Chapter XIV
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pared with his son Tu. I do not care to enter on the chapter of his personal vices, all which were as notorious to the missionaries as to the natives, but as he grew older -- in 1800 he was eighteen or twenty years of age -- and as he gained power, he developed a character such as the natives did not recognize as theirs, but ascribed to his savage Paumotu ancestry. The missionaries spoke constantly of the intense hatred caused by his treatment of the common people in his own districts of Pare Arue and Matavai: but if the missionaries, who held themselves aloof from other chiefs for fear of offending Pomare, had taken the trouble to inquire into the true nature of their situation, they would have found that the hatred of Tu was not confined to the commonalty or to the poor wretches reserved for human sacrifice. No doubt Tu carried human sacrifices, in his constant wars, to a point such as terrified beyond all previous experience the common people, whose numbers were so much diminished that three persons, taken for sacrifice, counted relatively as fifty or a hundred would have done a generation before; but even with this terror on their minds, and with the constant robbery of their property which Tu practised, the common people neither hated nor feared Tu more than he was hated and feared by their superiors and their local chiefs.
Already Pomare had succeeded in extinguishing the Vehiatuas of Taiarapu, and seizing that important district for his son. He had equally set aside the Ahurai family. He had established his own power in Eimeo, over the northern portion of the island. The old Teva districts and Hitiaa alone maintained an attitude of independence, and although Temarii Ariifaataia was dead the people of Attahuru, or Paea, with whom the whole population of the coast from Faaa to the isthmus were engaged, offered resistance that Pomare and Tu were afraid to defy without English aid. In the meanwhile, Tu threw aside all regard for the old courtesies of society, and terrified the chiefs as much as he terrified the mean people. Had they been the outcast class from which human victims were generally taken, the chiefs could hardly have been treated with more disrespect.
One or two such cases, showing the terror which Tu inspired among
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© Derived from the revised Paris edition of 1901 page 144, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/-marua-144.html