Part 6

While Fatu was paying out the anchor line, I took the glass and leaned over to see what I could make out. The water was about twelve fathoms deep, and far down beneath the whaleboat's keel I could distinguish the purple coral on the floor of the lagoon. Ofai, the Rangiroa boy, was preparing himself to dive. He coiled a long cotton line in the bottom of the boat, and made fast to one end of it a thirty-pound bulb of lead, like an enormous sinker. Then he adjusted his goggles and went over the side. While he lay in the water, drawing a series of deep breaths, Fatu passed him the weight. He allowed it to sink a yard beneath him, seized the rope between the toes of one foot, and took a grip, high up on the line, with his left hand.

"_A haere_!" ordered Fatu--"Go ahead!"

The diver filled his lungs with air, grinned at us like some goggle-eyed creature of the sea, and let go the gunwale. Coil after coil of line flew over the side, and a train of bubbles rose to the surface, hissing faintly. When the line ceased to run out, Fatu pulled in the slack till it stood taut from the bottom, and made it fast to a cleat. Gazing downward through the water glass, I found that I could see Ofai dimly, in the twilight of the depths. He was swimming close to the bottom, with strange slow motions of his arms and legs; at times he stopped as if examining something, and finally--after what seemed a longer time than any man could hold his breath--I saw him approach the rope, pull himself upright, and heave strongly with one hand. He seemed to shoot upward faster than he had gone down; an instant later his head broke water and he was expelling his breath with the eerie whistling sound I was to know so well. Then he shouted--the long-drawn yodeling cry which announces a lucky dive.

"Never have I seen shell of such a size!" he exclaimed, as he handed up a great coral-encrusted oyster and came clambering over the side. "It grows everywhere--the bottom was covered as far as my eyes could see!"

My uncle was opening the oyster with the blade of his clasp knife. It was a rough, roundish thing, uncouth to the eye, and a full eight inches across. He cut the muscle, felt skillfully but vainly for pearls under the fringe, tossed the soft body overboard, and handed the shells--still attached at the hinge--to me. Craning their necks to see, the natives exclaimed with wonder. When closed, the oyster might have been mistaken for an ugly lump of coral, picked up at random on the floor of the lagoon; when open, it displayed the changing opalescent shades of mother-of-pearl, fringed with a band of gold.

"Get up the anchor," ordered Uncle Harry; "we'll try again, a hundred yards farther on."

"There would be a sensation on Tahiti," he went on, turning to me, "if you showed the traders that shell! It's worth twenty dollars a ton more than the black-lipped variety, and the books say that it produces a great many more pearls. We'll do a bit of prospecting to-day, mark the best places, and let the men begin diving in the morning."

We wandered on for several hours, examining the bottom at each halt and marking the more likely spots with a small buoy, moored to the coral with a few fathoms of line. By mid-afternoon, our work seemed finished--we had found more shell than our men could bring up in all the months ahead of us. Our final halt was close to the reef, and there, in about ten fathoms of water, Ofai went overboard for the last time that day.

The coral was light-colored at this place and I could see every motion of the diver beneath us. Suddenly, when he had been about a minute under water, I saw him crouch and disappear in a crevice of the rock, and an instant later a long moving shadow passed beneath the boat.

"_E mao_!" exclaimed Fatu. "A shark!" My uncle sprang to the side.

I leaned over with the rest, watching with acute suspense to see if the shark would move away. No--he had seen Ofai and was turning back toward the deep crevice in which the diver had taken refuge. Then the shark rose toward us and we saw him clearly--longer than our boat, livid-brown and hideous. An exclamation of horror went up from the men. There seemed nothing we could do. Thirty seconds passed; Ofai had been under water a minute and a half. My uncle had reached the limit of his endurance. He spoke to Fatu sharply: "Your goggles! That knife! The other weight!"

The shark had approached the surface again, and as he turned to go down, before any of us could utter a cry of protest Uncle Harry went over the side, plunging downward with all the impetus of the heavy leaden bulb. It was an act of the most reckless courage; for in spite of the stories one reads, men do not attack the great sharks of the South Pacific in their own element.

Half sickened with suspense, I watched what followed: a drama played out in the limpid water beneath our boat. Grasping in his right hand a keen broad-bladed knife, my uncle shot down so fast that half-way to the bottom he overtook his monstrous antagonist. The shark was still intent upon Ofai; I saw him start and turn with a sweep of his tail as the man's body struck him and the thrust of a powerful arm sent the knife deep into his side. A pink cloud of blood gushed from the wound, and at that moment I saw Ofai emerge from his hiding-place, seize the rope, and bound toward the surface of the lagoon. The diver's lungs must have been nearly bursting, and he mounted the rope with desperate speed. Now he was close to my uncle. The shark had circled, turning on his side with a livid gleam of his under parts, and was coming straight at the native. The monster reared--again I saw Uncle Harry raise his arm, saw the long knife sink home and the water reddened by a cloud of blood. The respite had been enough for Ofai; his head broke water with a gasp, and before a hand could be raised to help him he had seized the gunwale and was over the side of the boat.

My uncle was in desperate straits. He had been under water nearly a minute and was still eighteen or twenty feet beneath the surface. Fatu and Ivi were brave men and devoted to him, but it would have been insanity to think of going to his rescue now. I heard Fatu's voice, unreal and far-off, shouting to the men to move to the other side of the boat; I felt the boat list, and saw, out of the corner of my eye, the gigantic figure of the mate standing on the seat beside me, bent almost double as he watched the scene below.

Uncle Harry had dropped the weight at the first attack, and now, still grasping his knife, he made for the rope and seized it with his left hand. The shark had darted away as he felt the steel for the second time, but now he was returning straight for the antagonist he seemed to recognize at last. Moving with horrid deliberation, he reared almost vertically beneath the swimmer, and opened his great jaws. My uncle stopped himself with his left hand on the rope, gathered his body together, and drove the knife into the broad rounded snout beneath him--the shark's most vulnerable point. For a moment the monster lay stunned and motionless, and in that moment Uncle Harry nearly reached the surface of the lagoon. Fatu was bent double, his hands already in the water. Then the shark seemed to regain his senses and came rushing upward grimly. I saw the muscles of the mate's arms standing out as though cast in bronze, I saw the swimmer's goggled face within a yard of the surface, and the great fish charging with open jaws, fearfully close behind. Then the whaleboat lurched as Fatu plunged his arms deep into the water, seized my uncle and swung him up and inboard with a single mighty heave.

The shark came crashing against the side of the boat--a blow that nearly stove in the planking and started a dozen seams.

A minute passed before my uncle sat up and lifted the goggles from his eyes. "Get the oars out," he gasped, "and pull for the shallow water yonder. Bale, you two, and look lively--that fellow means mischief!"

The shark was at the surface now, swimming in swift zigzags like a hound at fault. While Ofai and I baled and the others began to row, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the tall dorsal fin heading straight for us, so swiftly that the water rippled away on either side.

"Pull hard--he's after us!" shouted my uncle, standing in the stern with a twelve foot oar in his hand.

We were making for the shallows over a large coral mushroom, a hundred yards away, and the men were rowing at top speed, for they realized that our light cranky boat gave little protection against such an enemy. The shark drew rapidly abreast of us and as his head ranged alongside Uncle Harry raised the oar and thrust down with all his strength. The blow was a glancing one, and before he recovered his weapon the three-inch shaft of tough wood was between a pair of formidable jaws. My uncle's eyebrows went up as he raised what was left of the oar, sheared off as a child bites through a stick of candy. Next moment Ivi cried out, as the monster seized his sweep and wrenched it from his hands. I saw it float to the surface with a splintered blade--felt our boat shaken violently as the shark took the keel in his teeth. Then the bow grated on coral, and we leaped out in the shallows to pull the boat into the safety of a foot of water.

After a time the ominous fin tacked away toward the reef and disappeared. We were not anxious for another encounter and allowed our enemy plenty of time to go. The men were talking excitedly in high-pitched voices, when my uncle lit one of his long cigars and turned to me.

"What a brute!" he remarked. "I thought he had me that last time! By Jove! When Fatu took hold of me I could fairly feel those teeth sinking into my legs! Well, our work is cut out for us--there'll be no diving till that fellow is dead. The men are saying that in all probability there are no other dangerous sharks in the lagoon. Do you remember the letter I read you that evening at home? This is the same shark, without a doubt,--he may have been here for a hundred years. He's of a rare kind, by good luck; so rare that I know only his Latin name: _Carcharodon_. They are relics of prehistoric times and seem to be nearly extinct to-day, though a few of them still linger in the warm waters close to the Line. Remember the big fossil teeth, from Florida, on the mantel at the ranch? They came from one of this fellow's ancestors who grew to be ninety feet long and swarmed in the Tertiary seas."

"But won't he die?" I asked. "I saw you stab him three times."

My uncle laughed. "No more than you will," he replied. "A shark of that size takes a lot of killing. But he's going to die to-morrow, if we have to sit up all night hammering out a lance and a harpoon. Our fish-spears would only tickle his ribs. Come, he seems to have given us up--let's be getting back to the Tara."

VI

THE END OF THE SHARK AND THE BEGINNING OF THE DIVING

That Sunday night, while the crew of the Tara told to their friends the story of Ofai's rescue, my uncle and I labored with forge and anvil and grindstone under the shed of corrugated iron. From the schooner's trade-room we took a couple of the whale-spades used throughout the islands as agricultural tools, and removed the wooden hafts from their sockets. While I pumped the bellows, Uncle Harry heated one of these in the forge and hammered it into the shape of a harpoon, welding on a piece of steel to make the socket into which the hinged barb would fit. Then, gripping a morsel of steel in the tongs, he forged out the barb, punched a hole through it, and riveted it in place, so that it folded into its socket when the harpoon was thrown and opened to prevent the iron's withdrawal from the wound. When the harpoon was finished to his satisfaction, I turned the grindstone while he ground it to a razor-edge. After that he heated the other spade and forged out a lance for killing: a slender, double-edged blade, two inches wide and eighteen long--a murderous weapon in skilled hands. We fixed the lance on a twelve-foot pole of hibiscus, and whittled out a short stout shaft for the harpoon, tapered to fit loosely in the socket. Then my uncle fetched from the storeroom a coil of heavy cotton line. Passing one end of it through a screw eye halfway up the shaft of the harpoon he lashed it firmly to the small of the iron. It was long past midnight.

"We won't get much sleep," he remarked, as we paddled out to the schooner in a canoe. "We must kill that shark to-morrow--to-day, rather--without fail! The natives are superstitious as children; they used to worship sharks, you know, before the missionaries came, and if any ghost-talk starts, we may have to go back for another lot of men. I'll wake you at five o'clock."

I dreamed strange dreams that night, for my mind was feverish with the excitement of the day. I was diving, and like Ofai, I had taken refuge in the coral while a great shark nosed at me from above. But the crevice was too narrow for his head, and I crouched there with bursting lungs, praying that the monster would leave me to reach the air before I drowned. At last I could stand it no longer; I sprang out from my retreat--past the shark gazing at me with fierce green eyes, upward toward the surface, so far off that I gave myself up for lost. The water weighed on me like lead; I seemed to sink instead of rising; I saw the monster approaching, grimly and deliberately. Then he seized my shoulder in his jaws. I felt the sharp teeth tear the flesh and crunch the bone--and I awoke with a strangled shout.

The stateroom was lit by the first gray light of dawn, and my uncle's hand was on my shoulder as he shook me awake.

"Time for coffee," he said, smiling at my bewildered face. "The men have killed a pig for bait, and they're getting the surfboat ready. We'll be off in half an hour."

We left before sunrise, in the broad heavy boat used for landing cargo from the schooner. I sat aft with Fatu, who held the steering-sweep; Ivi and Ofai pulled, and my uncle stood forward in the bows. The morning was calm, and as we reached the line of buoys we kept a close lookout for the shark, but no fin cut the water and no long shadow passed beneath the boat. Finally, at the place where we had sighted our enemy the day before, we cut open the carcass of the pig, tied it to a buoy, and pulled off a little way to watch.

An hour passed; the sun rose, and the lagoon began to shimmer in the heat. I heard the booming of the breakers where the ring of land was broken north of us and saw the smoke rising vertically from the ovens at our island camp. The natives were half dozing, but my uncle had not relaxed his watch.

"There he is!" he exclaimed suddenly. "Quick--pull over there--don't make a noise with your oars!"

I glanced up as he spoke and saw the dead pig rise and disappear in a circle of ripples. Then the head and forelegs came to the surface again--the carcass of our pig had been bitten in two.

"Row faster," my uncle whispered in the native tongue. "Make haste, or he will eat the pig and go."

Our boat glided toward the feeding monster. Without turning his head, Uncle Harry motioned to the men to cease their rowing, and it was then I caught sight of the huge brownish body of the shark, rising to finish what was left. My uncle brandished the harpoon above his head--hurled it with all the strength of his arm. The water swirled and coil after coil of line flew out through the chock. We were fast.

As he felt the iron, the shark turned with a mighty sweep of his tail and rushed off swiftly to the south. Fatu swung the boat around to follow, and before half the line had streaked overboard we were gathering way. Then my uncle got his hands on the line, paying it out more gradually until our full weight was on the fish; the oars came in and we foamed along at a faster gait, perhaps, than the clumsy surfboat had ever known. The shark seemed tireless--we passed the islet, where the people stood on the beach, waving in answer to our shouts, and sped on toward the southern end of the lagoon. We were following a deep channel in the coral, which turned westward halfway to the pass and approached the long island that formed the atoll's western side. At the end of an hour I could see the village of the copra-makers and the distant pass, a gap in the low ring of wooded land. The channel had brought us close to the inner beach and our pace was slowing appreciably. My uncle was beginning to haul up, when all at once the fish turned at right angles toward the submarine cliff of coral, close at hand. The line went slack; the boat drifted quietly for a few yards, and came to a halt. My uncle turned his head.

"Look," he said, "he's gone into that hole yonder! See the mouth of it a couple of fathoms down? This must be his den."

Holding the line with one hand, he took up the lance and ordered the rowers to back water--to keep a steady galling strain on the fish. "The iron is tickling him," he remarked when five minutes had passed. "I can feel him twitch. Look lively now! He'll be out in a moment--Ah! Here he comes!"

Far in beneath the coral the cave must have broadened, for the shark had turned to face the entrance of his lair. He came out with a rush, maddened by the pain of his wound, open-mouthed and at bay. Before Ofai could pull in his oar the monster had wrenched it from his hands and turned to sink his teeth in the cutwater of the boat. But my uncle was ready with the lance. Again and again his arm rose and thrust downward, and at each stroke the keen blade bit deep. The water reddened; the jaws relaxed their hold; the tail ceased its lashing and lay quiet. The huge carcass turned belly-upward and sank in the clear blue channel beneath us.

Uncle Harry laid down the lance and came aft to light a cigar. "That's a good day's work," he said. "No diving with that fellow about! He's sinking now; we'll have the boys cut the line and make the end fast to the coral. To-morrow he'll float high--I'll send a couple of men to cut out the jaws. They'll make you a fine souvenir of Iriatai."

There was rejoicing when we arrived at camp, for the native regards a large shark with a peculiar, superstitious dread. There had been much talk among the divers since the night before, but now their fears were at an end and they busied themselves with preparations for the ensuing day.

That night, when dinner was over and we sat talking on the Tara's deck, my uncle explained to me the terms of the agreement under which his divers worked. "Ordinarily," he said, "when the Government opens the lagoons the men are free to keep everything they bring up: the shell and the pearls are theirs to do with as they please. The traders keep track of all the better men and do their best to get them as deeply as possible in debt before the season begins. You can imagine what happens when credit is offered to simple fellows like these Paumotans: they run up bills for all sorts of useless trash--guitars; silk dresses and high-heeled shoes for their women; cheap perfume at five or six dollars a bottle; every kind of fancy white-man's food in tins. They load up with this sort of stuff till they are over their heads in debt. By the time he begins to dive, each native is safe in the clutches of some trading-house--Chinese, more often than not--and every pearl and every pound of shell must be sold to the creditor at the creditor's price.

"It is different here on Iriatai, for the men know that I have a year's monopoly of the lagoon. But there is more shell, and it lies in shallower water than in the lagoons which have been worked for a generation, so the divers are glad to accept my terms. Ever since I came to the islands I have tried to deal honestly with the people, for I have a theory that the savage appreciates a square deal as well as a civilized man. It has paid me, too. As you know, I am furnishing the canoes and advancing a reasonable amount of food and goods. The men have agreed, on their side, to work every day the weather permits and to let me make the first offer on their catch. Half of the shell goes to me; all of the pearls and the other half of the shell will be theirs. At the end of the season I'll make each man an offer on his shell--cleaned, sacked, and loaded aboard the Tara. As for the pearls, they will be brought out every night and offered for sale to me. Those I do not care to buy, or for which the owners think they can get a higher price in Tahiti, will be sold in the open market when we go North. But I'll get all the really fine ones--I can pay good prices and still double my money in every case!"

In the morning I had my first sight of pearl-diving as it is practised among the atolls of the Paumotus.

The men we had brought with us from Raiatea, reënforced by a few volunteers from the copra-makers of Iriatai, made up fifteen crews of two men each. I say men, but one of the best of the lot was an elderly brown woman, and there was not a man who could dive deeper than old Maruia, or bring up more shell in a day.

Each canoe was equipped with its paddles, an anchor at the end of thirty fathoms of line, a five-gallon kerosene-tin, a stout knife, and two coils of light rope--one attached to the diving-weight, the other to a large openwork basket of bamboo. The two members of the crew shared equally in the catch, though almost without exception one man did all the diving while his partner remained at the surface, raising and lowering the basket, cleaning the shell roughly, opening the oysters and inspecting them for pearls.

As they worked no more than five hours a day, we did not leave camp till the sun was well up, illuminating the bottom of the lagoon. I went out with a pair of middle-aged Paumotans whose acquaintance I had made during the passage from Raiatea. It was about half a mile from the islet to the patch of shell on which work was to begin. Uncle Harry had gone out ahead of us in the whaleboat and as the little fleet of canoes drew near, he pointed out to the paddlers the two acres of lagoon in which they were to work. The bow-man in our canoe dropped anchor in about seventy feet of water, and began to prepare himself to dive.

First of all, he stripped off the cotton shirt he had been wearing and hitched the pareu tight about his waist. Then he polished his water goggles, adjusted them carefully over his eyes, and thrust his right hand into a heavy working-glove. A pile of coral lumps, picked up on the beach the night before, lay in the bottom of the canoe; the stern-man placed a couple of these in the basket and lowered it into the lagoon till it came to rest on the bottom. Then the diver went over the side and lay in the water with a hand on the gunwale of the canoe, while his partner coiled the diving-line and lowered the leaden weight till it hung a few feet beneath the surface. The man in the water gripped the line with his left hand and the toes of his left foot; he took two or three long breaths before he jerked his head upward in a sudden gesture that meant: "Let go!" Coil after coil of line went leaping overboard, as the diver sank like a stone, leaving a trail of bubbles in his wake. When the lead touched bottom the stern-man hauled it up at once, coiling the line in readiness for the next dive.