Legends

Louis took me to the house of Tipu to get parapores or legends. He lived in a little house in a garden neatly laid out in rows of taro and umara (potatoes). Potatoes are not eaten by the natives; they are a delicacy for the European. The place was hopping with fleas. We went back and filled our shoes with flea-powder. The old man was newly bedridden; he was gored in the leg by a hog ten years ago, and was treated for it by a Roman Catholic priest. The flesh had rotted away downwards to the foot. A hen clucked behind him and got up out of his bed, where it had perhaps been laying an egg. He produced a big book ruled with lines for money, like a ledger. He swept the fleas from his page as he read. I transcribed the first page or two of his book and promised I would show it to no one in Tahiti. This book ¹ was written in parau huna (a secret writing). Suddenly he grew suspicious of me and wished to know why I wanted his book. It is genealogy: parau tupuna. This is not legends; it is grandfather talk, true tales of the ancestors of men who live here, men that I know. It is always the custom to keep genealogies secret except for the members of the family, lest anyone should impose himself as a fetii dishonestly, the laws of hospitality being so chivalrously exacting to one's own fetii. It has the date 1830 at the beginning, but that cannot be the date of the book in which they were originally written. It is probably a copy of an earlier MS. or MSS. The contents of it are descriptions of the marriages and progeny of chiefly families and of the maraes at which they had the right of sacrificing both in Tahiti and in Eimeo. When he hears that I want parapore—i.e. legends—and not grandfather talk, be is relieved.