alasian, German, American and
Chinese. France is ten thousand miles away, and the French unequal
in the struggle for gain. Some of the stores occupy blocks, and in
them one will find a limited assortment of tobacco, anchors, needles,
music-boxes, candles, bicycles, rum, novels, and silks or calicos. Here
in this spot was the first settlement of the preachers of the gospel,
of the conquering forces of France, and of the roaring blades
who brought the culture of the world to a powerful and spellbound
people. Here swarmed the crews of fifty whalers in the days when
"There she blows!" was heard from crows'-nests all over the broad
Pacific. These rough adventurers, fighters, revelers, passionate
bachelors, stamped Tahiti with its first strong imprint of the white
man's modes and vices, contending with the missionaries for supremacy
of ideal. They brought gin and a new lecherousness and deadly ills and
novel superstitions, and found a people ready for their wares. An old
American woman has told me she has seen a thousand whalemen at one
time ashore off ships in the harbor make night and day a Saturnalia
of Occidental pleasure, a hundred fights in twenty-four hours.

As more of Europe and America came and brought lumber to build houses,
or used the hard woods of the mountains, the settlement pushed back
from the beach. Trails that later widened into streets were cut through
the brush to reach these homes of whites, and the thatched huts of the
aborigines were replaced by the ugly, but more convenient, cottages
of the new-comers. The French, when once they had seized the island,
made roads, gradually and not too well, but far surpassing those of
most outlying possessions, and contrasting advantageously with the
neglect of the Spanish, who in three hundred years in the Philippines
left all undone the most important step in civilization. One can
drive almost completely around Tahiti on ninety miles of a highway
passable at most times of the year, and bridging a hundred times the
streams which rush and purl and wind from the heights to the ocean.

The streets of Papeete have no plan. They go where they list and
in curves and angles, and only once in a mile in short, straight
stretches. They twist and stray north and south and nor'nor'west
and eastsou'east, as if each new-comer had cleft a walk of his own,
caring naught for any one else, and further dwellers had smoothed it
on for themselves.

I lost myself in a maze of streets,