MEMORIES OF NUKUHIVA.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 41, 18 February 1927, Page 6

MEMORIES OF NUKUHIVA.

The Duke and Duchess of York. when they landed on the beach at Kukuhiu Island, in the Marquesas Group. trod the soil of a strange land that has made material for sonic notable literature, for all its remoteness from the busy ways of the world. The wildly beautiful volcanic islands and their people pave Herman Melville the stuff of which he produced "Tvpee"— the curious spelling that disguised Tai pi * Valley. In Melville's day the Marquesas were a no-man's land, its handsome natives a remarkable blend of savagery and amiability. .Stevenson brought the islands again into the world's eye when he wrote the account of his South Sea cruises in the schooner Casco in 1888, and the Kquator in 1880. In the 'nineties, Mr. F. W. Christian wrote an uncommonly attractive narration of a cruise from Tahiti to the Marquesas, and a study of a romantic, dying people, which appeared in the "Xew Zealand Graphic.** It deserved to rank with anything ever R.L.S. penned about those islands.

Tai-o-hae, the small town in Xukuhiva Bay, off which the Renown anchored with the Royal pair, is the commercial and political capital of the Marquesas. Stevenson described his arrival there in the little Casco front San Francisco. "Now the wind blew squally from the land down gaps of splintered precipice; now, between the sentinel islet 9of the entry, it came iu gusts from seaward. Heavy and dark clouds impended on the summits; the rain roared and ceased; the scuppers of the mountains gushed; and the next day we would see the sides of the amphitheatre bearded with white falls. Along the beach the town shows a thin file of houses, mostly white, and all ensconced in the foliage of an avenue of green puraos; a pier give-i access from the sea across the belt of breakers; to the eastward there stands, on a projecting bushy hill, the old fort which is now the calaboose or prison; eastward still, alone in a garden, the Residency dies the colours of France." It was there, at Tai-o-hae, that Stevenson met the high chieftainess Vaekehu," a "queen of cannibals." "She was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps," be wrote, "the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o-hae."

The French Roman Catholic mission establishment mentioned in the wireless message from the Renown figures for some page: in Stevenson's "In the South Seas." So, too, do the ancient sacred "high places" of stone where the fearful feasts were held of old, the scenes that form the theme of one of his narrative poems in "Sons* of Travel."

The mountain scenery of Xukuhiva and its sister isles mast have impressed the Renown's people as they did their schooner-cruising predecessors. "li>e land heaved up in peaks and vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds." Again, of the Hivaoa coast: "In the morning, when the sun falls directly on their front, they (the mountains) stand like a vast wall; green to the summit, if by any chance the summit should be clear— watercourses here and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the range comes in relief, buffe gorges sinking into shadow, huge tortuous buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom." The Roy.il tourists will find themselves in a very different island world when they reach their next group of call, Fiji. But likely enough it is lonely, gloomy Xukuhiva that they will remember moM.