FISHING
Every Fijian is a fisherman by instinct. At ten years old, with a little
four-pronged spear, or with a bow and a four-pronged arrow, he is
scouring the pools left on the reef by the receding tide, and by the age
of eighteen his aim is unerring. He fishes for the pot, not for sport,
and seldom does he come home empty-handed. The spectacle of a big fish
swimming in the sea never fails to stir his emotion. A _sanka_ darting
across the bows of your boat will touch the most lethargic of your crew
to tense excitement; no spear being at hand he will poise and cast your
precious boat-hook at the monster, and fling himself into the sea to
recover it. Even among the tribes of hereditary professional fishermen
this emotion is never staled by use.
Wherever the sea runs up into sandy or muddy inlets there stands a
fish-fence belonging to some village in the neighbourhood. The fence is
from 100 to 200 yards long, built of reedwork supported by stout stakes
driven deep into the mud, and shaped like the segment of a circle with
its axis on the shore, and about the middle there is a bag-shaped annex
with an intricate entrance so contrived that a fish making for the sea
as the tide recedes will nose his way through it into the annex and not
be able to make his way out again. There is a scene of wild excitement
and confusion when the spearmen enter the annex at low-tide. Mad with
terror, the great fish lash the water into foam as they dart hither and
thither and leap clear of the water to escape the spear-thrusts.
[Illustration: The Chief's Turtle Fishers.]
[Pageheader: THE ROYAL FISH]
These fences do not survive tempestuous weather. The waves soon make a
breach in them, and the smallest hole renders them useless. When they
are rebuilt it is generally at a different place, and ruined fish-fences
may be seen at every inlet along the coast. But this is for another
reason; after some months of use the fish appear to know their danger
and to avoid the fence. Perhaps their range is very much restricted, and
when the fence has caught all the fish in its immediate neighbourhood
the sea at that point is depopulated for the time. At Nasova a superior
fence was built of wire-netting. Its daily catch for the first few weeks
was enormous--on some tides not less than 1500 fish of five pounds'
weight and over--but a few weeks later the catch failed quite suddenly,
and thereafter the trap was scarcely worth examining.
In the larger rivers the natives build stone fish weirs constructed to
lead into a basket trap. A rope bristling with fibre streamers is
dragged by men on both banks to frighten the fish down-stream, and the
basket is filled.
But these are mere amateur expedients compared with the methods of the
fisher tribes. These, as will be explained in another chapter, own no
planting lands, but barter their fish for vegetables, or live upon the
bounty of the great chiefs for whom they work. Their skill as seamen was
unsurpassed, and in the great confederations they manned the big
war-canoes.
In Fiji the royal fish is the turtle. Every considerable chief had
turtle fishers attached to his establishment. He would allow them to
take service with other chiefs for ten expeditions. The hiring chief
paid them by results; for blank days they received nothing, but food and
property were given to them for every catch, and a considerable present
was made to them at the end of their engagement. The turtle men use nets
of sinnet from 60 to 200 yards long and 10 feet wide, with meshes 8
inches square. The floats are of light wood 2 feet long and 5 feet
apart; the weights pebbles or large shells. A canoe takes the net into
deep water, and pays it out in a semicircle with both ends resting on
the reef. This intercepts the turtle on his way back from his
feeding-grounds in shallow water, and only a perfect knowledge of his
habits guides the fishermen to choose the proper time and place. If the
turtle takes fright at the net the men drive him forward by striking the
water with poles, and stamping of the canoe deck, and the dipping of a
float is the signal that he is entangled. The catch is announced by loud
blasts on the conch, and the canoes are received with the same noise of
triumph as when they brought back bodies for the cannibal ovens. The
women meet them with songs and dances, and sometimes they pelt the crew
with oranges and are chased from the beach with loud laughter.
[Pageheader: A CRUEL DEATH]
The hen turtle is taken when she crawls on shore to lay her eggs, and
the nest itself is robbed when eyes are sharp enough to detect the place
where she has so cunningly smoothed the sand over it. But in Kandavu the
turtle is actually taken in the sea without nets, and this is sport
indeed. Two men go out in a light canoe; the one paddles in the stern
while the other lies upon his stomach with his head projecting over the
bow, and with a heap of pebbles under him. With scarce a ripple from the
paddle the canoe is gently propelled to and fro over the bottom where
grows the green sea-grass which is the turtle's favourite pasture. The
watcher in the bow lifts his hand; the motion is checked; he takes a
pebble from the heap beneath him, and drops it gently into the water.
Down it goes pat upon the shell of the feeding turtle. Unsuspecting
danger, the beast crawls lazily out of range of such accidents and
begins to feed again. Steered by hand-signals from the watcher the canoe
swings her head over him again, and another stone taps rudely at his
shell. It may need a third or even a fourth to convince him that this
rain of solid bodies from the upper world is more than accidental, but
this unwonted exercise at meal times has bereft him of breath. Air he
must have, and he makes slantwise for the surface. Then the sport
begins; the watcher snatches off his _sulu_ and plunges down into the
depths to meet him. The art lies in seizing him by the edge of the
fore-flipper, and in turning him over before he reaches the surface. It
is a slippery handhold, but the hand that grasps the limb higher up will
be nipped between the flipper and the sharp edge of the shell, and to
seize a turtle by the hind-flipper is to be the tin can tied to the
puppy's tail. Having seized your flipper by its edge, you must turn the
beast over on his back (if he will let you) and propel him to the
surface, where your companion will help you to hoist him on board. The
turtle spends his few remaining days lying on his back, and throughout
Western Fiji he dies the horrible death which is prescribed by custom:
an incision is made at the junction of the hind limb with the under
shell, and through this the entrails are drawn out. After their removal,
and even during the process of dismemberment, he continues to live. I
have often reasoned with the natives against this cruelty, and they have
listened to me with amused surprise; "It was the way of our fathers,"
they said; "if we cut off his head he would not die any sooner, and the
meat would be spoiled." When a great feast is in preparation
turtle-fishing begins several weeks in advance, and the beasts are kept
alive in a stone or wickerwork enclosure in shallow water, which is
called a _mbi_. They can thus be kept alive for several months. There
was a tragic note in the fate of one little turtle captured when he was
no bigger than a soup plate, and presented to an European as a pet. The
owner had moored him to a stake by a string fastened to his
hind-flipper, and for several days and nights he swam bravely but
fruitlessly towards the open sea. But when, in pity for this wasted
expenditure of energy, his owner built a wickerwork _mbi_ for him, and
cut him loose, and he had explored every inch of his cage for an
opening, he abandoned the hope that had buoyed his spirits, and died in
twenty-four hours--a victim, one may suppose, of a broken heart.
The Fijian nets are so like our own that a newcomer may believe that
they have been imported. They are made of hybiscus fibre, and the mesh
and knot are identical with those of the European net-maker. Long seines
are used occasionally, but a commoner practice is to drag the _rau_--a
rope of twisted vines, bristling with cocoanut fronds, several hundred
yards long. The ends are brought together, and the fish are speared and
netted in the narrow space enclosed by the _rau_.
The women do most of their fishing with two-handed nets mounted on
sticks six feet long. A line is formed with two women to each net,
standing to their waists in the sea. As the fish make for the sea in the
ebbing tide they are scooped up and held aloft; the ends are brought
together, and a bite in the head from one of the women kills the fish
before it is slipped into the basket hanging from her shoulder. The
_kanathe_, a kind of mackerel, and the garfish spring high out of the
water in their efforts to escape, and it needs very dexterous
manipulation of the net to intercept them; sometimes women receive ugly
wounds in the face from these fish.
Eels grow to a great size in the rivers, and in the inland districts the
women mark their lairs in holes in the bank, and stupefy them with a
vegetable poison extracted from the stalk of a climbing plant, or with
tobacco. A sort of sponge made of bark-cloth is saturated with the
poison, and is quickly immersed and pushed into the mouth of the hole;
the poison distils into the surrounding water, and after a few minutes
it is safe to explore the recesses with the naked hand. The narcotic
effect of the poison is only temporary; left to itself in clear water
the fish would recover in about five minutes.
[Pageheader: _MBALOLO_ FISHING]
Strangest of all fishing is that of the _mbalolo_, which is still an
annual festival in the districts where it is taken. The _mbalolo_ is a
marine annelid about six inches long and of the thickness of vermicelli.
It is found on certain sea reefs in various parts of the Samoan, Tongan
and Fijian groups, and probably elsewhere in the Pacific. For ten months
in the year it is never seen at all. Somewhere deep in a reef cavern it
is growing to maturity, but on the night of the third quarter of the
October and the November moons it swarms in myriads to the surface and
dies, phoenix-like, in the propagation of its kind. So exact a
time-keeper is it that it gave names to two months in the native
almanac. October was called the _Little Mbalolo_, because the swarm in
that month was comparatively insignificant; the _Great Mbalolo_ was
November, and preparations for the fishing in that month were made
several weeks in advance. The fact--and it is a fact--that an annelid
should observe lunar time would not be very remarkable in itself, but
it seems that the _Mbalolo_ observes solar time as well. As Mr. Whitmee
has pointed out, the moon directs its choice of a day, and it follows
that the creature cannot maintain regular intervals of either twelve or
thirteen lunations without changing the calendar month of its
reappearance. For two years it rises after a lapse of twelve lunations,
and then it allows thirteen to pass, but since even this arrangement
will gradually sunder solar and lunar time it must intercalate one
lunation every twenty-eight years in order to keep to its dates. It has
now been under the observation of Europeans for more than sixty years,
and it has not once disappointed the natives who are on the watch for
it. What are the immediate impulses of tide or of season that impel it
to rise on its appointed day no one has attempted yet to show.
Consider for a moment how many centuries must have passed before the
desultory native mind became impressed with its regularity. Even on the
night of the _Great Mbalolo_ it is not a conspicuous object on the sea.
Mere chance must have brought the fisherman into a _mbalolo_ shoal;
years must have passed before a second chance again revealed its habits;
decades before the unmethodical mind of natural man had realized its
annual recurrence and had noted the day and the hour.
It is only at certain points in the sea reef fringing outlying islands
that there are _mbalolo_ holes. The canoes congregate there before
midnight. The behaviour of the fish is the first signal; they are there
in hundreds, dashing hither and thither in a criss-cross of
phosphorescence. Towards morning they lie, stupid from surfeit, flapping
their fins helplessly on the surface, and are speared in great numbers.
It is an orgie of rapacity and greed. _Salala_ gorge themselves on
_mbalolo_; _sanka_ devour the _salala_; rock-cod swallow the _sanka_; a
few sharks fill their bellies with rock-cod; and man, as usual, preys
upon all alike.
As the night advances the surface of the sea is oily and viscid with the
interlaced bodies of millions of _mbalolo_ that feel slimy to the touch
as one stirs the water. There are breaks in the mass, and natives have
assured me that through these they have seen an oscillating stalk,
about the thickness of a man's thigh, coiling up from the depths--a
fountain of worms spouting from some chasm in the reef. The fishermen
scoop up the worms with cocoanut baskets and empty them into the canoe
until the hold is full. The masses of worms are boiled, cut into slabs,
and sent, like wedding-cake, all over the country, packed in banana
leaves. To the European taste these dark-green masses, though
unappetizing to look upon, are not unpalatable. They taste like caviare.
Mr. Whitmee, who made a scientific examination of the _mbalolo_ in
Samoa, took a glass jar with him to the fishing, and watched the
behaviour of the worm in captivity. His catch included both brown and
green worms, the brown being the males and the green the females. They
varied in length, and as they swam incessantly round the jar with a
spiral motion he noticed that the shorter ones of six inches long had
two screw turns and the longer at the most three. Fished up by the
finger and thumb they broke spontaneously into short lengths at their
jointings.
[Illustration: Slaughtering the Turtle.]
[Pageheader: HOW THE EGGS ARE FERTILIZED]
At eight o'clock the _mbalolo_ have disappeared. If they break up
earlier the natives believe that there will be a hurricane between
January and March. As the sun gains power the _mbalolo_ may be clearly
seen in dense patches with individual worms bridging the clear water
between. They are now more active than in the night, the closer masses
even churning the surface of the water. A little before eight they begin
to disintegrate and break up; the sea becomes turbid and milky, and when
it clears they are gone. Mr. Whitmee's captives in the glass jar behaved
like their fellows in the sea. After swimming more rapidly for a few
moments they gave a convulsive wriggle and broke into half-a-dozen
pieces each, which wriggled about near the surface, squirting out their
contents. The vase looked as if a teaspoonful of milk had been emptied
into it, and the little transparent envelopes of the fluid sank empty to
the bottom, just as the green worms discharging their cargo of eggs
began also to settle down. After a few minutes' immersion in the
fertilizing fluid the eggs themselves sank gently to the bottom, where
they lay among the husks that had given them birth and being. Under
the magnifying glass a faint whitish spot was detected on each of the
tiny green eggs. Thus by a voluntary act of self-immolation the worms
had handed on their lives to a new generation.