TAHITI.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 387, 8 September 1875, Page 3

TAHITI.

We (New Zealand Herald) have files of the Messager de Tahiti to the 9th of July. An order had been published by the Commissioner of the Republic of France for the registration of Chinese entering the colony. A new Admiral had arrived on the station. The Court of Queen Pomare was still in mourning on account of the death of Teritua Tuavira (Joinville), the sixth son of the reigning monarch. The local official journal appears with a supplement in mourning columns, and giving an account of the educational career and promise of the young prince, who had spent his school boy years in Franc. 1 . The cause of death was phthisis. The young prince had married in 1868 a young English woman, MdUe Isabella Shaw, who is now left a widowed princess with an infant prince. One of the principal features recorded in all the numbers of the Messager is the exhibition of “colonial produce,” which is maintained under the authority of a decree by the French Government. There is an interesting account of the committal of a native child to the prison—ostensibly to undergo a punishment, but strictly for reformatory rather than correctional purposes. The young offender is to be imprisoned for a period of three years. He is to be apprenticed (the trade is not named), and though he will receive no salary, he may entitle himself to gratuities for good conduct. Some interesting experiments were being made in the culture of certain indigenous and fibrous plants and grasses, with a view to the manufacture of paper. The result, however, was not stated beyond the fact that the subject was referred to a commission of experts in France. There is a curious specimen of a Royal decree published in the Messager dc Tahiti, which runs as follows : —“ We, Pomare IV, Queen of the Society Islands and Dependencies, and Commandant Commissarie de la Republique,” in view of the proves verbal of a gendarme of Moorea, from which it appears that the Chieftainess Tauraa, of the district Papeloai, is charged with threats and violence towards a native woman named Tuane, of the district Tarerrau. Considering the charge proved, and that it is calculated to create a scandal, it is decreed as follows :—That all the functions administrative of the chieftainess Tauraa are revoked ; that the Director of Native Affairs shall give effect to the Royal decree, which shall be published in the Bulletin Official. It is, perhaps, worth notice that the Messager is now printed in the native language, as well as in Freach. Through this means the law is enforced upon colonists and natives alike.