The fish in the lagoon and sea—Giant clams and fish that poison—Hunting
the devilfish—Catching bonito—Snarling turtles—Trepang and sea
cucumbers—The mammoth manta.
THE schooner _Marara_ unloaded her cargo of supplies after several days
of riding on and off the lee of the island, and went on her voyage to
other atolls. McHenry and Kopcke joined interests for the nonce, and
tried to draw me into the net they said they were spreading for the
natives. I was convinced that I was as edible fish for them as the
Paumotuans, and, besides, I was determined to avail myself of the
leisure of the wise Nohea before the _rahui_, to learn all about the
fish in the lagoon and sea. An ignorant amateur of the life of the
ocean, I was devoured with curiosity to peer into it under his guidance,
and I was resolute to spend my days in such sport instead of in sleep
after roistering of nights with the traders.
“Nohea,” I said, “will you show me what the Creator has put in the
water? In my country I know the fish, but not here. Soon you will go to
the _rahui_, but we have a few weeks yet, and you are skilled in these
matters.”
The diver replied, “_E_, I will show you”; and he kept his word, with a
prideful exactitude. Days and nights I returned dog-weary, from the sea
and the lagoon, but never once threw myself on my mat and counted my
pains for naught, as scores of times I had on the brooks, bays, and
oceans of America. With our variety of edibles in islands and continents
where there are real soil and domestic animals of many kinds, we can
hardly appreciate the desperate necessity of the Paumotuans to comb the
waters of their bare atolls for food.
The pig, the only domestic mammifer before the whites came a century
ago, ate only cocoanuts, and, like fowls, was generally small and thin,
as well as too expensive for other meals than feasts. Few were the birds
in these white islands. In many only the sandpiper, the frigate, the
curlew, and the tern were found, but in uninhabited atolls others
abounded. I saw many pigeons, black with rusty spots which lived in the
_tohonu_ tree and ate its seeds and also those of the _nono_. Green
pigeons or doves, called _oo_, were sometimes seen. None of these
constituted any part of the diet.
Except for cocoanuts, the atoll yielded few growths of value. The most
characteristic was a small tree or bush with white flowers, the
_mikimiki_, the wood of which was very dense. It grew even in the most
solid coral blocks, and was formerly much used for the great
shark-hooks, for harpoons, and handles for their shovels of shells. The
_huhu_, another little tree, with yellow blossoms and the general
appearance of the _mikimiki_, was useless for timber, but the _kahia_,
with deliciously-perfumed flowers, made an excellent fuel. The _geogeo_
furnished boat-knees, the _tou_ was fit for canoes, and the _pandanus_,
the screw-pine, filled almost as many needs as the cocoanut-palm. Its
fruit was eaten by poor islanders, its wood and leaves formed their
houses, its leaves also made mats and hats and the sails of the _pahi_,
the sailing canoes, and, as throughout Polynesia, the wrappers of
cigarettes. All the clothing was formerly made of this prince of trees
for native wants. The _tamanu_ was scarce, and _purau_; but there were
some herbaceous plants, the _cassytha filiformis_, which climbed on the
_huhu_ and the _mikimiki_; a little _lepturus repens_; a heliotrope; a
cruciferous plant, and a purslane that afforded a poor salad, and was
also boiled. I also saw the _nono_, not here the arrow of Cupid as in
Tahiti, but a sour fruit, eaten only when hunger compelled.
In Takaroa, particularly favored by absence of cyclones, by safety of
harbor, breadth and depth of pass into the lagoon, and plentitude of
cocoa-palms and pearl-shell, herculean efforts had been made by bringing
whole schooner cargoes of soil to grow some of the food plants and trees
of Tahiti, but all such growths were a trivial item in the daily demand
for sustenance.
When Polynesians in their legends spoke of a rich island, they described
it as abounding in fish, as the Jews, pastoral tribes, sang of milk and
honey, the red Indian of happy hunting-grounds, and Christians of
streets of gold, and harps and hymns.
Shell-fish, mollusks and crustaceans, played as important a part in
their aliment as ordinary fish, and _ia_ or _ika_ meant both. In some
islands the people were forced to subsist largely on _taclobo_, the
furbelowed clam or giant _tridacna_ called _pahua_ here and _benitier_
in Europe, where the shells were used for holy water fonts. The flesh of
the _pahua_ was sold in the Papeete market but was not a delicacy. The
clam itself weighed up to fifty pounds or more, and the pair of shells
from a dozen to eight hundred pounds according to the age of the living
clams. The shells were so hard that they furnished the blades of the
shovels with which the native had anciently dug wells to hold the
brackish water.
“The _pahua_ is also a devil,” said Nohea. “In the lagoon he lies with
his shells open to catch his prey. Many a shark has torn off his tail in
trying to get free when the _pahua_ has closed on him, or has died in
the trap. When a young man, I put my hand into a shell not bigger than
your face, and it shut upon it. I was feeling for pearl-shell under
fifty feet of water. I could not reach the threads that anchor the clam
to the rock because it was in a crevice. If I could have cut them I
could have freed myself, but I was able after a minute to force my knife
beside my hand and stab the _pahua_ so that it let me go. Paumotuans
have often lost their lives in the _pahua’s_ shells, and one cut off his
fingers and left them to the fish. I always drive my knife into him, and
then cut the cord that ties him to the rock. They are hard to lift,—the
big _pahua_,—and often we must leave them. Sometimes they have pearls in
them that are very fine—not like oyster-pearls, but just like the white
inside of the clam-shell itself, which is like the marble of the
tombstone of Mapuhi’s wife.”
[Illustration:
Photo by Brown Bros.
Spearing fish
]
[Illustration:
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
A canoe on the lagoon
]
[Illustration:
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Ready for the fishing
]
Nohea rubbed me every day with the oil from the robber-crab’s tail, and
my wounds healed quickly, although the scars remained. He said that
Paumotuans died of coral poisoning, but usually recovered, unless their
blood was tainted by _tona_, the syphilis brought originally by the
white, and which the Paumotuan cured with native remedies. He pointed to
a species of corals which stung one if touched. The stony branches or
plates when fresh from the water had a harsh feeling and a bad smell,
but were not slimy. They pricked me when pressed against my arm, and the
sting lasted from a few minutes to half an hour, with different
specimens. The sensation was as painful as from nettles or the
_Physalia_, the Portuguese man-of-war. One coral, sulphurous or dark in
color, Nohea warned me not to touch, saying it would cause my hand and
arm to swell for days. There was a jellyfish, he said, the _keakea_,
that in certain months, January, February, and March, almost filled the
lagoon, and they stung so fiercely, especially about the eyes, that
diving ceased as soon as they appeared.
There were fish, too, that were deadly to eat, some at one time and some
at another, as fish venomous in one lagoon were innocuous in another.
Some isles were blessed by having no poisonous fish, as Hao, Amanu,
Negonego, Marokau, Hikueru, Vahitahi, Fakahina, and Pukapuka. Marutea of
the north, Raraka, Kauehi, Katiu, Makemo, Takume, Moruroa, and Marutea
of the south, were cursed by the opposite condition. In Rangira only the
_haamea_ of the pass was hurtful. The _meko_ was the most feared fish at
Marutea of the south, occasioning a terrible dysentery with cramps,
which ended in vertigo and extreme weakness. Mullets, also, were often
harmful in certain lagoons, and the _muraena_ killed.
What made these fish poisonous? Science guessed that the larvæ of the
coral animals were the cause. These fish ate the coral, and it was
noticed that in December, January, and February, at the time the corals
expelled their larvæ,—were in blossom, as the expression went,—the
toxicity of the fish was highest. Other fish were made poisonous by
eating the sea-centipede, curious creatures which looked like yards of
black string and wound themselves around the corals. They had thousands
of minute legs.
While all land-crabs were safe to eat, certain sea-crabs were injurious,
one in particular, a stark-white species, which was death to swallow,
and which despairing Paumotuans had bolted as a suicide potion. Even
certain starfish must be avoided, one, a lovely cone-shaped kind, being
deadly, their barbs injecting a virulent poison which speedily dilated
the arm and then the body hugely, and made the heart stop beating. To
the native such illnesses were awesome mysteries, yet he had learned
ages ago to distinguish the baneful fishes by the empire path of pain
and death which all races have trod toward safety from the enemies of
mankind. His more open foes, whom he hunted for food, the native met
fearlessly, and fought with adroitness.
The devilfish, or octopus, frequented mostly the outside of the reef and
preyed on mollusks and crustaceans, being naturally timid and
inoffensive, though capable of affrighting attack when molested. They
commonly took up their abode in some cavern or crevice, and lay safely
ensconced in the shadow, simulating the color of their surroundings so
artfully that their victims hardly ever saw them until grasped by the
suckers of the many long, muscular arms.
“In Samoa,” said Nohea, when we went to a certain spot to seek out the
devilfish, “is the _Fale o le Fe’e_, the House of the Octopus. It is
very large, with black basalt walls, and has a pillar in the center. It
was built to guard against the tribe of giants who once traded with
Samoa.”
The devilfish was, as I said, at most times shy and harmless but, when
roused, the most dangerous of antagonists. We met one at close quarters
the third time we paddled to the caves or recesses in the coral rock. It
was near sunset, and there were already black shadows about the ledge,
which at low tide disclosed the niches wrought in it by the action of
the water. In one of these I saw two fiery eyes with white rims as big
as dinner-plates, and Nohea said to beware, that they belonged to an
enormous _fe’e_. Nohea had a mighty spear or grain with three points of
solid iron, and a heavy, long shaft, on a rope attached to the prow of
the canoe. Better still I carried a rifle with bullets that would kill a
wild bull. Nohea steered the canoe up to the nook and thrust out a long,
light stick toward the glittering eyes. The cuttlefish threw out one
tentacle upon it. Nohea teased him as one might tease a cat, and another
tentacle took hold. Again the stick was manipulated, and finally, after
half an hour, ten arms were fastened tightly upon the rod. Nohea gently
drew the rod toward him, and the _fe’e_ emerged from his den, so that,
though the light was growing dim, I was able for a minute to survey him
in the fullest detail, as I sat with my rifle to my shoulder.
His body, bigger than a barrel, was like a dirty gray bag, with one end
three-cornered for use as a steering-fin, or rudder. His mouth was like
an opening in a sack, with a thick, circular lip and a great parrot-like
beak, which was almost hidden at the moment. His tentacles were in a
circle around the mouth, and were large at the trunk and tapering to the
ends. Two main arms with which he supported himself against the rock
were twice as long as the others, and differently formed. The fiery eyes
were serpent-like, and set back of the arms.
“If he were not so strong I would jump on him now that I have his
tentacles engaged, and would bite the back of his neck till he died,”
said Nohea, with anger. “I have slain many that way. But this one would
destroy me in a moment. Once we hooked one by mistake when we were
fishing for barracuda from a canoe. My companion hauled him to the side
of the canoe, when the octopus threw his arms about him and pulled him
into the sea. I sprang after him, and put my thumbs in the eyes of the
beast. He moaned and cried, and covered us with his black fluid; but he
let go, and fled, blinded.”
The octopus was regarding us with apparent calm. The rod he held was
twenty-five feet in length, so that our canoe was more than twenty feet
from his eyes. Nohea now agitated the rod, and the _fe’e_ retained his
grasp, but began to change from a slaty gray to red, with black
mottlings.
“He is enraged,” said Nohea, warningly. “Prepare to shoot if the
_tavero_ fails!”
He stood up in the canoe, and, resting the bamboo rod on the gunwale,
poised his spear. The devilfish felt the menace of his attitude, and his
two longest tentacles began to writhe in the air, as he measured our
distance. Then Nohea, with a step back, launched the grain, and with so
true an aim that it penetrated the eye of the grisly creature and half
unbalanced him. Instantly the air was filled with the cloud of sepia he
ejected,—a confession of defeat,—and the terrible arms with their
twisting, coiling tips were thrust at us in lightning movements. But
Nohea had seized a paddle, and parted us by thirty feet. The _fe’e_ was
pulled into the water, but was not yet dead. He struggled as if
drowning, the great arms rising and falling upon the surface, and a
direful groaning issuing with the bubbles that covered the surface. I
fired twice at his bulk seen clearly in the water, and after ten minutes
it relaxed utterly. A musky, delicious odor filled the air.
With immense difficulty we brought his abhorrent corpse partly upon the
ledge to measure it, and to cut off some of the tentacles for broiling.
Nohea said it weighed a thousand pounds, but that he had seen one that
weighed two tons, and whose arms stretched seventy feet. The two longest
limbs of our octopus were rounded from the body to within two feet of
their tips, when they flattened out like blades. Along the edges were
rows of suckers, each with a movable membrane across it. When these
suckers fastened on an object, the membrane reacted and made a vacuum
under each sucker. Nohea explained that wherever the suckers touched
one’s flesh it puckered and blistered, and two months would elapse
before it healed. He showed me scars upon his own skin. Our octopus had
two thousand and more suckers on its tentacles.
“In Japan,” I told Nohea, “I have seen the men at night sink in the sea
earthenware jars, very tall and stout, and in the morning find them
occupied each by a devilfish, who must have thought them suitable to its
condition in life.”
We had other methods of catching the _fe’e_. One was to tie many pieces
of shell on a large stick with the pointed ends up, and from our canoe
to strike the water with this. The resulting noise or vibration
attracted the octopi, who thought the bait alive, and, eager to examine,
threw themselves upon it and were killed and hoisted aboard. Nohea would
strike the canoe sometimes with his paddle in a rhythmical manner, and
draw them to hear the concert, when he would spear them.
At the rookeries of the hair seals on Puget Sound, bounty hunters lure
these destroyers of salmon nets and traps, by the wailing of a fiddle
string, the wheeze of an accordian, a hymn upon a mouth organ, or almost
any musical note. The hair seal rises to the surface to listen to the
entrancing notes, and is shot by the hunter from his boat.
The smaller devilfish Nohea eviscerated and ate, or gave to his friends.
I could not look at them as food. The sepia still contained in their
sacs he dried for bait for small-mouthed fish, and we used also the
bellies of hermit-crabs, the tentacles of squid, and the tails of
various kinds of fish. For the larger, scaled fish, Nohea preferred
hooks of _mikimiki_, which he carved from the bushes, or of turtle-shell
or whalebone, though the stores had the modern ones of steel. For
_bonito_ we used only the pearl-hook without barb, and, of course,
unbaited. The advantage of the barbless hook—that is, lacking the
backward-projecting point which makes extraction difficult—could,
perhaps, be appreciated only by seeing our way of fishing.
When we came into a school of _bonito_ pursuing flying-fish, I took the
paddle, and Nohea, with a fifteen-foot _purau_ rod, and a line as long,
trailed the _pa_, the pearly hook, on the surface, so that it skipped
and leaped as does the _marara_. When a _bonito_ took the lure, Nohea
with a dexterous jerk raised the fish out of the water, and brought it
full against his chest. He hugged it to him a second and, without
touching the hook, threw it hard into the bottom of the canoe where I
could strike it sharply over the head with the edge of my paddle. The
whole manœuver was a continuous motion on Nohea’s part. The fish seized
the hook, the rod shot up straight, the _bonito_ came quickly to his
bosom, he embraced it, and, with no barb to release, it slipped off the
bone into his powerful grip, and was hurled upon the hard wood. Thus no
time was lost, and the hook was in the water in another instant. Once or
twice when I failed in my part the _bonito_ raised itself on the end of
its tail, and shot through the air to its element. That Nohea was not
hurt by the fish when they were brought bang against his chest, can be
explained only by his dexterity, which doubtless avoided the full impact
of the heavy blow. The _bonito_ weighed from thirty to a hundred pounds.
The turtle-shell for the hooks Nohea got from the turtles which he
caught. They were a prime dish in the Paumotus, especially the great
green turtle. The very word for turtle, _honu_, meant also to be gorged,
associating the reptile itself with feasting. The thought of turtle
caused Nohea, a fairly abstemious man, to water at the mouth and to rub
his stomach in concentric circles, as if aiding in its digestion. The
_honu_ was in the days of heathenry sacred to high livers, the priests
and chiefs, and was eaten with pomp and circumstance; to make sure of
their husbanding, they were, in the careful way of the old Maoris, taboo
to women and children under pain of death. An old cannibal chief was
called the Turtle Pond because he had a record of more than a hundred
humans eaten by him. Turtles were of two hundred species, and were found
six feet long and weighing eight hundred pounds, but more ordinarily in
the Paumotus from a hundred to four hundred. After a feast the pieces of
turtle meat were put into cocoanut-shells, with the liquid fat poured
over them, and sealed with a heated leaf, for a reserve, as we put up
mince-meat.
The best season for turtles was when the Matariki, the Pleiades, rose in
the east, and the time of egg-laying arrived. Then the turtles came from
long journeys by sea, and looked for a place to deposit their eggs far
from the haunts of humans. They came two by two, like proper married
folk, and, leaving the husband on the barrier-reef, the wife, alone, dug
a hole from one to two feet in depth in the coral sand, above the
high-water mark, and in it scooped a deeper and smaller pipe, to lay
five or six score eggs, white and rough, like enlarged golf-balls. The
moon was usually full when this most important deed of the turtle’s
career was done with intense secrecy. The sand was painstakingly
replaced and smoothed, and the wife swam back to the reef and at high
tide touched flippers again with her patient spouse. The operation
occupied less than an hour.
McHenry, whom I met every day when I walked to the village, said that it
was the Southern Cross and not the Pleiades that governed the dropping
of the eggs, and that the _honu_ did not approach the beach until the
four stars forming the cross had reached a position exactly
perpendicular to the horizon.
“Those turtles are better astronomers than Lyin’ Bill,” said McHenry.
“They savvy the Southern Cross like Bill does a Doc Funk.”
The turtle returned to her eggs on the ninth night, but if she saw
evidences of enemies about, she left immediately, and waited another
novendial period and, if again scared, came back on the twenty-seventh
evening. But when that fatal night had passed she surrendered to the
inevitable. Nohea knew the habits of the _honu_ as well as she did
herself. He knew the broad tracks she made, which she tried in vain to
obliterate, and he often removed the eggs to eat raw, or freshly cooked.
Nohea could swim to the beach where the mother turtle was, and land so
quietly that she would not have notice of his coming, and so could not
escape to the lagoon or the moat; or he could swim noiselessly to the
reef, and forelay the uxorious male napping until the arrival of his
consort from her oviposition. To rush upon either male or female and
turn it over on its back was the act of a moment, if strength permitted,
but Paumotuans seldom hunted alone for turtles, the fencing them from
the water being better achieved by two or more. Even when we saw one at
sea, Nohea would spring from the canoe and fasten a hook about the neck
and front flipper which rendered the _honu_ as helpless as if a human
were bound neck and leg. Once fast, the turtle was turned, and then
pulled to the beach. Nohea could attach such a device to a turtle, and
without a canoe swim with him to the beach or to a schooner. The turtle
was put under a roof of cocoanut-leaves, until desire for his meat
brought death to him.
Nohea often picked up _rori_ to make soup. They were to me the most
repulsive offering of the South Seas, long, round, thin echinoderms,
shaped like cucumbers or giant slugs, and appalling in their
hideousness. The Malays called them trepang, the Portuguese
_bicho-do-mar_, or sea-slug, and the scientists holothurian. Slimy,
disgusting, crawling beings, they were like sausage-skins or starved
snakes six inches or six feet long, and stretchable to double that
length. One end had a set of waving tentacles by which they drew in the
sand and coral animalculæ. They crept along the bottom or swam slowly.
There was a small trade in these dried trepang, or _bêche de mer_, which
were shipped to Tahiti and thence to San Francisco, for transshipment to
China, for purchase by Chinese gourmets. The Chinese usually put them in
their gelatinous soups. I had eaten them at feasts in Canton and Chifu.
They were considered a powerful aphrodisiac, as swallows’-nests and
ginseng.
No race so eagerly sought such love philters as the Chinese. They had a
belief that certain parts and organs of animals strengthened the similar
parts or organs in humans. Our own medical men often verged on the same
theory, making elixirs, as the Chinese had for countless centuries. At a
Chinese feast where the heart of a tiger was the _pièce de résistance_,
I had been assured that a slice of it would make me brave. There may
have been something in it, for after eating I felt I was brave to have
done so.
The fishing for _rori_ was sometimes on a considerable scale. McHenry
had often taken a score of Paumotuan men and women on his schooner to
one of the unpopulated atolls. They built huts ashore for themselves,
and others for curing the trepang. They searched for them with long
grains or forks, going in calm weather to the outer edge of the reef
where they found the red rori, which ranked second in the grading by the
Chinese, but the black they had to dive for in the lagoon to great
depths. Some trepang had spicules, or prickles, on their skin, and some
were smooth, while others had teats or ambulacral feet, in rows; and
these, known to the trade as teat-fish, and to the Chinese as
_Se-ok-sum_, were _bonnes bouches_ to a Pekinese gourmand. Next in order
were the red, the black, and the lolly. These latter we found in great
quantities on the reef at low tide in shallow places. They exuded, when
stepped on, a horrid red liquid, like blood, from all the surface of
their body.
Against mankind these _rori_ had no defense when stabbed with the fork
or grain, but to touch one of the elongated _Blutwursts_ with any part
of one’s body was to rue one’s temerity. They were like skins filled
with a poisonous fluid, and this they ejected with force, so that if
contacted with a scratch or sore, or one’s eye, it set up immediate
inflammation, and caused hours of agony. Many Paumotuans had thus
suffered serious injury to their eyes. The leopard trepang, olive-green
with orange spots, disgorged sticky threads when molested, and these
clung fast to the human skin and raised painful blisters. Nature had
armed them for protection. The native never gathered the _rori_ in
baskets or sacks, but made a box to drag about on land or float on the
water, into which he put them.
The pawky Paumotuan gave no thought to the aphrodisiacal qualities of
the _rori_, as did the Chinese. The filling of his belly or his purse
was his sole idea. The trepang must be cooked as quickly as possible
after removal from the water because it quickly dissolved, like a salted
slug, into a jellied mass. If the native had no caldron in which to boil
the _rori_, he threw them on red-hot stones, covered them with leaves,
and left them to steam. In an hour they were shriveled and rid of their
poisonous power. They were slit with a sharp knife and boiled for
several hours in salt water until the outer skin was removed. Taken from
the pot, they were placed on screens made of the spinal columns of the
cocoanut-palm leaves, and underneath the screens was built a fire of
cocoanut-husks. When thoroughly dried and smoked, the trepang was put in
sacks, with great precaution against dampness. If not shipped at once
they were from time to time dried in the sun, because the presence of
any moisture prejudiced them to the palates of the Chinese epicures. In
China they sold for a high price, having the place in their _cuisine_
that rare caviar might have in ours.
Nohea and I essayed every kind of fishing afforded by the atoll. We
often went out at midnight, according to the moon, and speared swordfish
by the light of torches, and I also caught these warriors of the sea on
hook and line. We hooked sharks and many sorts of fish, and had many
strange and stirring adventures.
For rousing hatred and fear, neither the devilfish, with his frightful
tentacles and demoniacal body and eyes, nor the swordfish, which could
hurl his hundred or thousand pounds against the body or craft of the
fishermen, were peers of the _manta birostris_, the gigantic ray, called
the “winged devil of the deep passes,” which was seen only in the depths
between the atolls, and which was never fished for because worthless to
commerce or as food.
Nohea, Kopcke, and I were out one day in a cutter. This was a sailing
craft of about ten tons, which was used to pick up copra at points away
from villages and to bring it to the village or to the waiting schooner.
It was about noon. We had hooked a dozen _bonito_, and were having
luncheon when a sailor shouted to us to look at a sight near-by. We saw
a number of the largest _mantas_ any of us had ever seen. A dozen of
these mammoth rays were swimming round and round, in circles not more
than a hundred feet in diameter. They were about twenty-five feet
across, and twenty feet from head to tip of tail, and each one raised a
tip of an outer fin two feet or so above the water. The fin toward the
center of the circle was correspondingly depressed, and they appeared
like a flock of incredible bats. Every few minutes one threw itself into
the air and turned completely over, displaying a dazzlingly white belly.
Their long, whip-like tails were armed with dagger spines, double-edged
with saw-teeth. Their mouths were large enough to swallow a man, and
their teeth, as they gleamed, flat as jagged stones.
Nohea said they used these fins to wave their prey, fish and
crustaceans, into their maws. He expressed intense terror of them and
urged Kopcke to steer away from them.
The _manta_ had lifted the anchor of a vessel in harbor by pushing
against the chain, and had towed the vessel a considerable distance.
When harpooned, he had dragged as many as fourteen catamarans or boats
without apparent weariness. Well might the Paumotuan in his frail
fishing-canoe dread the sea-devil! He had known him rise beneath his
pirogue, and with a blow of his fearful fins shatter fisherman and
craft. Not vicious in pursuit of man as the shark, or lithe and able to
impale his victims as the swordfish, yet more terrible when aroused by
the impotent Paumotuan, the “winged devil of the deep passes” stood for
all that was perilous and awesome among the beasts of the ocean. When
harpooned from a schooner large enough not to be in danger from the
_manta’s_ strength, the Paumotuan or Tahitian sailor loved to vent his
hate upon the giant ray, and he had names for him then that he would not
dare to call him from a smaller boat.
------------------------------------------------------------------------