I lay long awake on deck, watching the eerily lighted sea and the great stars that hung low in the sky, and to my fancy it seemed that the air had changed, that some breath from the isles before us had softened the salty tang of the sea-breeze.

Land loomed at daybreak, dark, gloomy, and inhospitable.  Rain fell drearily as we passed Fatu-hiva, the first of the Marquesas Islands sighted from the south.  We had climbed from Tahiti, seventeen degrees south of the equator, to between eleven and ten degrees south, and we had made a westward of ten degrees.  The Marquesas Islands lay before us, dull spots of dark rock upon the gray water.

They are not large, any of these islands; sixty or seventy miles is the greatest circumference.  Some of the eleven are quite small, and have no people now.  On the map of the world they are the tiniest pin-pricks.  Few dwellers in Europe or America know anything about them.  Most travelers have never heard of them.  No liners touch them; no wire or wireless connects them with the world.  No tourists visit them.  Their people perish.  Their trade languishes.  In Tahiti, whence they draw almost all their sustenance, where their laws are made, and to which they look at the capital of the world, only a few men, who traded here, could tell me anything about the Marquesas.  These men had only the vague, exaggerated ideas of the sailor, who goes ashore once or twice a year and knows nothing of the native life.

Seven hundred and fifty miles as the frigate flies separates these islands from Tahiti, but no distance can measure the difference between the happiness of Tahiti, the sparkling, brilliant loveliness of that flower-decked island, and the stern, forbidding aspect of the Marquesas lifting from the sea as we neared them.  Gone were the laughing vales, the pale-green hills, the luring, feminine guise of nature, the soft-lapping waves upon a peaceful, shining shore.  The spirit that rides the thunder had claimed these bleak and desolate islands for his own.

While the schooner made her way cautiously past the grim and rocky headlands of Fatu-hiva I was overwhelmed with a feeling of solemnity, of sadness; such a feeling as I have known to sweep over an army the night before a battle, when letters are written to loved ones and comrades entrusted with messages.

That gaunt, dark shore itself recalls that the history of the Marquesas is written in blood, a black spot on the white race.  It is a history of evil wrought by civilization, of curses heaped on a strange, simple people by men who sought to exploit them or to mold them to another pattern, who destroyed their customs and their happiness and left them to die, apathetic, wretched, hardly knowing their own miserable plight.

The French have had their flag over the Marquesas since 1842.  In 1521 Magellan must have passed between the Marquesas and Paumotas, but he does not mention them.  Seventy-three years later a Spanish flotilla sent from Callao by Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, viceroy of Peru, found this island of Fatu-hiva, and its commander, Mendana, named the group for the viceroy’s lady, Las Islas Marquesas de Mendoza.