“It took place in the French main city and harbor of the Marquesas Islands, Tai-O-Hae, about three o'clock in the afternoon, on a winter day. The monsoon was blowing gusty and strong; The tidal waves roared onto the shore, strewn with large pebbles. A fifty-ton war schooner flying the French flag, the representative of French power on this cannibalistic group of islands, bobbed in its moorings under Prison Hill. Heavy, black clouds hung over the gloomy surrounding mountains. It has been raining since the morning, a real tropical downpour that falls in torrents, as if from a water pipe; the gloomy green slopes of the mountains were cut in places by silvery ribbons of stormy streams..."