In the morning, squatted on their haunches and chanting as they worked, the women scraped the rind from the fermented mei with cowry shells, and grated the fruit into the pit which they had lined with banana leaves.  From time to time they stood in the pit and tramped down the mass of pulp, or thumped it with wooden clubs.

For two weeks or more the work continued.  In the ancient days much ceremoniousness attended this provision against future famine, but to-day in Atuona only one rule was observed, that forbidding sexual intercourse by those engaged in filling the pits.

“To break that tapu,” said Great Fern, “would mean sickness and disaster.  Any one who ate such popoi would vomit.  The forbidden food cannot be retained by the stomach.”

To vomit during the fortnight occupied in the task of conserving the breadfruit brought grave suspicion that the unfortunate had broken the tapu.  When their own savage laws governed them, that unhappy person often died from fear of discovery and the wrath of the gods.  To guard against such a fate those who were not strong and well took no part in the task.

This curious connection between sex and the preparation of food applied in many other cases.  A woman making oil from dried cocoanuts was tapu as to sexual relations for four or five days, and believed that if did she sin, her labor would produce no oil.  A man cooking in an oven at night obeyed the same tapu.  I do not know, and was unable to discover, the origin of these prohibitions.  Like many of our own customs, it has been lost in the mist of ages.

A Tahitian legend of the origin of the breadfruit recounts that in ancient times the people subsisted on araea, red earth.  A couple had a sickly son, their only child, who day by day slowly grew weaker on the diet of earth, until the father begged the gods to accept him as an offering and let him become food for the boy.  From the darkness of the temple the gods at last spoke to him, granting his prayer.  He returned to his wife and prepared for death, instructing her to bury his head, heart and stomach at different spots in the forest.

“When you shall hear in the night a sound like that of a leaf, then of a flower, afterward of an unripe fruit, and then of a ripe, round fruit falling on the ground, know that it is I who am become food for our son,” he said, and died.

She obeyed him, and on the second night she heard the sounds.  In the morning she and her son found a huge and wonderful tree where the stomach had been buried.  The Tahitians believe that the cocoanut, chestnut, and yam miraculously grew from other parts of a man’s corpse.

Breadfruit, according to Percy Smith, was brought into these islands from Java by the ancestors of the Polynesians, who left India several centuries before Christ.  They had come to Indonesia rice-eaters, but there found the breadfruit, “which they took with them in their great migration into these Pacific islands two centuries and more after the beginning of this era.”