Breakfast with elders—The great Mapuhi enters—He tells of San
Francisco—Of prizefighters and Police gazettes—I reside with
Nohea—Robber crabs—The cats that warred and caught fish.
TIMES in my life a bath had been a guerdon after days of denial in
desert and at sea, but seldom so grateful as that in the stony garden of
Mapuhi under the tropical sun. My wounds were healing, but the new skin
forming in a score of places bound me like patches of plaster. Not many
houses in the Paumotus were constructed to impound rain, even for
drinking purposes. The cocoanut furnished the liquid for quenching
thirst, or the brackish rain-water retained in holes dug five or six
feet in the coral was drunk by the natives. The Europeans of any
permanent residence gathered the rain in barrels or cisterns, and
sometimes made ample reservoirs, while in a few atolls were little fresh
lakes fed by rains, the bottoms of which were formed by a coral
limestone impervious to water. Such lakes were very precious.
When I went up the steps to the house, I found the Mormon elders fully
dressed and preparing breakfast for three. A can of California peaches,
a small broiled fish, and pilot biscuits were all the meal, but the
grace was worthy of a feast. They bowed their heads, closed their eyes,
and implored God to bless their fare, to make it strengthen them for the
affairs of this world only as they conduced to His greater honor and
glory. And they put in a word for me, “Our brother who has come among us
all unannounced, but doubtless for some good purpose known to Him who
directs the sparrow’s fall, and the sphere’s movements.”
“We have to economize dreadfully,” said De Kalb, apologetically. “We are
spending our savings. Canned goods are dear. But we are saving souls
right along. There is to be a service in the temple in half an hour, and
we would like you to attend. We are going to pray for a successful
_rahui_, the diving season, and for the safety of the divers. You know
they never know when they’re going to come up dying or dead from the
bottom of the lagoon.”
As he spoke there was framed in the doorway a native whom I knew
instinctively to be the monarch of this cluster of atolls. He wore only
a dark-blue _pareu_ stamped with white flowers, but some men have an air
which makes you know at first sight that they are masters of those about
them. So was this Mapuhi, who, of all Paumotuans in a hundred years, had
become distinguished among whites. Mapuhi was a giant in stature, a man
solidly planted on spreading bare feet of which each toe was articulated
as the fingers of a master pianist’s hand. His legs were rounded
columns, the muscles hidden under the pad of flesh, his chest a great
barrel, and below it a mighty belly, the abdomen of a Japanese or
Chinese god of plenty. He was almost black from a life upon and in the
salt water.
His head was huge, a mass of grizzled hair low upon his forehead. His
eyes, very large and luminous, gentle but piercing, gave an impression
of absolute fearlessness, of breadth of mind, and of devotion to his
idea, be it ideal or indulgence. His chin was round and powerful, but
not prognathous. His mouth was well-formed, big and sensual under the
short gray mustache, and not lacking in humor or a trace of irony. His
nose was all but missing, for once when building a schooner an adz had
slipped and cut it off. His face was thus flattened, with a slight
suggestion of a fragment of a Greek gladiator’s head; but it was not so
disfigured as one might think, and preserved a mien of dignity and
reserve force, of moral grandeur and superiority which one might call
kingly were kings as of old. But it was in his eyes I read the reasons
for his rise from the ruck of his race to lordship over it, and to the
admiration of the white traders and mariners whom he bested in all their
own ways—navigation, ship-building, and even trade.
When Mapuhi saw me, he looked inquiringly at the elders, and then
smiled. I saw two rows of teeth, large as my thumb nail, and as
brilliant as the pearl-shell from which he had wrung his vast fortune.
He stood upright, straight as a mast, solid as a tree, and commanding in
every sense. More than seventy years of wrestling with the devils of the
sea and lagoon, and the outcasts of Europe and America, had failed to
bow him an inch or to take from him apparently a single attribute of his
vigorous manhood except that across his broad face ran a score of
wrinkles, which criss-crossed his forehead into diamond panes, and made
one know he had learned the secrets of man and wind and water by fearful
experience.
Thus was Mapuhi who had made the winds and currents his sport, who in
the dark of night ran the foaming passes that the white mariner shunned
even in daylight, and who had made the trees and lagoons of his isles
pay him princely toll. This was the man who alone had outwitted the
white trader who came to take much and give little.
“Good morning,” said Mapuhi, in English, of which he knew only a few
words. He gave me a probing glance, and retired, to appear in a few
minutes in black calico trousers, a pink undershirt, and a belt of red
silk. His eyes asked me if I was a trader come to compete with him. He
sat down in a great chair that vaguely resembled a throne, wrought of
bamboo, and carved, and trussed to bear the exceeding weight of the man,
for Mapuhi was over three hundred pounds. As he sat he inquired of the
elders the reason for my being there. He did it with his foot. He
twisted his toes into the most expressive interrogation, which was a
plain question to the elders. They said in Paumotuan that I was an
American, an important man, but precisely what were my affairs they did
not know. I was interested in Mormonism, in Takaroa, and in the career
of Mapuhi. Assured that I was not another Tahiti trader, Mapuhi put out
his great hands and took into them one of mine, and pressed it, as he
said in Paumotuan, “My island is yours.”
I was loath to talk my poor Paumotuan, because I wanted to get as
closely as possible to the mind of this noblest of his tribe; and so I
conversed in French, except when I appealed to the elders for more exact
meanings in Paumotuan.
“Mapuhi,” I began, “even in San Francisco sailors know your skill in
these dangerous waters.”
“Ah, San Francisco!” said Mapuhi, regretfully. “I was there. I had a
ship built there, and I sailed it to Takaroa. I lived there a week in
your great house into which one drives with horses.”
I conjured a picture of Mapuhi coming in a hack from the dock in San
Francisco to the Palace Hotel, and of the striking contrast between this
mighty man of these isles and the little men of finance and of commerce
who must have dined about him. Kalakaua, king of the Hawaiian Islands,
had lived there, and had died there. But charming as was that prince of
_bons vivants_, he was nevertheless the victim of the white man’s vices,
and as years passed, his appearance became that of an overfed,
over-ginned head porter. Even the patrons of the Palace must have had
some vision of this man Mapuhi on the deck of his schooner, his vast
chest and arms bare, his hair blown by the wind. Or, emerging from the
waters of the lagoon, arising from the plunge to the coral cave where
the lethal shark looks for prey. This was what he spoke in face and form
to me.
“I had seven nights,” said Mapuhi, “in your great house, and seven days
in your streets. The people were like the fish in the lagoon of
Pukapuka, where no man seeks them, and where they crowd each other until
they kill. I went in a room from the ground to where I slept, a room
that moved on a cord; and I rode in other rooms that moved about the
roads on iron bands in which people sat who never said a word to one
another, and who never spoke to me. As I walked in the roads they were
dark as in the cocoanut-groves, for your houses make caves of the roads,
as under the barrier-reef.”
“But, Mapuhi,” I said, “we are happy in our way.”
“You do not laugh much,” returned the chief. “Only I heard the laughter
from the houses in which you sold rum. I am a good Mormon. I do not now
drink your mad waters, but in your city only the mad waters made men
happy. I was a gentile myself many years and did not know the truth. I,
too, drank the mad waters.”
Mapuhi’s eyes sought the picture of Brigham Young which was on the wall,
but mine went to the figures of the prize-fighters, Jeffries and
Johnson. Mapuhi intercepted my glance and immediately became alert.
“Was it possible that I had ever seen _Teferite_ or _Tihonitone_?”
This question was put to Elder Overton, who hesitated to interpret. The
subject was a scandal throughout the Paumotus. I read that in the
preacher’s face, but, comprehending the import of the words, I said that
I knew _Teferite_; that he lived very near me, and that I saw him often
in his store. Once or twice I had bought goods of him. He was getting
very fat since _Tihonitone_ had whipped him, and most of his time he
hunted fish and wild animals. _Tihonitone_, the _neega_, as the
Paumotuans call Afro-Americans, I had seen more than once, I said.
“That _neega_ knocked down the white _Teferite_ and took the hundreds of
thousands of francs given the winner,” said Mapuhi, with spirit. “They
are both great men, but the _neega_ is the greatest. Next to the chiefs
of the Mormon church, they are the greatest Americans.”
“Have you never heard of Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt?” I demanded.
He did not know the man. An acquaintance in Tahiti sent him now and then
the pink paper which contained the pictures of fighting men, of fighting
dogs, and of women whose bosoms and legs were bare. America must now be
full of these fights, and of beautiful women almost naked, he said.
“Your two most famous men, _Teferite and Tihonitone_, sell rum. The
goods you bought of _Teferite_ was rum, for he keeps a rum store in Los
Angelese, and the _neega_, in Keekago.”
Each sentence tore the elders’ hearts, but Mapuhi salved their wounds.
“These men are gentiles, I know,” he concluded. “The elders have
informed me. Mormons sell no rum. But tell me, is _Tihonitone_ master of
his white wife? I have her picture. She is beautiful.”
Overton frowned.
“Mapuhi,” he said, gently, “you make too much of those ‘Police Gazette’
pictures. The godly in America never see them. They are for the
rum-drinkers, and are found only in the resorts of the wicked. Strength
is admirable, but the fighting men of our country are the Philistines
whom Jehovah chastised.”
To me, in English, the Utahan said: “That coon’s licking the white man
has cost the whole white race dear. A preacher in India told me England
could better have afforded to give Johnson five million dollars, for
what it has cost in troops. The same in Africa. The evil of
prize-fighting, was never better exemplified. Jeffries’ beating has hurt
religion seriously.”
Mapuhi and the elders left the room, and returned in a few minutes in
black broadcloth coats and high white collars, in which they sweated
woefully. We all walked to the temple. It was close beside the beach,
built of coral blocks, smeared with cement, white as the ocean foam. Its
iron roof, painted crimson, was the only spot of color on the _motu_,
except the nodding palms.
“It is like the blood of the martyrs,” exclaimed Overton, piously. “The
temple was begun over twenty years ago. Nine years it took to build it,
because the converts were few and poor, and labor scarce. Twice cyclones
leveled it. Ten years ago the Takaroans began it again, and for two
years it has been completed. I know of no more sublime monument to the
true religion than this little temple. Every block of coral is a
redeemed soul. If only the gentiles in America knew the work we were
doing!”
We entered the temple reverently, the congregation, already seated,
nearly filling it. On its rude coral floor were rough benches
accommodating five or six persons each. A pulpit of gingerbread
scrollwork, the only other furniture, was apologized for by De Kalb.
“It was the plainest we could get. It was made for the Catholics. They
like ’em fancy, like their religion.”
Elder Overton preached the sermon. De Kalb read from the Bible and the
“Book of Mormon.” The people who filled the edifice paid all attention.
Serious always in their demeanor, except when affected by alcohol, they
were positively melancholy in religion. All who could afford it wore
black, and the oldsters had long frock coats of funereal hue, and
collars like the Americans.
After the services, I broached to the elders my necessity of a
habitation. With the diving season opening in a few weeks, divers and
traders would be at Takaroa from all about, and the 140 people of the
atoll would be multiplied three or four times. Most of these divers
would crowd in the houses of the natives, and the majority of the
traders would live on their schooners. Mapuhi regretted that all his
accommodations were bespoken.
The elders took me to the house of Nohea, a small, neat cottage, at the
end of the avenue leading from the mole, an avenue all shining white
with coral sand. It reminded me of the shell roads of my native State,
Maryland, in my childhood. It was lined with the shanties and huts of
the inhabitants.
Nohea greeted me quietly. He was a dark man, six feet four inches in
height, big all over, his muscles well insulated by deep fat, and with
the placid giantism of a Yeddo wrestler. He was taciturn, reserved, and
melancholy. Most of these natives became spiritually strained when, as
commonly, late in life, they gave up the wicked pleasures of the
flesh—alcohol, tobacco, and philandering. They lost toleration for
unrighteousness, and the joy that in their unregenerate state had oozed
from their wicked pores turned to acid.
A friend and sometime partner of Mapuhi, and as devout a Mormon, Nohea
was, next to Mapuhi, the foremost figure in the archipelago. He was not
a trader, except that he sold his pearls, shell, and copra for money and
merchandise; but he had dignity, strength, and personality—not quite as
had Mapuhi, but more than any other Takaroan. Among Paumotuans few men
showed distinctive character. Nohea possessed that, and also physical
strength and skill for the diving, for the handling of boats, and for
the making of copra. When there was no white missionary at Takaroa, he
was the hierophant of the Mormon church. He conducted the services and
advised the faithful, collected the tithes, and admonished the sinners.
He did not fail in zeal for that task. Nohea painted a hell darker than
a shark’s jaws, a pit of horror, lit by black flames which burned the
non-Mormons, and a heaven on earth where baked pig was a free dish at
all hours. The Mormon heaven is nearer the Mussulman’s than the
Christian’s. Food and rills of fresh water, many beautiful and
passionate wives, song and feasting, were promised the Paumotuan. Golden
harps and streets of pearl would hardly have brought their tithes to the
church treasury.
The very day I joined him I began to see things through his eyes. I was
bathing at dusk in the clear waters of the lagoon near our home. The
severe heat of the equatorial day had passed, and the still salt lake
was as refreshing to my sun-stricken and coral-scratched body as the
spring of the oasis to the parched traveler. The night was riding fast
after the sunken sun, and driving the last gleam of color from the sky.
As I floated at ease upon the quiet surface of the pale-green lagoon,
the sounds of the murmurous twilight—the rustling of the trees and the
splash of the surf on the outer shore—were made discordant by a peculiar
scraping noise near-by. I turned lazily over on my face and raised my
head from the water.
On the coral in the deceptive half-light of the crepuscule was a
hideous, shell-backed monster, which had emerged from an unseen lair,
and moved slowly and lumberingly toward the cocoanut-trees. Its motions
and appearance, in the semi-obscurity, took on the quality of a
dream-beast, affrighting in its amazing novelty. It was like a great
paper-mâché animal in a pantomine.
I was beset by apprehension that it might advance to the lagoon and
approach me in an element in which it would be my master. I swam swiftly
to shore and called, “Nohea!”
My companion came from near our hut, where on the red-hot coral stones,
which had been made to glow by a fire of cocoanut-husks, he cooked the
fish he had caught that afternoon.
He looked at me inquiringly, and I pointed to the alarming creature now
disappearing in the palm-grove.
“_Aue!_” he cried irascibly, and sprang after the nightmare. When I
overtook him, he was standing at the foot of a lofty cocoanut-tree and
shaking his fist at the object of his pursuit, which was climbing with
unbelievable speed up the slippery gray trunk.
“_I teienei!_ It is the _kaveu_, that devil of the night who robs us of
our cocoanuts while we sleep. But wait! I made a vow to destroy the next
one I found thieving!”
Nohea went a hundred yards to where a banana plant was growing in earth
brought from Tahiti. He gathered clay and leaves, and with painstaking
effort fashioned a wreath of the mixture six inches wide and several
feet in length. I stood in wonderment, guessing that he was making a
charm to bring about the death of the despoiler of the groves.
Nohea took a length of _coir_, the rope the Paumotuans make of
cocoanut-fiber,—from the tree which feeds them, clothes them, and houses
them,—and, tying it into a girdle but little larger than the girth of
the palm, put it about his wrists. The cocoanut-tree had, at regular
intervals upon its trunk, projecting bands of its tough bark, and about
the first of these above his head Nohea slipped the rope. He pulled
himself up by it, and, clasping the tree with his legs, seized a higher
holding-place. Thus he proceeded with ease until he had reached a point
half-way of the lofty column. There he halted, and, taking from his
shoulders his matted band, he plastered it firmly around the trunk.
He then slipped to the ground. I was as puzzled as a boy who was told at
sailing that the ship was weighing its anchor, and saw no scale.
“That will do for him,” said Nohea, “as the reef shatters the canoe when
the steersman fails to find the pass.”
He returned to the fire, and soon we were absorbed in the pleasant
processes of supper. We lived simply, becoming near-to-nature folk, but
we had plenty. First, we ate _popo_, tiny fish we had snared in our
traps, and which we swallowed raw, after a soaking in the juice of
limes. With our _bonito_ steak we had broiled cocoanut-meat, and for
drink we opened the wondrous chalices of the green nuts and enjoyed the
cool wine. There was no breadfruit, for these islands of stone afforded
no nourishment to such delicate and rich plants. But we had ship’s
biscuit from the schooner, and for desert a pot of loganberry jam.
Nohea, his stomach full, sat contemplatively on his haunches. Now and
then he cocked his ear toward the cocoanut-grove, but he said nothing.
The crown of the tree in which the giant crustacean had vanished was
lost in the gloom of night. A slight breeze sprang up from the distance
toward the Land of the War Fleet, and _pandanus_ and _mikimiki_ bushes
nodded and gave forth little noises as their leaves and branches rubbed
together.
Over all was the atmosphere of mystic aloofness which the white feels so
keenly in these far-away dots—the utter difference of scene and incident
from the accustomed one of the home land. I mused about my own future in
these little known tropics—
Nohea cautiously raised himself to his feet, and, motioning me to be
silent, directed my attention to the tree up which had gone the ugly
marauder an hour before. We heard plainly a grating, incisive noise, and
in a moment a huge cocoanut fell from among the swaying leaves to the
earth.
A smothered exclamation of fury broke from the Paumotuan, but he made no
step and continued pointing at the palm. Then I heard a scratching, and
peering through the darkness with the aid of my electric torch, I saw
the colossal crab coming down the trunk. He held on to the slippery bark
by the sharp points of his walking legs, and backwardly descended with
extreme care.
Nohea watched intently as the animal neared the girdle of clay and
leaves. I noted his excitement, but still could not resolve his plan. It
flashed upon me as its success was established in an instant of action.
The robber-crab, touching the clay, moved less carefully, and suddenly,
to my astonishment, let go his hold, and with claws wildly beating the
air, whirled downward from the height of forty feet, crashing on the
rocks at the foot of the tree. In a second Nohea was upon him with a
club of purau wood. But there was no need for further punishment. The
drop had caused instant death. The immense shell was smashed and the
monster lay inert upon the coral stones.
The diver sprang in the air and clapped his hands rapidly, as might a
winning better at a prize-fight.
“The fool!” he said. “He has no _koekoe_—no bowels of wisdom. He thought
the clay was the bottom, and that he was already with the nut he had
robbed me of, and which he could open and eat. Many I have killed like
that one, but it takes time. I have had such a thief steal my _pareu_
for his house, and a bottle of kerosene for mere mischief. We will eat
the flesh of this one’s legs, and I will melt his fat against the
_rahui_ when I might have rheumatism.”
Nohea showed me a great mass of blue fat under the _kaveu’s_ tail, and
from this he boiled down a quart of the finest oil. It was not only a
specific for rheumatism but the best possible lubricant for
sewing-machines and clocks, he said. He put some of the oil in the sun,
and when thickened it made butter, though not with a milky taste.
This thievish crab seemed marked by his star—doubtless of the Cancer
constellation—to play a deceptive part in the crustacean world, for not
only had he practically abandoned the water as his element, learned to
climb trees, and to eat food utterly foreign to his natural appetite,
but he had a habit of hiding his tail when the rest of his body was in
full view. He would stick it in any convenient hole, under a log, or
even in the cocoanut-shell he had emptied. He was over-conscious and
seemingly ashamed of it, like an awkward man of his hands at a wedding.
The _kaveu’s_ descent from the hermit-crab family might explain his
tail-concealment custom, for the hermit concealed his entire body in a
borrowed shell, and so, perhaps, the robber-baron was but showing an
atavistic remnant of the disguise instinct. The whole crab tribe seemed
tainted with this fear of being merely themselves. Many of them picked
up a piece of seaweed and stuck in on their projecting curved bristles,
and let it grow as a kind of permanent bonnet. Others took pieces of
live sponge, and fastened them to hooks on their backs. One clever chap
stitched seaweed threads together to form a tube, and then crawled into
it. And one masonic crab mixed a sandy cement and plastered its back
with it until it looked like the floor of its pond.
These specious masqueraders selected colors, too, to suit their
background, and the seaweed or sponge must match the environment or be
rejected. Older and hardened backsliders invited oysters and other
mollusks and worms that live in limestone pipes to dwell on their
shells, and move about with them. I was convinced that these
low-down-in-the-scale beings knew more about their environment, and
practised “safety first” more assiduously, than did man himself. The
biggest robber-crab in the Takaroa groves could not have got a humble
hermit brother to volunteer to go to war against a crab colony, or risk
his life to glorify the crab state.
[Illustration:
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Robber-crab ascending tree at night. One of the few photographs taken
of
the marauder in action
]
In carrying a cocoanut, the robber crab held it under some of its
walking legs, and retired, raised high on the tips of its other members
a foot from the ground. Its body measured two feet long by eighteen
inches wide. It did not use its claws in ascending the tree, but clung
with the sharp points of its legs; and I saw it go up steep rocks upon
these. The remarkable strength of this mollusk was proved when one was
placed in an ordinary tin cracker-box, which it could not take hold of,
and a few hours later had twisted off the lid. Nohea said that they were
not easy to trap, and that more than once a Paumotuan, who had climbed a
tree in the night to procure nuts, to his great horror had had his hair
seized by a crab. He said that usually they bit off from six to ten nuts
upon each ascent of a palm.
[Illustration:
Photo from Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Where the _Bounty_ was beached and burned
]
“The _kaveu_ likes to eat the young turtles when they are hatched and
making their first journey to the water,” Nohea informed me. “The crab,
knowing where the eggs are buried, watches them as they mature in the
sand.”
I told Nohea of the crabs I had seen in Japanese waters, some stretching
seven or eight feet, and another which bore a human face upon its back.
To see one of the latter crawling upon the sand was to see what
apparently was a human mask moving across the beach. The Japanese said
that these crabs were never known until after a fleet of pirates had
been destroyed, and the leading villains beheaded upon the sea-shore.
Against the rat, which was perhaps a worse enemy of the beneficent
cocoanut than the crab, my friend Nohea had no safeguard. He could not
afford to encircle his trees with bands of tin, as did corporate owners
of plantations in Tahiti, but he told me, with great appreciation, the
story of Willi, the clever American dentist, and his atoll of Tetiaroa,
near Tahiti. Once it was the resort of the kings and aristocracy of
Tahiti, the sanatorium to which they went when jaded, or wounded in war
or sport, and to which the belles retired to whiten their complexion by
wearing off the sunburn in the shade of the banyans and cocoanuts. It
was famed in the annals of the _Arioi_, the ancient minstrels of Tahiti,
as a scene of orgiastic dances.
“The atoll of Tetiaroa,” said Nohea, “had always many cocoanut-trees.
The lagoon is as rich in fish as is Takaroa. Never had many people lived
there, for it was _tabu_, and only for the _Arii_, the nobles, and the
_Arioi_. But now it belongs to the man who takes away teeth from the
head, and who hammers gold upon those that remain.”
The master diver spun his tale vividly but slowly. Often he repeated the
same statement, for the Paumotuan speech, like that of all Polynesia, is
a picture language, and iteration and harping is the soul of it, as of
the ancient Hebrew chronicles.
Upon my mat and gazing into the expressive eyes of the diver, I recalled
what I myself had been told by the owner of Tetiaroa, and, with Nohea’s
story, pieced together the facts.
Dr. Walter Johnstone Williams, the dentist of Tahiti for twenty years,
had, as related Nohea, taken away the teeth of the South Sea Islanders
or gilded those which remained. They love those shiny, precious-metal
teeth, these children of the tropics, and would give almost anything to
gain the golden smile they admired. So when the royal family of Tahiti
fell in debt to Dr. Williams, they bartered, in exchange for fillings
and pullings, facings and bridges, and for other good and sufficient
consideration, the wondrous atoll of Tetiaroa. Upon it the shrewd and
skillful dentist found tens of thousands of cocoanut-palms which had
grown as volunteers in the generous way of tropic verdure, and he
himself planted tens of thousands more in order to increase the copra
crop. He found a plague of rats, and, being unwilling to expend the
large sum that would be needed for the metal bands which would frustrate
the rats, he longed for a Pied Piper to lead the pests into the sea. But
he bethought himself of the proverbial appetite of the domestic cat for
the rat, and, lacking a magic whistler, he advertised for cats, offering
to pay a franc for each one brought to his house by the Papeete quay. He
had copies of his advertisement struck off on the press and posted upon
the trees in and about Papeete, as was the custom.
The result was a flood, a deluge, a typhoon of cats. The Tahitian boy
was as eager as his American brother to earn a few coins to spend on
luxuries; and so the cats, much like our own in appearance except for
their tails, which were curved like a question-mark, came in bags, in
boxes, and in nets, while others were personally conducted, yowling, in
the arms of the Tahitian youth.
Dentist Williams had not expected so many, and had much trouble in
finding places for them to reside until he could remove them to
Tetiaroa.
There were cats in his office, cats on the landings, cats in every room,
and his garden was a boarding-place of felines. When more than a
thousand had been collected, he posted a notice to ward off any further
sellers, and, chartering a schooner, hastened with his live cargo to the
atoll. There was no necessity of putting down a gangway from the vessel
to the little wharf at Tetiaroa, for once she was made fast it needed
but the loosening of their bonds to cause the thousand cats to reach the
shore in one bound from the deck.
Of course, the cats set immediately about their pleasant business of
catching and eating the rodents. There were tens of thousands of them,
perhaps hundreds of thousands, because the island had been little
inhabited for many years and the rats had been multiplying unmolested.
But with a thousand South Sea Island cats to prey upon them, the easy
supply of rats was soon exhausted. Then the cats chased them up and down
the trees, in and out of caves and from every refuge, so that there came
a day when the last rat was in the maw of a cat.
Meanwhile, with such rich meat diet the cats increased mightily. When
the rats were all gone, they were confronted with the problem of
existence for uncounted thousands of cats. They might have learned to
eat cocoanuts, but they had become such confirmed meat-eaters that they
would not abandon their carnal appetites. They did what greed does the
world over—what the Russians did recently—they began to eat one another.
And they followed the example of industrialism which takes the young in
factories.
First toms and tabbies lay in wait for the children of other cats, and
soon there was not a kitten left alive, nor could the parents prevent
the devouring of their children because of the avid hunger of the
adults.
With the kittens gone, began a struggle, with the death of all as the
apparent end in view. Swifter and stronger cats slew weaker cats, and
the cats which allied themselves in bands, attacked distant strongholds
of cats. Slowly and surely went on this internecine warfare, with the
seeming certainty that, if not halted, one day the last two cats on
Tetiaroa would face each other in the final contest of prowess. Then one
lone cat might remain doomed to certain death from starvation, because
there would be no meat left.
Once on a leviathan Atlantic liner, when the usual exterminating process
of hydrocyanic gas could not be used, all food was removed, and the rats
were left to starve, with a dozen cats to hasten the end. But the rats
ate the cats, and then the leather cushions, and finally their weaker
brethren, until the last rat died of starvation.
But on Tetiaroa when there were but a few dozen of the quickest,
cleverest, and strongest cats remaining, the process suddenly stopped.
Atavism, heredity, or the stern battle for life, developed in the
survivors unusual intelligence, or they had a return of plain cat-sense.
Perhaps they held a powwow, or meowmeow, or whatever a council of cats
should be called, and decided upon the one course that would preserve
their species. In any event, they saved themselves by ending the
warfare. They reverted to the habits of their forefathers, and went
fishing. It is as natural for a cat to fish as for a dog to hunt a
rabbit. Falconer marked the ferocious jaguars of South America lying in
wait upon the shores of the river Plata to seize the fish that passed by
the roots of the trees. My goldfish ponds in California were raided by
cats many times.
“I myself,” said Nohea, “have seen the fisher-cats of Tetiaroa stretched
at length on the shores of the lagoon, awaiting their prey. I have seen
a mother cat, with her kittens stringing in a cue behind her, snaring in
silence, and with paws fierce to strike, the small fish which come in
the eddies of the shallow pools. I have seen the good parent pass a
small fish back to her child and smile under her bristling whiskers at
her cleverness in providing such fare for her little ones.”
The diver ceased speaking, and unrolled his mat. He knelt a moment and
prayed, and then he laid him down, and in a moment his deep breathing
was informing of his serene slumber.
I lay there a few minutes thinking of his story, of the robber-crabs and
the fisher-cats, and above me the vast fronds of the cocoas inclined to
and fro, while, doubtless, other industrious crabs, unwarned by their
kindred’s fate, were climbing for nuts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------