THE STORM ON MOOREA

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 21, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 12.

THE STORM ON MOOREA.

THE tidal disaster that visited the Society Islands February 7, is said to have been more forceful on the island of Moorea, or Eimeo, fifteen miles from Tahiti, than on the greater island. A correspondent of the San Francisco Examiner who was on Moorea at the time, says:

On February 7 the rain had been falling in solid sheets, but beyond a blurring of the battlemented mountains to the south of the settlement, and an unusual surge of the sea, no sign was manifest of the coming havoc. At 8 P.M., the word came from Afeweta, four miles to the westward, that a hurricane from the northwest had struck that part of the island, and destroyed all but three of the fifty houses in that settlement, everything being smashed flat, including the coconut plantations, and that all the coconuts and copra which had been gathered to send to San Francisco by the Mariposa were destroyed.

At 3 A.M. on the 8th, a hurricane from the southwest smote the sea which was advancing, tearing off the crests of the waves and drowning its noise.

This change in the direction of the wind saved the settlement of Oponohu from destruction by the waves, for, tho it leveled every house but two, it kept the sea back. Loud cries in the darkness and the crash of falling houses showed, however, that considerable damage was being done, and it was not long before my house went, too. The natives grabbed my belongings, and I made a hasty change of base. The corrugated iron roofs, the branches of trees, and lumber went whirling through the air, and a Chinese cherry tree in front of my temporary stopping-place was torn up by the roots.

The natives developed what to me was a new trait in their nature. They dropped their usual indolence, and, in the darkness and terror of that February night, threatened by the wind and sea, and thrown flat by the might of the storm, they worked hard and saved life and property. Only when they looked up at the denuded hillsides and saw where their little patches of plantains, on which they depended so much, were gone, they wrung their hands and made gestures of despair.