Biography Of Noted Tahiti Couple

Noted Tahiti Couple

Among the athletes who repre sented French Polynesia at the recent South Pacific Games in Suva was one, J. Salmon, a name with a decidedly non-Gallic and non-Tahitian ring, but one which has been intimately connected with Tahiti for more than 120 years.

THE original bearer of the name in Tahiti was Alexandre Salmon, a London Jew, whose family (they were bankers) fled to England from France during the French Revolution.

Alexandre Salmon was born in 1820, and at the age of 19 or there abouts he set out from London to seek his fortune. In 1841, after visiting California, Hawai and Sydney, he turned up in Tahiti, where, within a few months, he married the Tahitian chiefess Ariioehau.

Ariioehau was an intimate friend of Tahiti’s Queen Pomare IV, who conferred upon the newly-weds the title of Ariitaimai, meaning “chief from over the sea”.

Tahiti at that time had not become a French protectorate, and as the laws of the English Protestant missionaries forbade marriages be-

tween Tahitians and foreigners, Queen Pomare lifted the ban for three days to enable the marriage to take place.

For the next 24 years, until his death in 1866, Alexandre Salmon played a prominent part in Tahiti’s political and commercial affairs.

His wife, who became known as Ariitaimai, was also an important figure.

However, Ariitaimai is mainly remembered these days as the be getter of a celebrated book on Tahiti’s history called the Memoirs of Ariitaimai.

The book was first published in Paris in 1893 by the American historian Henry Adams, who visited Tahiti in 1891 and took down much of the contents of the book from the lips of Ariitaimai, as interpreted by her daughter Marau Ta’aroa, wife of Pomare V, Tahiti’s last king.

No copies of the 1893 edition and only a few copies of the second, revised edition of 1901 are known to exist, but the book has become widely known through a German translation and a facsimile version of the 1901 edition, published in New York in 1947.

A French version of the book is now being prepared by the Societe des Oceanistes in Paris.

Biography

Meanwhile, the Societe des Oceanistes has published a valuable biography (in French) of Ariitaimai and her husband. It was written by the late Ernest Salmon, a grandson of the subjects of the book and a son of Queen Marau. Ernest Salmon died in France in 1961 after retiring as First President of the Court of Appeal of Reunion.

The Memoirs of Ariitaimai, the unpublished memoirs of his mother, and other family papers, were among the sources used by the author.

The book has a preface by the Rev.

Patrick O Reilly, who says in it— nghtly that professional historians will regret the absence of notes on the sources of material quoted Another regrettable feature is that the author says nothing on how the Memoirs of Ariitaimai came to be produced and published.

These, however, are minor short en? 88 in a book that is a mine of information on two people whose descendants intermarried with such rn<ii? OWn D names in th e Pacific as Godeffroy, Brander, Darsie, Atwater S