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.