Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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I watched idly while Hitihiti’s retainers rolled the vessel out from her shed where she was kept, carefully oiled and chocked high above the ground. They fetched the mast and stepped it, and set up the standing rigging all ataut. Then, in their leisurely fashion, the women of the household fetched bunches of newly husked drinking nuts and other provisions for the voyage. The men seemed to look forward eagerly to the expedition—a break in the dreamy monotony of their lives. Counting on taking the deserters by surprise, they seemed to have no fear of the muskets, but Hitihiti asked me with some concern if I were sure that Churchill and his companions had no pistols. When I assured him that the deserters were not provided with pistols, he brightened at once, and began to speak of the voyage.

We sailed at two o’clock in the afternoon, with a fresh easterly breeze on the beam. Tetiaroa lies almost due north of Matavai, about thirty miles distant. It is a cluster of five low coral islands, set here and there on the reef which encircles a lagoon some four miles across, and is the property of what mariners call the royal family—that of the great chief Teina, or Pomare. It is the fashionable watering place for the chiefs of the north end of Tahiti; they repair to its shady groves to recover from the ravages of the ava with which they constantly intoxicate themselves, and to live on a light wholesome diet of coconuts and fish. And to Tetiaroa also repair the pori—the young girls, one from each district of Tahiti, who are placed on stone platforms at certain times of the year, where they may be admired and compared with their competitors by passers-by. In Tetiaroa, these pori are fed on a special diet, kept in the shade to bleach their skins, and constantly rubbed with the perfumed mollifying oil called monoi; and I must do the old women who care for them the justice to remark that the whole of Europe might be searched without finding a score of young females lovelier than the pori I saw on one small coral island.