Martinsburg Gazette

From the New York Times.

KINGATARA, THE SOUTH SEA MAIDEN.

A friend has handed us the following extract of a letter from the South Sea Islands, giving an account of the singular and melancholy departure of Kingatara, the pride of Tahete—who, but a few days before her death, had bestowed her heart and hand upon a hardy New England whaler. Most of our readers are aware of the fondness of all the South Sea Islanders for sea sports. Our own Stewart has delineated them with a graphic pen, and Byron, in his poem of The Island, has endowed his heroines with swimming powers and propensities scarcely surpassed even by the inhabitants of the ocean. A landsman must incur a great risk in connecting himself for life with a being to whom the water is as common as the earth, and who divides her time between sea and land: he might almost as well marry a mermaid. But to the letter—

"Mrs. Kingatara Ororuth Spooner, one of the most distinguished ladies of Otaheite, whose marriage was duly chronicled a few weeks ago, has been chawed up before the very eyes of the man of her choice. It cannot be said that she has gone the way of all flesh, for if such were the case, the sharks and other cannibals of the deep would be the most plentifully fed of all monsters. But a few days before the melancholy and Jonah-like departure of Mrs. Kingatara Spooner, she and a hardy whaler had been made one flesh. Scarcely a week's suns had risen and set, before she was made one fish with one of the most cruel and carnivorous of his sex, the hungriest of all sea dwellers—an enormous shark. The fair Kingatara, in the days of her maidenhood. had passed the chief part of her play-time among breakers, where she frisked and floundered about. and rode upon the billow like a sea goddess among the exulting waves of her own realm. The South Sea Islanders are a famous people for sea bathing, and the lovely Kingatara had obtained the reputation of being the best swimmer the deepest diver, and the most graceful flip-flapper of all the young virgins of Otaheite. It is not a wonder that she should have gained the affections of a hardy whaler, whose ideas of grace and beauty were probably derived from exhibitions of the flounderings of the big whales which he encountered in the course of his ocean wanderings. He watched the dusky maiden as she ducked and dived among the breakers, and was completely overcome with the graceful contortions of her well turned limbs, as she paddled about and wrestled with the angry billows. The whaler wooed and won her, and the happy pair, after having been joined together according to the statute, set out on a short voyage among the beautiful Islands of the South Pacific. But even the delights of the honey moon could not entirely win the young Kingatara from the exciting sports of her unwedded years; even in her moments of warmest transport she would tear herself from her husband's arms, and jump overboard, and splash about in the waves like a north river sturgeon. There was a degree of coolness in this that might have quenched the passion of the most ardent lover—but the gentle amphibia had no other object in it than to delight her husband by a display of those graces which had first caught his eye and won his heart. She would dive down among the coral reefs, and bring back precious gifts to her bosom's lord, and more than once she gathered from the ocean a store of the richest and rarest pearl oysters. But Kingatara, like Sam Patch, took one leap too much. In her last jump, she jumped the life to come. A keen eyed and ravenous fellow of a shark. who had long feasted on her beauties in imagination, watched for, and obtained an opportunity of feasting on them in reality. The South Sea wife had launched into her lov'd element, intending to cut only a few watery capers, when she was herself cut short by the ravenous maw of this flesh-loving fish of prey. With one mighty crunch he bit her in two pieces, and swallowed half of her; another mouthful finished his meal, and he quietly sunk to the lowest deep of his element, to take a nap and digest his dinner—and that was the last of the beautiful and accomplished Kingatara. Shakspeare himself could not imagine a greater "sea change" than she has undergone. Since this melancholy occurrence, there has not been one regular swimming party in all the South Sea Islands. The maidens of Tahiti were wont to amuse themselves with little picnics among the breakers, at which their lovers assisted, and these innocent recreations were encouraged by prudent mothers, for it is an old saying in these parts that a well contested swimming match is pretty sure to be followed by a match of another kind. But at present the whole business of floundering in the salt water has become decidedly unfashionable.—The ladies no more exhibit their fair proportions among the waves, or play hide and seek with the young gentlemen in the deep waters. The most graceful flip-flapper of all Tahiti has been taken from them: the pride of the island has departed, and no young woman who belongs or aspires to good society will now-a-days indulge in the unfashionable luxury of swimming.'