CHAPTER VII1I1.
THE history of the Marquesas Islands is like a con-tinuation of that of the Society and Hawaiian groups;as their first missionaries came from Tahiti and those ofsubsequent times and of the present time are fromHawaii , and as they will probably pass again under thecare of Tahitian missionaries, since France owns theseislands together with Tahiti and the adjacent groups.
The Marquesas Islands lie in two parallel groups,thirteen in all, trending from southeast to northwest,between latitudes 8° and 11° south, and longitudes 133°and 150° west. The southern group was discoveredJuly 21, 1595, by Alvaro Mendana de Neyra , as hewas voyaging with four ships to colonize the SolomonIslands , and by him named Marquesas de Mendoca, inhonor of the viceroy of Peru . The northern group,though near by, was not discovered until nearly twohundred years later, in 1791, when they were seen byCapt. Ingraham of Boston and named Washington Isl-ands. But the term Marquesas now embraces bothgroups.
[t seems to be the rule that the further east one goes,in the Pacific, the more wild, broken and picturesqueare the mountains. The Marquesas are even more re-markable in this respect than the Society Islands , ex-