Only gained 50 NM in the past 24 hours. We could have walked to this point faster than that. Came through a couple squalls in the night which washed the boat down nicely (you can see we try to be positive). We can't even fish at this speed.

A bit more about the Marquesans. Jerome, our tour guide, took us to an archeological site that had been used for festivals. Early Marquesans built their homes on slabs of skillfully placed together boulders, called pie pie. This site was a series of pie pie surrounding the central square. During the festivals people came together to dance, eat, pray, get married, and offer human sacrifice to appease their gods. The sacrifice was usually a young girl who had not yet reached puberty and who was free of tattoos (why is it always a young girl?)

Anyway, food was an issue for early Marquesans, a problem they solved through cannibalism. They ate the dead by necessity. They cut off the head of the dead, which was considered sacred, and buried it under one of the large stones outside the pie pie.

Only the heads of the chiefs were buried at this ceremonial site; the new chief ate the eyes and the brain of the deceased chief, which they believed would help him move into the position as chief with knowledge and vision. (yuck!) Jerome told us that after the missionaries arrived, it's believed that if they fell out favor with the chief, they became his next meal. The missionaries soon learned to tread softly, or suffer the consequences.