With such connections as her father and mother and husband gave her, Purea had no serious rival in the island, and when her son Teriirere was born, somewhere about the year 1762, he became at once the most important person in the world in the eyes of his mother and of Tahiti. The son always superseded the father, whose authority after the birth of a child was merely that of guardian. As often happened, Tevahitua took a new name from the child, and called himself Amo, the winker, from a habit of winking which seems to have amused him in the infant Teriirere. The same cause that superseded the father gave the mother often an increase of influence and freedom from restraint. Purea, after the birth of Teriirere, was emancipated, and the relation betwen her and Amo was from that time a political rather than a domestic one. They were united only in the interests of Teriirere.

They then asserted the child’s supremacy by undertaking what no other great chief had ever attempted, and what still strikes us with astonishment as it struck Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks in 1769. They not only imposed a general Rahui for the child’s benefit, as Tavi of Tautira did for his unfortunate son a hundred years before; but they also began a new Marae for Teriirere, in which he was to wear the Maro, and they set their people to work on the enormous task of piling up the pyramid at Mahaiatea which was an exhibition of pride without a parallel in Polynesia.

This was more than Purea’s female relations could bear, and it set society in a ferment. The island custom provided more than one way of dealing with pride. Though Purea and Teriirere were admitted to be political superiors, they were socially no better than their cousins, and custom required that if during a Rahui any relative or guest of equal rank should come to visit the chief who had imposed it, the Rahui

Indigenous Histories