It was Stevenson who though that “the ending of the most healthful, if not the most humane, of field sports—­hedge warfare—­” had much to do with depopulation.  Either horn of the dilemma is dangerous to touch.  It is unthinkable, perhaps, that white conquerors should have allowed the Marquesans to follow their own customs of warfare.  But changes in the customs of every race must come from within that race or they will destroy it.  The essence of life is freedom.

Any one who has read their past and knows them now must admit that the Marquesans have not been improved in morality by their contact with the whites.  Alien customs have been forced upon them.  And they are dying for lack of expression, nationally and individually.  Disease, of course, is the weapon that kills them, but it finds its victims unguarded by hope or desire to live, willing to meet death half way, the grave a haven.

[Illustration:  Beach at Oomoa]

[Illustration:  Putting the canoe in the water]

In the old days this island of Fatu-hiva was the art center of the Marquesas.  The fame of its tattooers, carvers in wood and stone, makers of canoes, paddles, and war-clubs, had resounded through the archipelago for centuries.  Now it is one of the few places where even a feeble survival of those industries give the newcomers a glimpse of their methods and ideals now sinking, like their originators, in the mire of wretchedness.

Outside the mission gates, in the edge of the jungle, Pere Olivier and I came upon two old women making tapa cloth.  Shrunken with age, toothless, decrepit, their only covering the ragged and faded pareus that spoke of poverty, they sat in the shade of a banian-tree, beating the fibrous inner bark of the breadfruit-tree.  Over the hollow log that resounded with the blows of their wooden mallets the cloth moved slowly, doubling on the ground into a heap of silken texture, firm, thin, and soft.

This paper-cloth was once made throughout all the South Sea Islands.  Breadfruit, banian, mulberry, and other barks furnished the fiber.  The outer rough bark was scraped off with a shell, and the inner rind slightly beaten and allowed to ferment.  It was then beaten over a tree-trunk with mallets of iron-wood about eighteen inches long, grooved coarsely on one side and more finely on the other.  The fibers were so closely interwoven by this beating that in the finished cloth one could not guess the process of making.  When finished, the fabric was bleached in the sun to a dazzling white, and from it the Marquesans of old wrought wondrous garments.