Chapter V
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Raiatea, and she was or became the wife of Tunuieaiteatua i Tarahoi, Cook’s friend Otoo, and the missionaries’ friend Pomare. A very famous woman in Tahitian history, much talked about by Captain Bligh in 1788 and by the missionaries as Iddeah, Tetuanui i Nuurua was not even mentioned by Wallis or Cook, although the latter, in 1774, frequently mentions "Tarevatoo, the king’s younger brother," whom I take to be Terii vaetua, the king’s brother-in-law, who had begun the attempt to break the Rahui. Indeed, Cook never saw even Pomare until August, 1773, when Pomare was already thirty years old.
After the repulse of Terii vaetua, this sister undertook to pursue the quarrel. The matter had become uncommonly serious, for a feud between Papara and Ahurai might upset the whole island. Nothing more would then be needed to overthrow the Papara supremacy than the alliance of Ahurai and the Purionuu with Vehiatua, whose fortunes had been made a hundred years before by a similar combination to break a similar Rahui. Tradition has preserved the precise words used by the family to avert the peril into which Purea’s pride and temper were pushing them.
Tetuanui in her turn made her appearance in the state canoe off the point of Mahaiatea, and as she approached the beach was received by Purea with the same order, "Down with your tent!" Tetuanui came ashore and sat on the beach and cut her head with the shark’s tooth till the blood flowed down into a hole she dug to receive it. This was her protest in form; an appeal to blood. Unless it were wiped away it must be atoned by blood.
Then the high-priest Manea interposed. Manea was Amo’s younger brother, from whom we are directly descended in the fourth generation, and probably we owe our existence in a double sense to him, for his act wiped out the blood-feud as far as his own descendants were concerned.
"Hush, Purea! Whence is the saying, ’The pahus (drums) of Ma-tairea call Tetunai for a Maro-ura for Teriirere i Tooarai. Where wilt
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Indigenous Histories |  |
© Derived from the revised Paris edition of 1901 page 45, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/-marua-045.html