law prohibited selling, exchanging, or giving to any
Marquesan any alcoholic beverage. But the law was a dead letter, for
only with rum and wine could work be urged upon the Marquesans, and
I failed to reprove them even in my mind for their love of drink.
One who has not seen a dying race cannot conceive of the prostration
of spirit in which these people are perishing. That they are
courteous and hospitable--and that to the white who has ruined
them--shows faintly their former joy in life and their abounding
generosity. Now that no hope is left them and their only future is
death, one cannot blame them for seizing a few moment's forgetfulness.

Some years earlier, in the first bitterness of hopeless subjugation,
whole populations were given over to drunkenness. In many valleys
the chiefs lead in the making of the illicit _namu enata_, or
cocoanut-brandy. In the Philippines, where millions of gallons of
cocoanut-brandy are made, it is called _tuba_, but usually its name
is arrack throughout tropical Asia. Fresh from the flower spathes of
the cocoanut-tree, _namu_ tastes like a very light, creamy beer or
mead. It is delicious and refreshing, and only slightly intoxicating.
Allowed to ferment and become sour, it is all gall. Its drinking
then is divided into two episodes--swallowing and intoxication.
There is no interval. "Forty-rod" whiskey is mild compared to it.

I had seen the preparation of _namu_, which is very simple. The
native mounts the tree and makes incisions in the flowers, of which
each palm bears from three to six. He attaches a calabash under them
and lets the juice drip all day and night. The process is slow, as
the juice falls drop by drop. This operation may be repeated
indefinitely with no injury to the tree. In countries where the
liquor is gathered to sell in large quantities, the natives tie
bamboo poles from tree to tree, so that an agile man will run
through the forest tending the calabashes, emptying them into larger
receptacles, and lowering these to the ground, all without descending
from his lofty height.

The _namu_ when stale causes the Marquesans to revert to wickedest
savagery, and has incited many murders. Under the eye of the
gendarme its making ceases, but a hundred valleys have no white
policemen, and the half score of people remaining amid their
hundreds of ruined _paepaes_ give themselves over to intoxication. I
have seen a valley immersed in it, men and women madly dancing the
a