THE kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands,Great and Little Makin;some two thousand subjects pay him tribute,and two semi-independent chieftains do him qualified homage.The importance of the office is measured by the man;he may be a nobody,he may be absolute;and both extremes have been exemplified within the memory of residents.
On the death of king Tetimararoa,Tebureimoa's father,Nakaeia,the eldest son,succeeded.He was a fellow of huge physical strength,masterful,violent,with a certain barbaric thrift and some intelligence of men and business.Alone in his islands,it was he who dealt and profited;he was the planter and the merchant;and his subjects toiled for his behoof in servitude.When they wrought long and well their taskmaster declared a holiday,and supplied and shared a general debauch.The scale of his providing was at times magnificent;six hundred dollars'worth of gin and brandy was set forth at once;the narrow land resounded with the noise of revelry:and it was a common thing to see the subjects (staggering themselves)parade their drunken sovereign on the fore-hatch of a wrecked vessel,king and commons howling and singing as they went.
At a word from Nakaeia's mouth the revel ended;Makin became once more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers;and on the morrow all the population must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling under his bloodshot eye.
The fear of Nakaeia filled the land.No regularity of justice was affected;there was no trial,there were no officers of the law;it seems there was but one penalty,the capital;and daylight assault and midnight murder were the forms of process.The king himself would play the executioner:and his blows were dealt by stealth,and with the help and countenance of none but his own wives.These were his oarswomen;one that caught a crab,he slew incontinently with the tiller;thus disciplined,they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance,which he would then execute alone and return well-pleased with his connubial crew.The inmates of the harem held a station hard for us to conceive.Beasts of draught,and driven by the fear of death,they were yet implicitly trusted with their sovereign's life;they were still wives and queens,and it was supposed that no man should behold their faces.They killed by the sight like basilisks;a chance view of one of those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood.In the days of Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms which commanded the enclosure.It chanced one evening,while Nakaeia sat below at supper with his wives,that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine;it chanced that he looked down,and the king at the same moment looking up,their eyes encountered.
Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal.But during the remainder of that reign he must lurk and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle;Nakaeia hunted him without remission,although still in vain;and the palms,accessories to the fact,were ruthlessly cut down.Such was the ideal of wifely purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise.And yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia's well-guarded harem.He was at that time the owner of a schooner,which he used for a pleasure-house,lodging on board as she lay anchored;and thither one day he summoned a new wife.She was one that had been sealed to him;that is to say (I presume),that he was married to her sister,for the husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets.She would be arrayed for the occasion;she would come scented,garlanded,decked with fine mats and family jewels,for marriage,as her friends supposed;for death,as she well knew.'Tell me the man's name,and I will spare you,'said Nakaeia.But the girl was staunch;she held her peace,saved her lover and the queens strangled her between the mats.
Nakaeia was feared;it does not appear that he was hated.Deeds that smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice;his orgies made him popular;natives to this day recall with respect the firmness of his government;and even the whites,whom he long opposed and kept at arm's-length,give him the name (in the canonical South Sea phrase)of 'a perfect gentleman when sober.'
When he came to lie,without issue,on the bed of death,he summoned his next brother,Nanteitei,made him a discourse on royal policy,and warned him he was too weak to reign.The warning was taken to heart,and for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia's.Nanteitei dispensed with guards,and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag.To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence;you might talk to him all day;advice,reproof,appeal,and menace alike remained unanswered.
The number of his wives was seventeen,many of them heiresses;for the royal house is poor,and marriage was in these days a chief means of buttressing the throne.Nakaeia kept his harem busy for himself;Nanteitei hired it out to others.In his days,for instance,Messrs.Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the town.The masonry was the work of the seventeen queens,who toiled and waded there like fisher lasses;but the man who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished,lest by chance he should look down and see them.
