Moorea or Eimeo is a small island, not quite thirty miles in circuit, and with paths across, at a few points, through mountains which are not so high as those of Tahiti, but more striking in their outlines. The place where the boys were killed, the great central valley of the island, with its two wide and mountain-set bays, has often been called the most beautiful valley in all the South Seas. Remote and solitary now, rarely visited except by professional travellers, like Herman Melville or Captain Cook, it once swarmed with thousands of inhabitants, and was the district against which an army and fleet of ten thousand men were seen by Cook to be collected at Faaa, The chiefs of the island were powerful and numerous. When the Atiroo wars occurred, possibly two hundred and fifty years ago, no chief had any great superiority over the others. Te aro poanaa went to four in succession, and none dared take up her quarrel. At each place she cut her head with the shark’s tooth, and appealed to relationship, telling her story, which was already notorious, yet she got only refusal.

In such a society, where everything was public, the scandal must have been immense; and when Te aro poanaa returned home at night, the whole island must have known that no chief had dared to quarrel with the Atiroos. All the more, everyone must have looked to Marama of Haapiti to see whether she would dare to do what the other chiefs had refused. As soon as Te aro poanaa reached home, her husband asked her whether she had succeeded, and she answered no. He then asked whether she had yet called on Tetupua iura o te rai, -- Marama -- and she said that, absorbed in her grief, she had passed by. Her husband told her to go at once.

She went, and the same scene was acted for the fifth time. She cut her head, told her story, and asked for aid. Marama replied:

"Why have you passed by here, and repassed, and why did you not call for me then ? You have been to the other chiefs before coming here. Still I will take up your cause".

Indigenous Histories