Fishing in Hanavave; a deep-sea battle with a shark; Red Chicken
shows how to tie ropes to shark's tails; night-fishing for dolphins,
and the monster sword-fish that overturned the canoe; the native
doctor dresses Red Chicken's wounds and discourses on medicine.
Grelet returned to Oomoa in the whale-boat, but I remained in
Hanavave for the fishing. My presence had stimulated the waning
interest of the few remaining Marquesans, and the handful of young
men and women went with me often to the sea outside the Bay of
Virgins, where we lay in the blazing sunshine having great sport
with spear or hook and line.
We speared a dozen kinds of fish, specially the cuttlefish and
sunfish, the latter more for fun and practice than food. They are
huge masses, these pig-like, tailless clowns among the graceful
families of the ocean, with their small mouths and clumsy-looking
bodies, but they made a fine target at which to launch harpoon or
spear from the dancing bow of a canoe. Keeping one's balance is the
finest art of the Marquesan fisherman, and he will stand firm while
the boat rises and falls, rolls and pitches, his body swaying and
balancing with the nice adjustment that is second nature to him. It
is an art that should be learned in childhood. Many were the
splashes into the salt sea that fell to my lot as I practised it,
one moment standing alert with poised spear in the sunlight, the
next overwhelmed with the green water, and striking out on the
surface again amid the joyous, unridiculing laughter of my merry
companions.
Wearying of the spear, we trolled for swordfish with hook and line,
or used the baitless hook to entice the sportful albicore, or dolphin,
whose curving black bodies splashed the sea about us. A piece of
mother-of-pearl about six inches long and three-quarters of an inch
wide was the lure for him. Carefully cut and polished to resemble
the body of a fish, there was attached to it on the concave side a
barb of shell or bone about an inch or an inch and a half in length,
fastened by _faufee_ fiber, with a few hog's bristles inserted. The
line was drove through the hole where the barb was fastened and,
being braided along the inner side of the pearl shank, was tied
again at the top, forming a chord to the arch. Thus when the
beguiled dolphin took the hook and strained the line, he secured
himself more firmly on the barb.
This is the best fish-hook, as it is perhaps the oldest, ever
invented, and I have found it in many parts of the South Seas, but
never more artfully made than here on Hanavave. It needs no bait,
and is a fascinating sight for the big fish, who hardly ever
discover the fraud until too late.
The line was attached to a bamboo cane about fifteen feet long, and
standing in the stern of the canoe, I handled this rod, allowing the
hook to touch the water, but not to sink. Behind me my companions,
in their red and yellow _pareus_, pushed the boat through the water
with gentle strokes of their oars. When I saw a fish approaching,
they became active, the canoe raced across the sparkling sea, and
the hook, as it skimmed along the surface, looked for all the world
like a flying fish, the bristles simulating the tail. Soon the
hastening dolphin fell upon it, and then became the tug-of-war,
bamboo pole straining and bending, the line now taut, now relaxing,
as the fish lunged, and the paddlers watching with cries of
excitement until he was hauled over the side, wet and flopping, a
feast for half a dozen.
One never-to-be-forgotten afternoon we ran unexpectedly upon a whole
school of dolphins a few miles outside the bay, and before the sun
sank I had brought from the sea twenty-six large fish. Some of these
were magnificent food-fish, weighing 150 to 200 pounds. We had to
send for two canoes to help bring in this miraculous draught, and
all the population of the valley rejoiced in the supply of fresh and
appetizing food.
The Marquesan methods of fishing are not so varied to-day as when
their valleys were filled with a happy people delighting in all
forms of exercise and prowess and needing the fish to supplement a
scanty diet. For many weeks before I came, they said, no man had gone
fishing. There were so few natives that the trees supplied them all
with enough to eat, and the melancholy Marquesan preferred to sit
and meditate upon his _paepae_ rather than to fish, except when
appetite demanded it. There is a Polynesian word that means
"hungry for fish," and to-day it is only when this word rises to
their tongues or thoughts that they go eagerly to the sea or to the
tooth-like base of the cliffs.
Often we took large quantities of fish among these caves and rocks
by capturing them in bags, using a wooden fan as a weapon. The sport
called for a cool head, marvelous lungs, and skill. It was extremely
dangerous, as the sharks were numerous where fish were plentiful,
and the angler must needs be under the water, in the shark's own
domain.
[Illustration: Pascual, the giant Paumotan pilot and his friends]
[Illustration: A pearl diver's sweetheart]
The best hand and head for this sport in all Hanavave was a girl,
Kikaaki, a name which means Miss Impossibility. She was not handsome,
save with the beauty of youth and abounding health, but her wide
mouth and bright eyes were intelligent and laughter-loving.
Starting early in the morning, we would go to the edge of the bay,
where the coral rises from the ocean floor in fantastic shapes and
builds strange grottoes and cells at the feet of the basalt rocks.
While I held the canoe, Miss Impossibility would remove her shapeless
calico wrapper, and attired only in scarlet _pareu_, her hair piled
high on her head and tied with the white filet of the cocoanut-palm,
she would go overboard in one curving dive, a dozen feet or more
beneath the sea.
When the water was quiet and shadowed by the cliffs, I could see her
through its green translucence, swimming to the coral lairs of the
fish that gleamed in the reflected, penetrating sunlight. Walking on
the sandy bottom, a hand net of straw in one hand, and a stick
shaped like a fan in the other, she would cover a crevice with the
net and with the fan urge the fish into it.
Foolish as was their conduct, the fish appeared to be deceived by
the lure, or made helpless by fear, for they streamed into the
receptacle as Miss Impossibility beat the water or the coral. She
would have seemed to me well named had I never seen her at the sport.
She would usually stay beneath the water a couple of minutes, rising
with her catch to rest for a moment or two with her hand on the edge
of the boat, breathing deeply, before she went down again. Losing
sight of her among the under-water caves one day, I waited for what
seemed an eternity. I cannot say how long she was gone, for as the
time lengthened seconds became minutes and hours, while I was torn
between diving after her and remaining ready for emergency in the
boat. When at last she came to the surface, she was nearly dead with
exhaustion, and I had to lift her into the canoe. She said her hair
had been caught in the branching coral, and that she had been barely
able to wrench it free before her strength was gone.
I went down with her several times, but could not master the art of
entrapping the fish, and was overcome with fear when I had entered
one of the dark caves and heard a terrible splashing nearby, as if a
shark had struck the coral in attempting to enter my hazardous refuge.
Even Miss Impossibility had not the courage to face a shark; yet
every time she dived she risked meeting one. Red Chicken had killed
one at this very spot a few weeks earlier. The danger even to a man
armed with a knife was that the shark would obstruct from a cave, or
come upon him suddenly from behind.
Often we had with us in the fishing a Paumotan, Pascual, the pilot
of the ship _Zelee_, who was in Hanavave visiting a relative. He was
the very highest physical and mental type of the Paumotan, a
honey-comb of good-nature, a well of laughter, and a seaman beyond
compare. To be a pilot in the Isles of the Labyrinth demands many
strong qualities, but to be the pilot of the only warship in this
sea was the very summit of pilotry. He had an accurate knowledge of
forty harbors and anchorages, and spoke English fluently, French,
Paumotan, Tahitian, Marquesan, and other Polynesian tongues. From
boyhood until he took up pilotage he was a diver in the lagoons for
shell and in harbors for the repair of ships.
"I have killed many sharks," he said, "and have all but fed them
more than once. I had gone one morning a hundred feet. The water is
always colder below the surface, and I shivered as I pulled at a
pair of big shells under a ledge. It was dark in the cavern, and I
was both busy and cold, so that as I stooped I did not see a shark
that came from behind, until he plumped into my spine.
"I turned as he made his reverse to bite me, and passed under him,
out to better light. I knew I had but a second or two to fight. I
seized his tail quickly, and as he swept around to free himself I
had time to draw the knife from my _pareu_ and stab him. He passed
over me again, and this time his teeth entered my shoulder, here--"
He opened his shirt and showed me a long, livid scar, serrated, the
hall-mark of a fighter of _mako_.
"But by fortune--you may be sure I called on God--I got my knife
home again, and sprang up for the air, feeling him in the water
behind me. Twice I drove the blade into him on the way, for he would
not let me go. My friend in the canoe, who saw the struggle, jumped
down to my aid, and being fresh from the air, he cut that devil to
pieces. I was not too strong when I reached the outrigger and hung
my weight upon it. We ate the liver of that _mako_, and damned him
as we ate. I had fought him from the ledge upward at least eighty
feet of the hundred."
"_Aue!_" said Red Chicken, hearing me exclaim at the tale. "You have
never seen a man fight the _mako_? _Epo!_ To-morrow we shall show you."
On the following day when the sun was shining brightly, several of
us went in a canoe to a place beneath the cliffs haunted by the
sharks, and there prepared to snare one. A rope of hibiscus was made
fast to a jagged crag, and a noose at the other end was held by Red
Chicken, who stood on the edge of a great boulder eagerly watching
while others strewed pig's entrails in the water to entice a victim
from the dark caves.
At length a long gray shape slid from the shadows and wavered below
our feet. Instantly Red Chicken slipped from the rock, slid
noiselessly beneath the water, and slipped the noose over the
shark's tail before it knew that he was nearby. The others, whose
hands were on the rope, tightened it on the instant, and with a yell
of triumph hauled the lashing, fighting demon upon the rocks, where
he struggled gasping until he died.
There was still another way of catching sharks, Red Chicken said,
and being now excited with the sport and eager to show his skill, he
insisted upon displaying it for my benefit, though I, who find small
pleasure in vicarious danger, would have dissuaded him. For this
exploit we must row to the coral caves, where the man-eating fish
stay often lying lazily in the grottoes, only their heads protruding
into the sun-lit water.
Here we maneuvered until the long, evil-looking snout was seen; then
Red Chicken went quietly over the side of the canoe, descended
beside the shark and tapped him sharply on the head. The fish turned
swiftly to see what teased him, and in the same split-second of time,
over his fluke went the noose, and Red Chicken was up and away,
while his companions on a nearby cliff pulled in the rope and killed
the shark with spears in shallow water. Red Chicken said that he had
learned this art from a Samoan, whose people were cleverer killers of
sharks than the Marquesans. It could be done only when the shark was
full-fed, satisfied, and lazy.
I had seen the impossible, but I was to hear a thing positively
incredible. While Red Chicken sat breathing deeply in the canoe,
filled with pride at my praises, and the others were contriving
means of carrying home the shark meat, I observed a number of fish
swimming around and through the coral caves, and jumped to the
conclusion that from their presence Red Chicken had deduced the
well-filled stomachs and thoroughly satisfied appetite of the shark.
Red Chicken replied, however, that they were a fish never eaten by
sharks, and offered an explanation to which I listened politely, but
with absolute unbelief. Imagine with what surprise I found Red
Chicken's tale repeated in a book that I read some time later when I
had returned to libraries.
There is a fish, the Diodon antennatus, that gets the better of the
shark in a curious manner. He can blow himself up by taking in air
and water, until he becomes a bloated wretch instead of the fairly
decent thing he is in his normal moments. He can bite, he can make a
noise with his jaws, and can eject water from his mouth to some
distance. Besides all this, he erects papillae on his skin like
thorns, and secretes in the skin of his belly a carmine fluid that
makes a permanent stain. Despite all these defences, if the shark is
fool enough to heed no warning and to eat Diodon, the latter puffs
himself up and eats his way clean through the shark to liberty,
leaving the shark riddled and leaky, and, indeed, dead.
Should this still be doubted, my new authority is Charles Darwin.
After his display of skill and daring--and, as I thought, vivid
imagination--Red Chicken became my special friend and guide, and on
one occasion it was our being together, perhaps, saved his life, and
afforded me one of the most thrilling moments of my own.
He and I had gone in a canoe after nightfall to spear fish outside
the Bay of Virgins. Night fishing has its attractions in these
tropics, if only for the freedom from severe heat, the glory of the
moonlight or starlight, and the waking dreams that come to one upon
the sea, when the canoe rests tranquil, the torch blazes, and the
fish swim to meet the harpoon. The night was moonless, but the sea
was covered with phosphorescence, sometimes a glittering expanse of
light, and again black as velvet except where our canoe moved gently
through a soft and glamorous surface of sparkling jewels. A night
for a lover, a lady, and a lute.
Our torch of cocoanut-husks and reeds, seven feet high, was fixed at
the prow, so that it could be lifted up when needed to attract the
fish or better to light the canoe. Red Chicken, in a scarlet _pareu_
fastened tightly about his loins, stood at the prow when we had
reached his favorite spot off a point of land, while I, with a paddle,
noiselessly kept the canoe as stationary as possible.
Light is a lure for many creatures of land and sea and sky. The moth
and the bat whirl about a flame; the sea-bird dashes its body
against the bright glass of the lonely tower; wild deer come to see
what has disturbed the dark of the forest, and fish of different
kinds leap at a torch. Red Chicken put a match to ours when we were
all in readiness. The brilliant gleam cleft the darkness and sent
across the blackness of the water a beam that was a challenge to the
curiosity of the dozing fish. They hastened toward us, and Red
Chicken made meat of those who came within the radius of his harpoon,
so that within an hour or two our canoe was heaped with half a dozen
kinds.
Far off in the path of the flambeau rays I saw the swordfish leaping
as they pursued small fish or gamboled for sheer joy in the luminous
air. They seemed to be in pairs. I watched them lazily, with
academic interest in their movements, until suddenly one rose a
hundred feet away, and in his idle caper in the air I saw a bulk so
immense and a sword of such amazing size that the thought of danger
struck me dumb.
He was twenty-five feet in length, and had a dorsal fin that stood
up like the sail of a small boat. But even these dimensions cannot
convey the feeling of alarm his presence gave me. His next leap
brought him within forty feet of us. I recalled a score of accidents
I had seen, read, and heard of; fishermen stabbed, boats rent,
steel-clad ships pierced through and through.
Red Chicken held the torch to observe him better, and shouted:
"_Apau!_ Look out! Paddle fast away!"
I needed no urging. I dug into the glowing water madly, and the
sound of my paddle on the side of the canoe might have been heard
half a mile away. It served no purpose. Suddenly half a dozen of the
swordfish began jumping about us, as if stirred to anger by our torch.
I called to Red Chicken to extinguish, it.
He had seized it to obey when I heard a splash and the canoe
received a terrific shock. A tremendous bulk fell upon it. With a
sudden swing I was hurled into the air and fell twenty feet away. In
the water I heard a swish, and glimpsed the giant espadon as he
leaped again.
I was unhurt, but feared for Red Chicken. He had cried out as the
canoe went under, but I found him by the outrigger, trying to right
the craft. Together we succeeded, and when I had ousted some of the
water, Red Chicken crawled in.
"_Papaoufaa!_ I am wounded slightly," he said, as I assisted him.
"The Spear of the Sea has thrust me through."
The torch was lost, but I felt a big hole in the calf of his right
leg. Blood was pouring from the wound. I made a tourniquet of a
strip of my _pareu_ and, with a small harpoon, twisted it until the
flow of blood was stopped. Then, guided by him, I paddled as fast as
I could to the beach, on which there was little trouble in landing
as the bay was smooth.
Red Chicken did not utter a complaint from the moment of his first
outcry, and when I roused others and he was carried to his house, he
took the pipe handed him and smoked quietly.
"The Aavehie was against him," said an old man. Aavehie is the god
of fishermen, who was always propitiated by intending anglers in the
polytheistic days, and who still had power.
[Illustration: Spearing fish in Marquesas Islands]
[Illustration: Pearl shell divers at work]
There was no white doctor on the island, nor had there been one for
many years. There was nothing to do but call the _tatihi_, or native
doctor, an aged and shriveled man whose whole body was an intricate
pattern of tattooing and wrinkles. He came at once, and with his
claw-like hands cleverly drew together the edges of Red Chicken's
wound and gummed them in place with the juice of the _ape_, a
bulbous plant like the edible _taro_. Red Chicken must have suffered
keenly, for the _ape_ juice is exceedingly caustic, but he made no
protest, continuing to puff the pipe. Over the wound the _tatihi_
applied a leaf, and bound the whole very carefully with a bandage of
_tapa_ cloth folded in surgical fashion.
About the mat on which Red Chicken lay the elders of the village
congregated in the morning to discuss the accident and tell tales
while the pipe circulated. One had seen his friend pierced through
the chest by a sword-fish and instantly killed. Numerous incidents
of their canoes being sunk by these savage Spears of the Sea were
recited by the wise men who, with no books to bother them or written
records to dull their memories, preserved the most minute
recollections of important events of the past.
For my part, on the subject of the demoniacal work of the swordfish,
I regaled them with accounts of damage wrought to big ships; of how
a bony sword had penetrated the hull of the _Fortune_, of Plymouth,
cutting through copper, an inch of under-sheathing, a three-inch
plank of hard wood, twelve inches of solid, white-oak timber, two
and a half inches of hard oak ceiling, and the head of an oil cask;
of the sloop _Morning Star_, which had to be convoyed to port with a
leak through a hole in eight and a half inches of white oak; of the
United States Fish Commission sloop, _Red Hot_, rammed and sunk; of
the British dreadnaught, which was pumped to Colombo where the leak
made by the fish was found, and 15,000 francs insurance paid.
"Our fathers never went fishing until they had implored the favor of
the gods," said Red Chicken. "I am a Catholic, but it may be the sea
is so old, older than Christ, that the devils there obey the old
gods we used to worship. If that largest Spear of the Sea that we
saw had attacked me or our boat, he would have killed us and sunk
the canoe, for he was four fathoms long, and his weapon was as tall
as I am."
The _tatihi_ nodded his head gravely. His soul was still in the
keeping of the gods of his fathers, and-he saw in Red Chicken's
wound the vengeance of the un-appeased Aavehie.
I was amazed to find that Red Chicken had no fever, and was
recovering rapidly. Without modern medicine or knowledge of it, the
_tatihi_ had healed the sufferer, and I drew him on to talk of his
skill.
His surgical knowledge was excellent; he knew the location of the
vital organs quite accurately from frequent cutting up of bodies for
eating. He had treated successfully broken bones, spear-wounds
through the body, holes knocked in skulls by the vicious, egg-sized
sling-stones. If the skull was merely cracked, with no smashing of
the bone, he drilled holes at the end of each crack to prevent
further cleavage and, replacing the skin he had folded back, bound
the head with cooling leaves and left nature to cure the break. If
there was pressure on the brain or a part of the skull was in bits,
his custom was to remove all these and, trimming the edges of the
hole in the brainpan, to fit over it a neat disk of cocoanut-shell,
return the scalp, and nurse the patient to health.
He had known of cases when injured brain matter was replaced with
pig-brains, but admitted that the patient in such cases became first
violently angry and then died. Lancing boils and abscesses with
thorns had been his former habit, but he favored a nail for the
purpose nowadays.
Fearing lest fever should attack Red Chicken, he had prepared a
decoction from the hollow joints of the bamboo, which he
administered in frequent doses from a cocoanut-shell. It was
milk-white, and became translucent in water, like that beautiful
variety of opal, the hydrophane. There was a legend, said the
_tatihi_, that the knowledge of this medicine had been gleaned from
a dark man who had come on a ship many years before, and with this
clue I recognized it as _tabasheer_, a febrifuge long known in India.
A fire had been built outside the straw hovel in which Red Chicken
lay, and stones were heating in it, so that if milder medicine did
not avail the patient might be laid on a pile of blazing stones
covered with protecting leaves, and swathed in cloths until
perspiration conquered fever. The patient would then be rushed to the
sea or river and plunged into cold water.
But this procedure was not necessary. Red Chicken got well rapidly,
and in a few days was walking about as usual, though with a
thoughtful look in his eye that promised a soul-struggle with Père
Olivier, whose new gods had not protected the fisherman against the
gods of the sea.