AT FAATEMU

I wish that I had space to tell more of the month I spent at

Faatemu--the story of all that happened in those days would fill a

thicker volume than this one. I was young, keenly alive, and set down

among strange and kindly people in a brand-new world. When the Tara

set sail at nightfall I felt a little lonely and forlorn, but before

another day had passed I was beginning to enjoy one of the happiest

periods of my life. No matter how far I wander, or how remote those

dreamy island days, I shall never forget the kindness of my friends,

the brown Faatemu villagers.

We had been sighted offshore and canoes were thick about the Tara when

her anchor dropped. Taura was the first man aboard--a stately,

gray-haired native, of a type not common nowadays. He was barefoot,

but his suit of drill was spotless and he wore a beautifully plaited

hat. His fat old wife Hina came behind him, her kindly face working

and her eyes full of tears; and Tetua, Marama's little sister, stood

shyly at her mother's side. Hina made straight for her son and clung

to him for a time, sobbing gently; Tetua kissed her brother bashfully;

and finally the chief, after he had shaken hands with the rest of us,

sat down beside Marama for the silent greeting of their race.

"Come ashore with me," called my uncle, as the ship's boat went over

the side; "there's some copra here and I still have room for a bit of

deck cargo. We must hurry if I'm going to get away to-night!"

The boat plied back and forth all morning, laden with bags of copra,

while Uncle Harry unlocked his store, showed me how to keep account of

the goods, and explained to Taura that I was to stop over and that the

canoe-building must be hurried as much as possible. The chief promised

to have the canoes ready in a month's time. As for divers, he believed

we could pick up all we needed on Raiatea--Paumotu men who had settled

in the Leeward group. My bag and light blanket were brought ashore and

installed in Taura's house, and toward evening my uncle bade us

good-bye and was pulled out to the schooner. It was dusk when she

stole out through the pass, before the gentle night-breeze which comes

down from the hills.

I lay awake long that night, in my bed in a corner of Taura's great

single room. The others had spread a mat on the floor and set a

turned-down lamp near by. Father, mother, and sister lay in a circle

about Marama while he recounted, in a low voice and with many gestures,

the story of his adventures in the north. I lay staring up at the

rafters under the lofty thatch, thinking of all that had happened since

Uncle Harry had steered his boat in through the California surf; of the

von Tesmars, father and son; of Iriatai, and what the future held in

store. The lamp flickered when the land breeze found its way through

the thin bamboo walls, causing the shadows above me to deepen and

retreat; Marama's rapid flow of words droned on monotonously; and at

last sleep closed my eyes.

Early next day, when Taura came to demand half a dozen axes for his

men, I did my first bit of trading. Then I closed the store, and

Marama and I went with the canoe-builders to select their trees in the

valley far up among the mountains. We followed the river up from the

bay toward Faaroa, the great central valley of the island. A dim path,

along which we walked in single file, led through the jungle, winding

about the trunks of fallen trees, across the rushing, waist-deep

stream, high along the mountain-side, at a place where the valley

became a gorge. I saw thickets of _fei_, the wild plantain, bearing

great bunches of its reddish fruit; jungle cock crowed shrilly among

the hills; and once a troop of wild pig, led by a gray old boar,

crashed off, grunting, through the undergrowth. It was strange to

think that only three generations had passed since Marama's ancestors,

fierce brown warriors armed with rude ironwood clubs and spears, had

stolen along this same path on forays against neighboring clans.

The wild hibiscus seldom grows large enough to furnish a log for a

twenty-foot canoe, and it took us the best part of the day to choose

our trees. All were close enough to be dragged to the river and

floated down to Faatemu, and while the work was going on Marama and I

went out every day with the men. First of all, the tree was felled and

the branches chopped off smoothly, flush with the trunk. Then a

twenty-foot length was measured along the straightest part of the tree

and the ends cut off, before the log was rolled and dragged to the

riverside. Finally, when our fifteen logs were ready, it took a

strenuous day's work, pushing over shallow reaches and swimming through

deep pools, to float them to the beach.

Once our logs were at Faatemu, Taura was for giving a feast and resting

for a day or two. But I urged haste, recalling my uncle's words to the

chief. Then the logs were laid out in the shade, close to the village,

and one man set to work on each, fashioning a canoe with axe and adze.

Day after day the builder chopped, while the chips flew and the form of

the canoe emerged--the curve of sheer, the rounded bilge, the sharp

lines of bow and stern. Sometimes a man stood off, squinting at his

handiwork with one eye closed--judging the symmetry of the slender

hull. When the outside was roughly chopped to shape, the log was

turned over and the builder began to hollow out the inside with his

adze. At last, when the walls of wood were of the required thickness,

the process of finishing began: a slow and laborious rubbing with hard

bits of coral, and a final smoothing with the rough skin of a

stingray's tail, tacked to a wooden block. Then a pair of narrow

planks of hibiscus were sawn out to make the raised gunwales, six

inches high and of the same thickness as the sides of the canoe. After

long scraping and repeated trials, these gunwales were made to fit so

perfectly that no crack of light appeared when they were set in place.

At intervals of about a foot, holes were drilled in the gunwales and

corresponding holes in the dugout-sides beneath. The planks were

joined at stem and stern and lashed to the canoe with cinnet--strong

cording made of the braided fibre of the coconut. Now, save for its

outrigger, the canoe was finished.

Round-bottomed and very narrow for their length, the native canoes

would capsize at once were it not for their outriggers--light slender

logs which float in the water alongside at a distance of four or five

feet, attached to the hull by a pair of transverse poles. When Captain

Cook first sailed among the islands, the natives marveled at the great

canoe which remained upright without an outrigger--more wonderful by

far, in their eyes, than the white man's cannon, or muskets, or axes of

steel. "_Aué!_" they exclaimed, in astonishment. "_E vaa ama

oré!_"--a canoe without an outrigger!

We made our outriggers of light _purau_ wood, twenty feet long, five or

six inches thick, and pointed at the forward end. The attaching poles

were of iron wood--_casuarina_ is the name of the beautiful,

pale-foliaged tree--lashed across the gunwales fore and aft, the bow

pole rigid, the rear one curved and flexible. At Taura's suggestion, I

gave orders that all the outriggers and their fittings be assembled,

and the canoes tested in the water before they were taken apart to be

loaded aboard the Tara. Thanks to the chief, they were ready some days

before the schooner came in sight, and our diving-goggles, made in the

evenings by the old men of the village, were finished and waiting at

the store.

To the native fisherman, these goggles are nearly as important as his

spear. They are not unlike the goggles used by motorists at home: a

pair of glasses, set in wooden rims which fit tightly about one's eyes,

and held in place by an elastic around the head. With such glasses,

well fitted and water-tight, one can see nearly as well in the clear

sea-water as in the air above.

I kept two pairs for Marama and myself, and we went out often, on

afternoons of leisure, to spear fish inside the reef. Paddling to a

place where the water was from five to ten feet deep, we moored our

canoe to a coral mushroom and set out, swimming for long distances or

wading as the water shoaled. Little by little I learned one of the

most difficult of native arts: to swim gently with my face under water,

holding the spear between my toes. I learned to distinguish the good

fish from the bad, the wholesome from the poisonous; to recognize the

holes where the fat black _maito_ hide; to see the octopus dart into

his cranny; to transfix my quarry with a well-aimed thrust. Sometimes

we were in the water for three hours at a stretch, but I never wearied

of admiring the strange beauty of this underwater world. The sunlight,

filtering through the clear lagoon and reflected from the bottom in

delicate tints of blue and green, revealed shoals of fish, colored like

jewels and of fantastic shapes, gliding among the branches of the coral

forest. In deeper water a gleam of vivid blue showed where the

tridacna--the giant clam--lay in his hole with jaws agape, and I

learned to swim down with a bar of steel and pry him from the rock.

Sometimes, on moonless nights, we took torches and went out spearing on

the reef. The Raiatea barrier-reef, about a mile offshore, is no more

than a low dyke of coral, half awash and breaking the landward run of

the swell. By night, when the torches flicker and flare, and mighty

combers, bursting on the outer edge, come foaming waist-deep across the

jagged rock, the reef is an eerie place, not without dangers of its

own. Under cover of darkness, strange monsters have been known to

crawl up from the depths on the seaward side--the huge decapods on

which the sperm whale feeds, and nameless creatures of which the

natives speak with whispered dread. There were tales of fishermen who

had paddled out at nightfall, never to return.... Nothing would have

tempted me to fish on the reef alone at night, though when several of

us went out together, armed with machetes and heavy spears, there was a

wild charm about the sport.

We walked abreast in a line that reached from lagoon to sea, each man

bearing in his left hand a torch of dry bamboo. At times, a cry from

the seaward man caused us to brace ourselves for the big sea he had

seen rearing in the torchlight. Then with a roar and a crash the wave

would break, sending a wall of white water across the barrier.

Sometimes a shark came thrashing across with the wave, to be speared

before he could reach the deep water of the lagoon. Sometimes a series

of shouts went up as a great silver cavally swept by us so fast that

man after man missed his thrust. When the wave receded there were

spiny crayfish to be caught in the pools, and enormous pink-spotted

crabs to be held down with a spear-shaft till one could take a safe

grip, out of reach of the menacing claws.

One day, when the sun was bright and the current in the pass was slack,

Marama showed me a pleasanter and lazier kind of fishing. He had

caught a great quantity of hermit crabs the night before, and at

daybreak I found him on the beach, picking up the pebbles used for

sinkers and tossing them into the bottom of the canoe. He had brought

a line fitted with strong hooks on wire leaders, and his water glass--a

small wooden box, open at the top and with a bottom made of a pane of

clear glass. We paddled to the passage and anchored the canoe on one

side, where she could swing out over the wall of coral, shelving almost

vertically into deep blue water. Then Marama began to crack the shells

of his crabs, smash the claws and bodies between two stones, and toss

this ground bait over the side of the canoe. I took the glass and

watched the fragments of crab-meat eddying down beside the seamed and

crannied wall. The water was so clear that every detail of the scene

was visible: the strange fish drifting along the face of the cliff; the

mouths of the caverns from which larger fish looked out; the sandy

bottom beneath us, scoured clean by the current of the pass. At first,

only a shoal of small fry gathered to gobble up the bait, but suddenly

they scattered in terror as a pair of parrot fish, bright blue and a

yard long, with horny beaks instead of mouths, moved leisurely from

their hiding-place. There was so little wind that my companion had

seen them without his glass. He baited his hook with the soft body of

a hermit crab, tied a pebble to his line with the curious hitch that

allows the sinker to be released by a jerk, and dropped hook and stone

over the side. I watched the pebble rush down toward the bottom; saw

it halt below the drifting bait; saw the line jerk and the sinker drop

off and disappear; watched the baited hook rise slowly to the level of

the parrot fish, that were beginning to feed in their deliberate way.

Now Marama's bait was eddying among the other morsels of crab, and I

almost shouted as I saw it disappear in the beak of the larger of the

big blue fish. The native boy struck sharply and began to haul in his

line, cutting the water in crisp zigzags this way and that. A final

heave brought the twenty-pound fish tumbling into the canoe, a blow of

a short club ended its struggles, and I examined it at leisure while

Marama baited his hook once more. It was the first that I had seen--a

strange and beautiful creature, covered with scales larger than a

fifty-cent piece, scales of a vivid iridescent blue with a green spot

at the base of each. A nip of its horny beak would have severed a

man's finger clean. Later that day when I ate my share of it,

steaming-hot from the oven, I understood why the parrot fish was prized

so highly.

When Taura's family assembled for a meal, all of their cooked food came

from the native oven, under the shed behind the house. Their method of

cooking seemed to me--and still seems, when I think of those dinners at

Faatemu--the finest in the world, preserving as it does all the juices

and flavor of fish or fowl or meat. The native cook's equipment

consists of a heap of waterworn pebbles, picked up along the beach, a

pile of large green leaves, and a supply of firewood. Fish and chicken

and pork are cut into pieces of convenient size and made into little

leaf-wrapped packages. Yams, sweet potatoes, plantains, and bananas

are selected for cooking and laid out beside the packages of meat.

Then a shallow hole is scraped out in the earth--perhaps a foot deep,

and two feet across--and a hot fire is built inside. When the fire is

blazing well, the pebbles are heaped on the wood and left till they are

heated almost to a glow. At this stage the hole is raked out clean,

the food put in and covered with hot pebbles, and the whole overlaid

with a thick layer of leaves and earth. An hour later the oven may be

opened, the baked vegetables peeled, and the packages of fish and meat

removed from their clean leafy wrappings.

As time went on, it seemed to me that my friend Marama possessed more

useful accomplishments than any lad of his age at home. The fishing

excursions in which I was always eager to join were in reality his

work, for we supplied more than half of the household's food. My

friend could read and write, but otherwise he had no education in our

sense of the word. He knew nothing of history, algebra, or geometry,

but his mind was a storehouse of complex fishing-lore, picked up

unconsciously since babyhood and enabling him to provide himself and

his family with food. And when you come to think of it, that is one of

the purposes of all education.

The habits of the fish in the South Pacific are regulated by the moon,

and Marama knew what kinds were to be found on any night of the native

lunar month. On nights of bright moonlight we cast a white fly for the

small rockfish which frequent patches of live coral; on dark nights we

gathered the mollusks abounding in the lagoon. During the week of the

new moon's first appearance, we went out at dawn to fish for tunny in

the pass. Sometimes Tetua, the twelve-year-old sister of Marama, took

me with her to spear prawns in the Faatemu River. Carrying torches and

armed with small barbless spears, we slipped and clambered over the wet

rocks, scanning the pools for the little fresh-water lobsters which

soon filled our pail. Sometimes I took a paddle in one of the long

narrow bonito-canoes and went with the men on trips that took us far

offshore, following the birds above the leaping schools. I grew hard

and browned by the sun, and the native language came to me surprisingly.

Once on a Saturday, when my uncle's work was done, Taura took us to the

mountains to hunt for pig. The chief's two lean dogs ranged ahead, and

far up in the Faaroa Valley they started a bristling gray boar, fierce,

old, and fleet of foot. He led us a long chase over the rough

stream-bed and through dense thickets of tree-fern and hibiscus. In

the end we heard a fierce uproar of snarls and yelps and grunting, and

knew that he had turned at bay. Taura was too old to run as we did,

and by this time the chief was a good half-mile behind. We had no

weapons, and when I saw the angry brute, foam dripping from his jaws as

he faced the dogs with his back to a great tree-trunk, I wondered what

we were to do, now that we had come up with him. But Marama did not

share my hesitation.

"Take care!" he warned me--unnecessarily, I thought. "He is a bad pig!

If he runs at you, jump into a tree!"

He took a clasp knife from the tuck of his pareu, cut a limb of

hibiscus, and peeled off a length of the tough bark--the strongest of

natural cord. Then he shouted encouragingly to the dogs, and while

their attack diverted the boar's attention, he stole quickly around the

sheltering tree-trunk. I saw his brown hands shoot out to seize the

boar's hind legs, and the next moment--grunting and struggling

ferociously--the old brute was thrown heavily upon his back. I rushed

to lend a hand and our combined strength was enough to hold him while

we tied his legs with strips of bark. Taura found us lying exhausted

beside our captive, while the dogs lay in the cool stream, with heaving

flanks and tongues lolling in the water.

That evening, when Marama had recounted the details of our hunt, his

mother told us one of her tales of heathen days--the story of how the

first pigs were given by the ancient gods to mankind. Many of her

words I understood; at times her son whispered a translation in rapid

broken English. We were lying on a wide mat, spread under the palms

close to the beach. A new moon was setting behind the point and the

evening was so calm that only the faintest of murmurs came from the

reef.

There was a time--so the story ran--many years ago, when there were no

pigs on any of these islands. In those days men ate only fish, and

sometimes, in seasons of famine, the flesh of rats. The clans of the

different valleys were constantly at war, for there was no one

government over the island--no family of Raiatean chiefs. Men lost

heart for the planting when villages were destroyed and crops burned on

every hand, and many of the people left their lands to live in hidden

caves among the hills.

In this bay of Faatemu lived a feeble old man, blind with age and

weeping, for his wife and all but one of his children had been

slaughtered in the wars. He was called Vatea, and the name of his

young son, who cared for him, was Tamatoa. They lived in a rude

thatch-shelter the boy had built. It was a time of famine; a war-party

from Tahaa had burned the village, and there were no plantations of

yams or sweet potatoes. The men of Tahaa, as was their custom, had

chopped down all the coconut palms, and Tamatoa feared to go after

plantains. By day the father and son kept to their hidden shelter, and

each night the boy came cautiously to the seaside, to catch what fish

he could. Since he dared not use a torch, that was not much; on many

occasions his patience was rewarded by no more than one small fish.

Then he would make for himself a poor dish of scraped banana-stalks,

not fit to keep the life in a man, and after preparing his single fish,

he would carry the food to where blind old Vatea awaited him. "I have

caught only two small fish," he told the old man at these times; "one

for you, and one for me. Now let us eat!" And while the hungry father

devoured his fish, the son would make a great noise of smacking his own

lips over the wretched scrapings of banana stalk.

Each day the fish were smaller and more difficult to catch, and finally

the old man was starving, though Tamatoa gave him all the real food

that he could find. As happens at such times, Vatea grew suspicious of

his son, thinking that the boy was taking advantage of his blindness to

save the best morsels for himself. One day, when the son brought a

small raw fish and his own dish of grated banana-stalk, the old man

spoke. 'Fetch me a calabash of cool water from the stream,' he said;

and when the boy was gone, he felt his way across to where his son's

food lay in a wooden bowl. Then his tears fell, and his heart was

heavy with remorse.

That night, as they lay side by side on their mats, old Vatea spoke to

his son. "Listen carefully to my words," he said, "and forget nothing

that I say. To-morrow I shall die; when I am dead, bury me by the

great rosewood tree yonder in the valley. Then, every morning, you

shall go to my grave at the hour when the sun first strikes the ground.

Watch closely; take what you find and use it wisely--it will make you a

powerful man."

Next morning old Vatea died, and his son, who was a dutiful lad, did as

the father had instructed. For two days, when the first rays of

sunlight touched his father's grave he was watching by the rosewood

tree, and on the third morning his eyes saw a strange thing. The earth

cracked and heaved, and he heard a new sound, the sound of grunting, as

a pair of pigs came up out of the dust--the first pigs that any man had

seen. Marveling greatly, Tamatoa took them home and cared for them,

and only a day or two later, peace was made among the clans, and a

bountiful run of fish entered the lagoon.

Litters of young pigs were born as time went on, and the fame of

Tamatoa went abroad among the islands--to Huahine, to Bora Bora, and

even to distant Maupiti. Then the high priest of Oro, at the Opoa

temple, was seized with a frenzy, and through his lips the chiefs

learned that Tamatoa, the favored of the gods, was to be made ruler of

the island. Thus Tamatoa became king, and the race of swine was given

to furnish food for men.

As she finished the story, Marama's mother heaved herself to her feet

and led the way to Taura's steep-roofed house. The moon had set, and

as I followed through the warm darkness, I thought drowsily of my uncle

and wondered when the Tara would return. I might have slept less

soundly if I had known that she was then within twenty miles, and that

in the morning she would anchor in Faatemu Bay.

V