ferns were dipped in these colors and impressed on the tapas in elegant designs.

The garments were virtually indestructible.  Did a dress need repairing, the edges of the rent were moistened and beaten together, or a handful of fiber was beaten in as a patch.  Often for fishermen the tapas were made water-proof by added thicknesses and the employment of gums, and waterproof cloth for wrappings was made thick and impervious to rain as the oilcloth it resembled.

Hardly one of these garments survives in the Marquesas to-day.  They have been driven out by the gaudy prints of Germany and England brought by the traders, and by the ideas of dress which the missionaries imported together with the barrels of hideous night-gown garments contributed by worthy ladies of American villages.

The disappearance of these native garments brought two things, idleness and the rapid spread of tuberculosis.  The tapa cloth could not be worn in the water or the rain, as it disintegrated.  Marquesans therefore left their robes in the house when they went abroad in stormy weather or bathed in the sea.  But in their new calicos and ginghams they walked in the rain, bathed in the rivers, and returned to sleep huddled in the wet folds, ignorant of the danger.

As the tapa disappeared, so did the beautiful carvings of canoes and paddles and clubs, superseded by the cheaper, machine-made articles of the whites.  Little was left to occupy the hands or minds of the islanders, who, their old merrymakings stopped, their wars forbidden, their industry taken from them, could only sit on their paepaes yawning like children in jail and waiting for the death that soon came.