Mystic Isles of the South Seas. Frederick O'Brien

8
at the message. If many had believed him, the panic would have been
illimitable. He was dressed in a brown cassock, and looked like the
blue-eyed man who had been refused passage to my destination. Probably,
that American in the toga and sandals, exiled from the island he loved
so well, had a message for the Tahitians or others of the Polynesian
tribes of the South Seas; Essenism, maybe, or something to do with
virginal beards and long hair, or sandals and the simple life. I
wished he were with us.
We were in the Golden Gate now, that magnificent opening in the
California shores, riven in the eternal conflict of land and water,
and the rending of which made the bay of San Francisco the mightiest
harbor of America. Before our bows lay the immense expanse of the
mysterious Pacific.
The second officer was directing sailors who were snugging down
the decks.
"What did the queer fellow want to go to Tahiti for?" I asked him.
He regarded me a moment in the stolid way of seamen.
"The blighter likes to live on bananas and breadfruit and that kind
of truck," he replied. "The French won't let 'im st'y there. 'E's
too bloomin' nyked. 'E's a nyture man. They chysed 'im out, and
every steamer 'e tries to stow 'imself aw'y. 'E's a bleedin' trial
to these ships."
That was puzzling. Did not these natives of Tahiti themselves wear
little clothing? Who were they to object to a white man doffing the
superfluities of dress in a climate where breadfruit and bananas
grow? Or the French, the governors of Tahiti? Were they, in that
isle so distant from Paris, their capital, practising a puritanism
unknown at home? Was nature so fearful? The figure of the barefooted
man often arose as I watched the Farallones disappear, the last of
land we would see until we arrived at Tahiti, nearly two weeks later.
The days fell away from the calendar; they obliterated themselves
as quietly as our ship's wake to the north, as we planed over the
smooth waters toward the equator. Gradually the passengers took on
character, and out of the first welter of contacts came those definite