Chapter XII
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district of Papara. The descendants of Amo and Berea had till then been nearly always the chiefs of the isle, and since several generations their ancestors occupied the throne, or took rank among the most powerful chiefs. Pomare, whose family, on the contrary, had never been one of the most considered or most influential, became by the submission of Ariipaea master of the peninsula called O-tainee, and prepared to march at once on Taiarabou, the other peninsula of Otaiti, whose chief, Vaiatua or Te arii navaora, far from submission, had himself pretensions to supremacy. In consequence of this opposition, Pomare thought he had best make sure of the conquest of Taiarabou, but he still kept his views in regard to Eimeo. The English, who had brought from the Bounty many more guns and munitions than they needed, gave some of them to the chief and his subjects, some of whom had learned the use of fire-arms. Profiting by this advantage, they attacked the island, got rid of the chief, and hastened to restore Motou Aro, Pomare’s old ally, who had been long exiled from the place where his family had ruled from time immemorial."
The impression made on the people of Papara by Ariipaea’s betrayal of his trust was profound. They had no share in it, and seem never to have recognized it as binding upon them. Pomare’s reception at the Marae of Mataoa must have been before August, 1790, when the mutineers launched their schooner, yet when Edwards arrived in the Pandora in March, 1791, he instantly discovered not only that Tu was without authority or influence at Papara, but that Temarii of Papara had recently been threatening to drive Tu out of his own district of Pare. To reconcile these facts, we must suppose that Ariifaataia had come of age early in 1790, immediately after Ariipaea’s homage. The next that was said about Temarii was told by the missionaries of the Duff, who reached Tahiti in March, 1797. They got the story from two Swedes; Andrew Lind of the ship Matilda, which had been wrecked in these seas in 1792; and Peter Haggerstein, who deserted from the Daedalus in February, 1793. Both these men were beach-combers of the type that has infested the South Seas for a century; they became promine
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© Derived from the revised Paris edition of 1901 page 115, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/-marua-115.html