War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet Nanteitei died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession of the throne, and it was in the reign of the third brother, Nabakatokia, a man brave in body and feeble of character, that the storm burst.  The rule of the high chiefs and notables seems to have always underlain and perhaps alternated with monarchy.  The Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in the Speak House and debate:  and the king’s chief superiority is a form of closure—­’The Speaking is over.’  After the long monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous of the influence of Maka.  Calumny, or rather caricature, was called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed affront, the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings.  In the space of one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the dust.  The king sat in the maniap’ before the palace gate expecting his recruits; Maka by his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in the door of a house at the north entry of the town, a chief had taken post and diverted the succours as they came.  They came singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung about his neck.  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the chief.  ’The king called us,’ they would reply.  ‘Here is your place.  Sit down,’ returned the chief.  With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was summoned and surrendered.  About this period, in almost every part of the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to ambition.  Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was stripped of power.  The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia; and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in debt.

He died some months before my arrival on the islands, and no one regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor.  This was by repute the hero of the family.  Alone of the four brothers, he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.  Nontemat’, Mr. Corpse, was his appalling nickname, and he had earned it well.  Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families.  Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux.  He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin:  he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the name of Tebureimoa.