Part 7
A minute passed--a minute and a quarter--a minute and a half. The canoe lurched to a sudden strain on the taut basket-line. I looked over the side. Far down in the green water I could see the shadowy figure of the diver, mounting the rope with leisurely movements of his arms. He came to the surface, exhaling the breath from his lungs with the strange shrill whistle I had heard before. Then, raising the goggles from his eyes, he gave the exultant whoop of the diver who has brought up a rich haul--a cry that was beginning to ring out on all sides, where the canoes lay at anchor. He lay resting alongside while his companion pulled up the basket, loaded with six or seven great gold-lipped oysters; and craned his neck to watch as the other opened the shells with a twist of his knife at the hinge, felt for pearls under the soft mantle, and tossed the body of each mollusk into the open kerosene-tin. My companions seemed excited.
"_Aué_!" exclaimed the diver. "There is no other island like this! It is as Seroni told us--the bottom is covered with shell, and the water is not overdeep: twelve fathoms, by the knots on my line. Last year, at Hikueru, I worked at twenty till my head ached all through the night. And this shell--the size, the weight, the color of the lip--think of what it must be worth a ton! No man in all these islands has ever seen its like! I would still dive if there were fifty sharks instead of the one Seroni killed yesterday. But watch carefully, and if a shark comes, move the basket up and down a little so that I may be warned. Now pass me the weight, for I am ready to go down again."
At the end of three hours the diver clambered stiffly into the canoe; even in this water, only a few degrees below the temperature of one's blood, a man grows chilled and must come out to rest and warm himself in the sun. He had averaged a minute and a half to two minutes under water, and five minutes' rest at the surface between dives, and I noticed that he sent up five or six oysters each time he went down. We had brought along a bottle of water and a package of cold food done up in leaves. When lunch was over and the diver lay basking in the sun, I asked him how he could stay under water so long, and how a man could stand the pressure of the depths. At home in California I had excelled my friends by bringing up sand from the bottom at thirty feet, and my ears had ached for an hour afterward. These natives thought nothing of working at seventy feet, and from what they said, I knew that one hundred and twenty feet was not considered an extraordinary depth.
"It is not difficult," the diver remarked, smiling at my efforts to question him in his own tongue. "If he would take the trouble, the white man could learn as well as we. But one must know how. You say that at six fathoms your head ached and your lungs were bursting. That was because you tired yourself by swimming down instead of letting a weight pull you to the bottom. And perhaps you held all of your breath until you rose--that is wrong. First of all, you must learn never to tire yourself beneath the water, and not to fill your lungs too full before you start. When your time is half up, you must begin to let the air out of your lungs, little by little,--a few bubbles now and then,--so that, as you reach the top, there will be scarcely any air left in you. If your ears ache, swallow; or hold your nose and blow--this will clear the little passages between your nose and ears, and stop the pain. That is all, except that in deep water you must never look up, nor bend your body backward. As for the sharks, there is little danger--not one in a hundred will do you harm. When that one comes, you will know him by the way he swims, and if there is sand or mud on the bottom, you can escape by throwing it up to cloud the water while you pull yourself quickly up the basket-rope. Otherwise you can only take refuge in a crevice of the coral, hoping that the shark will leave you before your lungs go flat. Conger eels are more to be feared; you must watch sharply as you pass the holes where they lie hidden. The big eel's jaws are like the jaws of a dog! If a conger seizes wrist or ankle, it is useless to struggle--ten strong men could not drag one from his hole. Three times, when I was young and careless, I have felt the teeth of the eel; see--my ankles bear the scars to this day. But I remembered what the old men had told me and lay quietly without struggling, till the conger relaxed his jaws to dart forward for a better hold. Each time I tore my ankle free and reached the surface with only the loss of a little blood. But we must get to work--the others are beginning to dive."
The canoes returned to camp in mid-afternoon. The women were waiting to begin their task of cleaning shell, and there were exclamations of wonder as the day's catch was brought ashore. While the men went off to rest, their wives and daughters sat gossiping in little groups, hammering, chipping, and washing the mother-of-pearl. Half of the catch of each canoe had been set aside as my uncle's share, and some of his own people--Ivi, Ofai, and a few men and women from the settlement on Iriatai--set to work to clean it in a space reserved for them. I saw a number of women along the beach, filling the tins from the canoes with sea water, mashing the soft meat between their fingers, and pouring off the mess little by little, as they searched for any pearls that might have been overlooked. My uncle was delighted with the first day's work.
"It is going better than I had hoped," he said, as we sat in his stateroom that evening. "They brought in about two tons of shell to-day, and the quality is superb--nothing like it has ever been seen in this part of the Pacific. Your canoe had no luck, but the others netted four handsome pearls and a number of small ones for the day. That alone proves that there must be something in von Tesmar's theory. I've seen thousands of black-lipped oysters opened without a pearl. Old Maruia found a beauty to-day, with her usual luck. I gave her a thousand dollars for it, and any jeweler in Paris would jump at a chance to offer twice as much. You are smiling, eh, to think of that funny old woman having a thousand dollars, all at once? Why, in the eyes of her people Maruia is a millionaire! Twenty years of diving have made her the owner of a fine plantation, and one of the prettiest villas on Tahiti. Ah--I almost forgot to show you our first pearls."
He leaned over to twirl the knob of the safe, swung open the door, and took from the shelf a small tobacco-tin, which he opened and handed to me. It was lined with cotton and there, lying side by side like tiny eggs in a nest, were four pearls, pale, lustrous, and without a flaw. Three of them were like peas in size and the other was larger than the three together,--I had never seen a pearl of such size and beauty,--shimmering with a soft opalescence in its bed. My uncle took it in his hand, turning it to admire the perfection of its shape.
"You won't see a pearl like this five times in a season," he remarked. "There are many larger ones of greater value, but there is nearly always something wrong with them--a flattened spot, a flaw on the surface, a dullness in orient. Though not of great size, this is a really perfect pearl. If I had a mate for it I could ask my own price for the pair!
"I wish now that I had brought a few more men," he went on, "but I think we can make out by shutting down the copra-making and putting everyone at work. I am going to put Fatu and Ofai to diving, with a couple of stern-men from the village; they say we can find trees to build two or three more canoes. The others will have to work at cleaning shell, and from now on I'm counting on you and Marama to feed us. Tins are all right in an emergency, but it would be absurd to make ourselves ill on canned stuff in a place swarming with excellent fish. There are eight of us on board, counting the new cook, and I want you to supply us with fish. You can begin to-morrow--I'll give you the small canoe and whatever gear you need."
VII
SOUTH SEA FISHERMEN
I have always loved fishing since I was old enough to hold a rod and cast out into the surf at home, and now, as I look back on the months spent with my uncle in the South Seas, I know that my happiest memories of Iriatai are of the long hours in a canoe with Marama in the lagoon or on the open sea beyond the reef. It was fishing in unspoiled waters--fishing to dream about in after years. Our primitive tackle, much of which was fashioned by our own hands, did not detract from the charm of the sport, and the background--the land, the sea, the sky--was hauntingly and strangely beautiful.
Some of those nights were unforgettable--calm nights when we lay off the reef from sunset till dawn began to brighten in the east. In all that solitude our lantern was the only light, the only sign of man. Iriatai lay like a shadow on the sea, stretching off vaguely to the south, and the heavens above us were powdered with stars of a brilliance I had never known before. The native boy was a better astronomer than I; he had names for many of the constellations, and strange old stories to tell of them. Castor and Pollux, the Twins, sinking on the horizon to the west, he called _Pipiri-Ma_--a boy and a girl, he told me, who had lived in very ancient times and who, because of their unkind parents, had fled away to the skies. The Southern Cross was _Tatauro_; the Scorpion was a great fishhook, flung into the sky after a god had used it to pull up the islands of the Paumotus; the Pleiades, visible in the east an hour before the dawn, he called _Matarii_--the Little Eyes, and told me a pretty story of their origin.
Much of our fishing was done at night, when we fished offshore for the great bottom-feeders of the South Pacific: the deep-water albicore, the castor-oil fish, and the _manga_--a long black creature shaped like an enormous pickerel, with goggle-eyes and rows of formidable teeth.
Our custom was to start an hour before sunset and paddle north to a break between the two long islands, where we dragged our canoe through the ankle-deep wash of the barrier, waited our moment, and slipped out through the surf. The outer face of the reef shelved off steeply, and our line, which reached the bottom at two hundred fathoms, would have reached the reef as well. Marama usually took the stern, paddling gently, while I did the fishing forward. Our bait was fish, saved from the previous day's catch and salted. I chose a morsel large as a man's fist and tied it with strong thread to the point of one of the great wooden hooks used in this deep-sea fishing: a fork of ironwood, six inches from tip to tip, and barbed with a cod-hook lashed on to point down and inward. It was useless, I learned, to fish with an ordinary hook for these dwellers on the bottom. Their habit of swimming down vertically, to seize the bait from above, made necessary the use of our barbaric implement. When my hook was baited, I fastened a large pebble to the line, with a special hitch that Marama had taught me. Coil after coil ran out as the pebble sank, until at last I felt the slackening which told me that it had touched bottom. Hauling up a yard or two, I gave the jerk which freed my coral sinker, and settled myself to wait. Sometimes an hour passed without a strike, and then, when I was least prepared for it, some monster of a hundred pounds seized my hook with a rush that carried my arm elbow-deep into the black water alongside. Hand over hand I brought him slowly to the surface till he lay wallowing beside the canoe, eyes bulging with the release from the pressure of his deep-sea haunts. A blow with the blunt side of our whale-spade ended his struggles, and taking hold by the gills, we tilted the canoe and slid the quivering body inboard.
Sometimes, as my fish neared the surface, I felt a sudden slackening of the line--one of the small sharks that prowled along the reef at night had helped himself, leaving only a bodiless and gaping head upon the hook. Once or twice, when the marauder rose close to our canoe, Marama sprang to his feet in a rage--keen-bladed spade in hand--and ended the shark's life with a cutting blow forward of the eyes. At those times we seized our paddles and made off swiftly for new fishing-grounds; for the scene of the ensuing feast was no place for our light canoe.
Fishing by night meant sleeping through the warm hours of the day. Sometimes, when we wearied of this, the order was reversed and we went out at daybreak to pursue the schools of bonito far offshore. The lures for bonito are made of mother-of-pearl, and the fisherman must carry six or seven different shades to suit the varying conditions of sea and sky. Marama selected half a dozen large pearl-shells, shading from light to dark, and marked with a pencil on the thickest part of each the outline of a small fish. When this was done we took our shell to the shop my uncle had set up ashore, and set to work with vise and hacksaw to cut out the lures. Then came the grinding and polishing, and finally a barbless hook of brass was attached to each, the line made fast to the forward end, and a tuft of coconut fibre bound on across the rear. We tied the lines to a stiff pole of bamboo, ten or twelve feet long and equipped with a ring at the butt end, in which to hook the lures when not in use.
Bonito-fishing was hard work and not unspiced with danger,--the risk of being swamped or blown offshore in a squall,--but it had a fascination of its own. We used to paddle half a mile out to sea and wait in the morning calm, on the lookout for birds. At sunrise the boobies and noddy terns left their roosting-places by hundreds and cruised about over the sea, singly or in little bands, in search of breakfast. We watched them flying this way and that until at last, perhaps a mile away, a dozen noddies began to circle and dive. Then it was time to seize our paddles and strain our backs to make for the birds at top speed. Keener eyes than ours had been on the watch, and before a minute had passed hungry sea-birds were flapping from all directions toward the school of fish. The small fish, pursued by both bonito and birds, were far from remaining stationary; sometimes they sounded and disappeared altogether; sometimes, when our backs were aching with an hour's chase, they swept off to windward at a pace that made us lay down our paddles in despair. There were days when we went home worn out and empty-handed, but there were other days when luck was with us and we drove the canoe into the midst of ravenous schools. Then, while the man forward paddled with all his might, the stern-man faced about, long rod in hand and lure skittering over the waves behind us. A hasty trial proved which shade of mother-of-pearl was most attractive, and next moment fish after fish came tumbling aboard--fat, steel-blue, and vibrant. There were days when we hooked and landed thirty fish in half as many minutes, before we sank down exhausted to rest, leaving the birds to circle off above the foaming sea.
Sometimes, when we could get bait, we enjoyed a sport even more thrilling than bonito-fishing--trolling along the reef at daybreak for tunny, barracuda, and the giant cavally of the Pacific. A silvery species of mullet proved the best lure for the fish that lay in wait in the caverns along the outer edge of the reef, and many of our afternoons were spent in mullet-catching. First of all we prepared a mass of paste, made of flour or arrowroot, and with this for bait, we paddled to a place in the lagoon where the water shoaled to three or four feet over a coral bottom. Our tackle was a stick of light wood eighteen inches long, attached by a trace to twenty feet of line, and fitted with a small hook on a leader at either end. One of us baited the hooks with bits of paste and stood ready to cast the stick, while the other threw pieces of our dough ahead of the motionless canoe. Presently the water would dimple and swirl with rising mullet--it was time to cast. The float lay quietly for a moment--bobbed--jerked disappeared under water, with a pair of fat mullet, as often as not, fast on the hooks. We kept them alive in an openwork basket floating alongside, and towed our catch back to the Tara, in readiness for the morning's fishing.
An hour before sunrise we dragged our canoe over the reef, shot out through the breakers, and paddled to our favorite trolling-grounds--a shoal which ran out a quarter of a mile to sea. Our hook for this kind of fishing was equipped with a leader of piano-wire, which was passed lengthwise through the body of a mullet and pulled through the mouth until the shank of the hook was out of sight. Then the lips were lashed to the wire with a bit of thread and the leader made fast to the end of a hundred yards of heavy line. Arranged in this way and towed at a good pace behind the canoe, the mullet flashed and zigzagged through the water in imitation of a living fish--an imitation so perfect that many a wary old dweller on the reef was deceived and came rushing upward to his death.
The handling of these powerful fish required all our skill, and Marama, being more experienced than I, usually took the stern on trolling-expeditions. Making the line fast to the outrigger-pole which crossed the canoe behind his seat, he gave the word, and we began to paddle our hardest, following the edge of the shoal. As the sun rose, one could look down and see the changing colors of the coral--every fold and crevice clearly visible ten fathoms beneath us. There were certain crannies and caverns where we knew the big fish lay, and as we passed above them we increased our efforts to make speed. In this kind of sport there was no holding the line to feel for a bite; we were never in doubt when a monster tunny or barracuda struck. The canoe quivered with the shock. Sometimes we fought for half an hour while the hooked fish towed us in rushes, this way and that. One old barracuda, I remember,--seven feet long and with the jaws of a shark,--pulled us more than a mile before he lay exhausted at the surface.
We seldom returned from trolling till the trade wind came up at eight or nine o'clock, for a good catch, sufficient for two or three days, meant rest and time for other amusements. The weather was hot of course, and we had no ice, but the native method of cooking--baking over and over again, which improves the flavor with each succeeding day--permitted fish to be kept for as long as a week. On days of leisure we rested, overhauled our tackle, or went in search of the shellfish which abounded at Iriatai.
There were lobsters, crabs, and sea snails on the reef, clams and mussels in the lagoon, and best of all,--to be found on patches of shallow sandy bottom,--there were _varos_, creatures whose repulsive English name is "sea centipede." They look like the tail of a lobster, with rows of legs along the sides and a small head, armed with a pair of wicked nippers, said to inflict a poisoned wound. The varo is no beauty, but if it is broiled over a charcoal fire and eaten hot with melted butter, I agreed with my uncle that the sea produced nothing half so good.
One calm morning, when there was a plentiful supply of fish aboard, Marama suggested that we try our luck at varo-fishing and showed me the tackle he had made the afternoon before. It consisted of half a dozen slender sticks of wood to which rows of small fishhooks were lashed, points out. Each stick was provided with a few feet of line and a light float, made fast to the upper end. While I was examining these curious snares, my uncle passed along the deck and stopped at sight of us.
"Going after varos, eh?" he remarked. "The men used to say there were plenty of them here. Good luck to you--we'll have a feast here tonight if you can get some!"
The native boy threw his snares and a few pieces of smelly fish into our canoe and we paddled to the western shore of the lagoon, where a bottom of mud and sand ran out from shore. He allowed the canoe to drift over the shoal while he scanned the bottom through the calm water, clear as glass. Here and there I saw that the sand was pitted with holes, the burrows of various marine creatures; and presently Marama pointed down to one, smaller than the rest and surrounded by a little mound of sand. "That is the dwelling of the varo," he said, "I can tell by its freshness and the smallness of the opening that he is at home."
I held the canoe in place while he took up one of the snares, tied a bit of fish to the upper end, and unwound the short line attached to the float. Then he tucked up his pareu and went overboard. Taking a long breath and working with head and shoulders submerged, he enlarged the mouth of the burrow until its full size was exposed and inserted the baited stick--gently, so as not to alarm the creature inside. Varos were plentiful at this place; we set all our snares within a radius of fifty yards and sat at leisure in the canoe, watching the floats for the first signs of life. We had not long to wait; Marama pointed to one of the floats which was beginning to bob and twitch; a few strokes of the paddle brought us alongside and he went overboard again.
The fishhooks on the snares were lashed on in tiers of three, pointing out and up. The bait was tied to the upper half of the stick, so that in order to get at it, the varo was obliged to pass the uppermost tier of hooks. As it tore the fish with its nippers and crammed the pieces into its mouth, its hard back was against the wall of the burrow and its more vulnerable under-parts in range of the barbs. Marama put his head under water again, seized the end of the stick and held the varo against the side of its hole; then, with a quick pull, he sank his hooks into the creature's under joints and held up the snare with a triumphant shout, the captive struggling and waving its claws. "Take care you are not hurt," he told me as he broke off the nippers. "They cut like scissors and they are poisoned--the wounds will fester and swell for weeks!"
At ten o'clock, when the breeze came up, we paddled back to the schooner with a score of varos in the bottom of our canoe, a feast for all hands.
As we crossed the lagoon Marama spoke to me suddenly at the end of a long silence. "Listen, Tehare," he said,--"Tehare" was as near as he could come to pronouncing my name,--"let us speak together, for there is a plan in my mind. I dare not ask Seroni myself. Fishing is the work he gave me, but he is your father's brother and if you desire to do the thing that I propose, perhaps you will speak to him. You have learned much about our fishing and you see how easy it is to provide for the Tara's needs: two or three nights each week give us more fish than we can use. It is in my mind that on days when there is fish in plenty we might take this canoe and go out with the others to dive. I can dive deeper than one need go in this lagoon, and you can pull up the basket and open shell, since men are not accustomed to diving in your land. We shall get much shell, and perhaps a great pearl like the one Maruia found. What say you--will you ask Seroni?"
VIII
I TURN PEARL-DIVER
My chance came the same afternoon, as we were finishing lunch. At last Uncle Harry lit a cigar and called for coffee. "By Jove!" he remarked as he blew out a cloud of fragrant smoke, "those varos were wonderfully good. I reckon the best restaurant in San Francisco couldn't produce a finer dish!" The moment seemed opportune.