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who has read Cook, or the Missionary relations, or Herman Melville's Omoo, is a small island, opposite Papeete and Faaa, with fantastic mountain peaks which, a dozen miles away or more, lend unreal and mysterious beauty to the sunset as we watch it from the Papeete shore. Eimeo is forty-eight kilometres in circumference, and now contains, or did contain in 1887, fifteen hundred and fifty-seven persons, all told, of whom about five hundred are men of military age, above fourteen and below sixty years. Eimeo is smaller in circumference than the peninsula of Taiarapu, in the proportion of forty-eight to seventy-two, but its proportion of cultivable land is larger; of thirteen thousand two hundred and thirty-seven hectares, three thousand five hundred are fit for cultivation and were cultivated in the past -- that is to say, about eight thousand six hundred and fifty acres. It is, in fact, one large extinct volcano, whose crater, in the centre, has become the richest and most beautiful valley in the South Seas, opening, through two magnificent bays, northward upon the ocean.
The army and fleet of 1774 were raised to attack not the whole island of Eimeo, but only the district on the north, on the bay of Opu-nohu, or Taloo Harbor, as it was often called. "They told us," said Forster, "that their fleet was intended to reduce the rebellious people of Eimeo (or York Island) and their chief Te-aree-tabonooee [Terii tapu nui] to obedience, adding that they would make the attack in a district of that island called Morrea." 1 When Cook returned to Tahiti, in 1777 on his third voyage, he found that the people of Moorea "had made so stout a resistance that the fleet had returned without effecting much, and now another expedition was necessary."2 Cook himself visited Taloo Harbor in October, 1777, and saw Mahine, the chief of Opunohu, or, as he spelt it and as it is pronounced, Poonohoo. Mahine was only one of the four fighting chiefs of the island; Teriitapunui was another, and according to Cook, the war was waged by the Tahiti chiefs in order to support Teriitapunui against Mahine.3
From this we know that a fleet and army of nine thousand men
1. Forster's Voyage, ii, 69. Observations, 217. -- 2. Cook's Third Voyage, ii, 30, 81, 84, 87. --
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© Derived from the revised Paris edition of 1901 page 5, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
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