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.”

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 manoeuver 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.