Pearl hunting in the lagoon—Previous methods wasteful—Mapuhi shows me the wonders of the lagoon—Marvelous stories of sharks—Woman who lost her arm—Shark of Samoa—Deacon who rode a shark a half hour—Eels are terrible menace.

THE lagoon of Takaroa was to be the scene of intense activity and of incredible romance for the period of the open season for hunting the pearl-oyster. Eighty years or more of this fishing had been a profitable industry in Takaroa, especially for the whites who owned or commanded the vessels trading here. A handful of nails would at one time buy the services of a Paumotuan diver for a day. Trifles, cheap muskets, axes, and hammers, were exchanged for shells and pearls, often five dollars for five hundred dollars’ worth. The Paumotuan was robbed unconscionably by cheating him of his rights under contracts, by intimidation, assault, and murder, by getting him drunk, and the usual villainous methods of unregulated trade all over the world. The Sons of Belial were hereabouts. They had to haul down the black flag under compulsion, but they sighed for the good old days, and did not constitute themselves honest guardians for the natives even now.

The piratical traders of the early decades sailed from atoll to atoll, bartering for pearls and shells, or engaging the Paumotuans to dive for them, either by the month or season, at a wage or for a division of the gains. For their part, the traders supplied firearms, salt meat, and biscuit or flour, though rum or other alcoholic drink was their principal merchandise. The average native would continue to sell his soul for the godlike exaltation of the hours of drunkenness, and forget the hell of the aftermath. He did sell his body, for often the diver found himself in debt to the traders at the end of the year. If so, he was lost, for he remained the virtual slave of the creditor, who gave him still enough rum to make him quiescent, and to continue in debt till he died from the accidents of his vocation, or from excesses.

The lagoons were emptied of their shells in improvident manner, shells of any size being taken, and no provision made for the future nor for the growth and propagation of the oysters. The industry was the usual fiercely competitive struggle that marks a new way of becoming rich quickly. The disorder and wasteful methods of the early days of gold digging in California, and later in Alaska, matched the reckless roguery and foolish mishandling of these rich pearl-fisheries before the French Government tardily ended the reign of lawlessness and prodigality. Gambling became a fever, and the white man knew the cards better than the brown. Driven by desire for rum and for more money to hazard, the Paumotuan risked terrible depths and killed himself, or ruined his health by too many descents in a day. Atoll and sea must soon have been deprived of people and oysters.

Thirty years ago, the secretary of the CollÈge de France, summoned to Tahiti to find a remedy, reported that, if laws were not made and enforced against the conditions he found, the industry would speedily pass. Schooners of many nationalities frequented the atolls. Pearls were not rare, and magnificent shells were found in many of the eighty lagoons. Their size surpassed all found now. The continuous search had impoverished the beds, which were the result of centuries, and had robbed them of shells of age and more perfect growth, as war took the strongest and bravest men of a nation, and left the race to be perpetuated by cowards, weaklings, and the rich or politic who evaded the front of battle.

It took five years to grow a fine shell. The sixth year often doubled the value in mother-of-pearl, and the seventh year doubled it again. The Chinese, in a certain famous fishery off their coast, sought the shells only every ten or fifteen years; but those yellow people had the last word in conservation of soil and every other source of gain, forced to a sublimated philosophy by the demands of hundreds of millions of hungry bellies.

Warned by the Parisian professor, the French Government made strict regulations to prevent the extinction of the pearl-oyster, and, incidentally, of the Paumotuan. For the oyster they instituted the closed season or rahui, forbidding the taking of shells from certain atolls except at times stated. Experts examined the lagoons, and upon their recommendations a schedule of the rahui was drawn out, so that while diving might be permitted in one lagoon for successive seasons it might be prohibited in another over a term of years. This had caused a peripatetic school of divers, who went about the group from open lagoon to open lagoon, as vagrants follow projects of railroad building. But the lagoons would never be again what they had been in wealth. The denuding had been too rapacious. However, the oysters were now given time to breed, and their food was taken care of to a degree, though France, the most scientific of nations, with the foremost physicists, chemists, and physicians, did not send her genius to her colonies.

To protect the divers and their families, alcohol was made contraband. It was unlawful to let a Paumotuan have intoxicants. The scenes of riotous debauchery once common and which always marked the diving season, in the merciless pitting of pearl- and shell-buyers against one another, were rare, but surreptitious sale and donation of drink were still going on.

Mormonism, Josephitism, and Seventh Day Adventism, strict sects as to stimulants, had aided the law, and the Lying Bills and McHenrys, the Mandels and the Kopckes, had a white god against them in their devil-take-the-hindmost treatment of the natives. France also confined the buying and selling in the Paumotus to French citizens, so that the non-Gauls by blood had been driven to kiss the flag they contemned. But business excused all subterfuges.

One day when the diving term was almost on, Mapuhi and I were talking on his veranda about the ventures of his life, and especially of his experiences under the sea.

“Come!” he said, with an indulgent smile upon his flawed but noble face, “American, you and I will go upon the lagoon, and I will show you what may be strange to you.”

Going to the end of his spit of land, we entered a canoe, and, with the chief paddling swiftly, moved towards the other side of the lagoon, away from the habitations of the Paumotuans. When a hundred yards or two offshore, Mapuhi shipped his paddle and let the outrigger canoe lie idly on the water.

“Look!” he said, appraisingly, “See the wonders of God prepared for his children!”

I took the titea mata he handed me, the four-sided wooden box with a pane of ordinary glass fixed in it, about fifteen inches square, and notched for the neck of the observer. Putting the glass below the surface and gazing through it, I was in fairy-land.

The floor of the lagoon was the superbest garden ever seen by the eye of man. A thousand forms of life, fixed and moving, firm and waving, coral and shells, fish of all the colors of the rainbow, of beauteous, of weird, and of majestic shape and size, decorated and animated this strange reserve man had invaded for food and profit. The giant furbelowed clams, largest of all mollusks, white, or tinged with red and saffron or brown-yellow, a corruscating glare of blue, violet, and yellow from above, reposed like a bed of dream tulips upon the shining parterre.

The coral was of an infinitude of shape: emerald one moment and sapphire the next, shot with colors from the sun and the living and growing things beneath. Springing from the sea-floor were cabbages and roses, cauliflower and lilies, ivory fans and scarlet vases, delicate fluted columns, bushes of pale yellow coral, bouquets of red and green coral, shells of pink and purple, masses of weeds, brown and black sponges. It was a magic maze of submarine sculpture, fretwork, and flowers, and through all the interstices of the coral weaved in and out the brilliant-colored and often miraculously-molded fish and crustaceans. There were great masses of dark or sulphur-hued coral into which at any alarm these creatures darted and from which they peeped when danger seemed past. Snakes, blue, gold, or green bars on a velvet black-brown, glided in and out of the recesses, or coiled themselves about branches.

Big and small were these denizens of the lagoon. The tiny hermit-crab in a stolen mollusk-shell had on his movable house his much smaller paramour, who, also in her appropriated former tenement of a dead enemy, would spend the entire mating season thus waiting for his embrace. And now and again as I looked through the crystal water I saw the giant bulks of sharks, conger-eels, and other huge fish. These I pointed out to Mapuhi.

He peered through the titea mata.

“E!” he exclaimed. “For fifty years I have fought those demons. They will take one of us this rahui as before. It may be God’s will, but I think the devil fights on the side of the beasts below. I myself have never been touched by them though I have killed many. When I think of the many years I entered the water all over these seas, and in blackest sin, I understand more and more what the elders say, that God is ever watching over those He intends to use for His work. I have seen or known men to lose parts of themselves to the sharks, but to escape death. They prayed when in the very jaws of the mao, and were heard.”

Mapuhi blew out his breath loudly, as if expelling an evil odor.

“Tavana, tell me about some of the bad deeds of sharks,” I said.

“Aue! There are no good ones,” he replied. “In Raiatea, near Tahiti, they were fishing at night for the ava, the fish something like the salmon. They had a net five meters high, and, after the people of the village had drawn the net round so that no fish could escape, a number of men dived from their canoes. You know they try to catch the ava by the tail and make it swim for the air, pulling the fisherman with it. That is an arearea [game]. The torches held by the women and children and the old people were lighting the water brightly when Tamaehu came up with his fish. He was baptized Tamaehu, but his common name was Marae. Just as he brought the ava, or the ava brought Tamaehu, to his canoe, and the occupants were about to lift the ava into the canoe, a shark caught Tamaehu by the right foot. He caught hold of the outrigger and tried to shake it off. It was not a big shark, but it was hungry. He shouted, and his companions leaned over and drove a harpoon into the shark, which let go his foot, tore out the harpoon, and swam away. Poor Tamaehu was hauled in, with his foot hanging loose, but in Raiatea the French doctor sewed it on again. You can see him now limping about, but he praises God for being alive.”

“He well may; and there are many others to join with him?” I ventured, inquisitively.

“Do you know Piti, the woman of Raroia, in these Paumotu islands?” he asked. “No? If you go there, look for her. You will know her, for she has but one arm. Raroia has a large door to its lagoon. The bigger the door the bigger the sharks inside. The lagoons to which only small boats can enter have small sharks only. Piti was diving in the lagoon of Raroia during the season. She was bringing up shell from fifty feet below, and had several already in her canoe. She dived again, and, after seizing one shell, started to come up. Suddenly she saw a shark dart out of a coral bank. She became afraid. She did not pray. She forgot even to swim up. A man like me would not have been afraid. It is the shark that takes you when you do not see him that is to fear. Piti did nothing, and the mao took her left arm into his mouth. He closed his teeth and dragged off the flesh down to the elbow where he bit her arm in two. You know how when a shark bites, after he sinks his teeth into the meat, he twists his mouth, so as to make his teeth cut. That is the way God made him. This shark twisted and stripped off Piti’s flesh as he drew down his teeth. When he bit off her lower arm he swam off to eat it, and she rose to the top. She put her good arm over the outrigger, and those other women paddled to her and pulled her into the canoe. The bone stuck out six inches below the flesh the shark had left. There were no doctors, but they put a healing plant over the arm. The wound would not heal, and ate and ate inside for several years until the upper arm fell off at the shoulder-joint. Then she got well.”

“Is the shark himself never frightened? A human being must seem a very queer fish to a shark. They do not always attack, do they?” I said. “I have swum where they were, and Jack of the Snark, Monsieur London, told that at Santa Ana in the Solomon Islands, when they were putting dynamite in the water to get a supply of fish, the natives leaped into the water and fought with the sharks for the fish. He said that the sharks had learned to rush to the spot whenever they heard dynamite exploded. The Solomon people had to grab the stunned fish away from the sharks, and one man who started for the surface with a fish came to the boat with only half of it, as a shark had taken away the head.”

“E!” answered Mapuhi, “Sharks are devils, but the devils are not without fear, and sometimes they become neneva, and do things perhaps they did not think about. At Marutea Atoll, Tau, a strong man, caught a shark about four feet long. They had a feast on the beach, and Tau, to show how strong he was, picked up the shark and played with it after it had been on the sand for some minutes. The mouth of the mao was near his arm, and it opened and closed, and took off the flesh of the upper arm. He got well, but he never could use that arm. Right here in Takaroa, in the rahui of seven years ago, a man, diving for shell, met a shark on the bottom. He was crawling along the bottom, looking for a good shell, when the shark turned a corner and struck him square in the mouth. The shark was a little one, not more than three feet long, but so frightened was he that he bit the man’s two cheeks right off, the cheeks and the lips, so that to-day you see all his teeth all the time. He has become a good Mormon.”

Mapuhi laughed. I looked at him, and his face was filled with mirth. He was not deceived as to the heart of man. Devout he was, but he had dealt too long with brown and white, and had been too many years a sinner—indeed, one of the vilest, if rumor ran true—not to have drunk from the well-springs of the passions. Mapuhi wore a blue loin-cloth and a white shirt. The tails of the latter floated in the soft breeze, and the bosom was open, displaying his Herculean chest. We could see his house in the distance across the lagoon, and now and then he kept it in his eyes for a minute. He had gone far for a man whose father had been a savage and an eater of his enemies. The Mormon tenets permit a proper pride of possession, like the Mohammedan philosophy. One can rejoice that God has signaled one out for holding in trust the material assets of life. The bankers of the world have long known this about their God. Mapuhi had become thoughtful, and, as I was sure he had other and more astonishing facts about the sharks not yet related, I suggested that other archipelagos were also cursed by the presence and rapacity of the mao.

“In Samoa,” said Mapuhi, “the shark is not called mao or mako as in Nuku-Hiva, but malie. There are no lagoons in Samoa, for there are no atolls, but high mountains and beaches. Now the malie is the shark that swims around the islands, but the deep-sea shark, the one that lives out of sight of land, is the malietua. The Samoans are a wise people in a rich country. They are not like us poor Paumotuans with only cocoanuts and fish, but the Samoans have bananas, breadfruit, taro, oranges, and cocoanuts and fish, too. They are a happy people. Of course, I am a Paumotuan, and I would not live away from here. Once, a woman I had—when I was not a Mormon—wanted me to take my money and go and live in Tahiti, which is gay. I considered it, and even counted my money. But when I thought of my home and my people, I thrust her out as a bad woman. Now in Manua in Samoa was a half-caste, and his daughter was the queen of Manua. The half-caste’s name was Alatua Iunga, and he was one day fishing for bonito in the way we do, with a pearl-shell hook, when one of the four or five Samoans with him said, ‘There is a small shark. Put on a piece of bonito, and we will catch the malie.’ They did so, and then they let their canoe float while they ate boiled taro and dried squid.

“Then one of the Samoans said, ‘I see a shark.’ Others looked, and they said, also, ‘A shark is rising from the deep.’ Now a deep-water shark, as I said, is a malietua and is not to be smiled at. Iunga said, ‘Get the big hook and bait it!’ Then the shark rose, twenty feet of its body out of the water, and its jaws opened. They closed on the outrigger of the canoe, and bit one end clear off. Iunga said again, ‘Get the hook!’ He thought the shark would take the baited hook, and then they could throw the rope attached to the hook overboard, and the malietua would be troubled with the rope at the end of his nose and would cease to attack them. They could see the shark all this time. He was a blue shark with a flat tail, and was forty feet long at least. Their canoe was just half as long, and they thought of Iona [Jonah]. The perofeta was swallowed by a shark, because a whale can swallow only little fish. The malietua would not take the hook, and, leaving the outrigger, rammed the stern of the canoe. The shock almost threw them into the water. All were paddling hard to escape, for they knew that this shark was a real devil and sought to destroy them. Iunga, who was steering the va aalo, rose up and struck the shark many times on his nose. This angered him, but Iunga kept it up, as their one chance of safety. There is a saying in Samoa, ‘O le malie ma le tu’tu’, which is, ‘Each shark has its pay.’ Iunga and all the Samoans were religious men, though not Mormons, and they sang a hymn as they paddled hard. They made their peace with the Creator, who heard them. For over two miles the race was run. The malietua pursued the va aalo, and Iunga jabbed him with the big paddle. At last they were nearly all dead from weariness, and so Iunga sheered the canoe abruptly to the right, intending to smash on the reef as a chance for their lives. But just as the va aalo swerved, to strike upon the coral rocks, they rested on their paddles, and they saw that the shark had disappeared. If that shark had kept on for another minute it would have killed itself on the reef.”

“Mapuhi,” I verified, “I, too, have been to Manua, and heard the story from the kin of Alatua Iunga, whom I knew as Arthur Young, the trader. He became very pious after that, and was a great help to the mitinare.”

The republican king of the atolls may have thought he detected in my voice or manner a raillery I did not mean to imply, for he inspected my countenance seriously. He had long ago discovered that white men often speak with a forked tongue. But I was sincere, because I had never known a joyous, unfrightened person to become suddenly religious, while I had witnessed a hundred conversions from fear of the devil, hunger, or the future. However, Mapuhi, who was an admirable story-teller, with a dramatic manner and a voice of poesy, had reserved his chef d’oeuvre for the last.

“American,” he said, “If I were a scoffer or unbeliever to-day and I met Huri-Huri and he informed me of what God had done for him, and his neighbors who had seen the thing itself brought their proof to his words, I would believe in God’s goodness. Have you seen Huri-Huri at Rangiora? He lives at the village of Avatoru. He has a long beard. Ah, you have not seen him. Yes, very few Paumotuans have beards, but no Paumotuan ever had the experience of Huri-Huri. He was living in his village of Avatoru, and was forty years old. He was a good diver but getting old for that work. It takes the young to go deep and stay down long. As we grow older that weight of water hurts us. Huri-Huri was lucky. He was getting many large shells, and he felt sure he would pick up one with a valuable pearl in it. He drank the rum the white trader poisons my people with, and he spent his money for tobacco, beef, and cloth. He had a watch but it did not go, and he had some foolish things the trader had sold him. But here he was forty years old, and so poor that he had to go from atoll to atoll wherever there was a rahui because he wanted all these foreign goods.

“This time he was diving in the lagoon of Rangiroa. He was all alone in his canoe, and was in deep water. He had gone down several times, and had in his canoe four or five pairs of shells. He looked again and saw another pair, and plunged to the bottom. He had the shells in his sack and was leaving the bank when he saw just above him a shark so big that, as he said, it could have bitten him in half as a man eats a banana. The shark thrust down its nose toward Huri-Huri, and he took out his shells and held them against the beast. He kept its nose down for half a minute but then was out of breath. He was about to die, he believed, unless he could reach the air without the shark following him. He threw himself on the shark’s back, and put his hands in the fish’s gills, and so stopped or partly stopped the shark’s breathing. The shark did not know what to make of that, and hurried upward, headed for the surface by the diver. Huri-Huri was afraid to let go even there, because he knew the mao would turn on him and tear him to pieces. But he took several long breaths in the way a diver understands, and still held on and tore the shark’s breathing-places.

“Now the shark was angry and puzzled, and so rushed to the bottom again, but with the man on his back. The shark had not been able to enjoy the air at the top because he breathes water and not air. Huri-Huri closed his gill openings, and piloted him, and so he came up again and again descended. By pulling at the gills the shark’s head was brought up and he had to rise. All this time Huri-Huri was thinking hard about God and his own evil life. He knew that each second might be his last one in life, and he prayed. He thought of Iona who was saved out of the shark’s belly in the sea where Christ was born, and he asked Iona to aid him. And all the while he jerked at the gills, which are the shark’s lungs. He knew that the shark was dying all the time, but the question was how long could the shark himself hold out, and which would weaken first. Up and down they went for half an hour, the shark’s blood pouring out over Huri-Huri’s hands as he minute after minute tore at the gills. Now he could direct the shark any way, and often he guided him toward the beach of the lagoon. The shark would swim toward it but when he felt the shallow water would turn. But after many minutes the shark had to stay on top altogether, because he was too far gone to dive, and finally Huri-Huri steered him right upon the sand. Huri-Huri fell off the mao and crawled up further, out of reach of him.

“When the people on shore who had watched the strange fight between the mao and the man came to them both, the fish could barely move his tail, and Huri-Huri was like dead. Every bit of skin was rubbed off his chest, legs, and arms, and he was bleeding from dozens of places. The shark’s body is as rough as a file. When Huri-Huri opened his eyes on his mat in his house, and looked about and heard his wife speak to him, and heard his friends about say that he was the bravest and strongest Paumotuan who ever lived, he said: ‘My brothers, praise God! I called on Iona, and the prophet heard me, and taught me how to conquer the devil that would have killed me in my sin!’ They listened and were astonished. They thought the first thing Huri-Huri would say would be, ‘Give me a drink of rum!’ American, that man is seventy years old now, and for thirty years he has preached about God and sin. Iona was three days and nights in the shark’s belly, but nobody could ride a shark for a half-hour, and conquer him, except a Paumotuan and a diver.”

Mapuhi was glad to be corroborated by LinnÆus in his opinion that a white shark and not a whale had been the divine instrument in teaching the doubting Jonah to upbraid Nineveh even at the risk of his life. The great Swedish naturalist says:

Jonam Prophetum ut veteris Herculem trinoctem, in hujus ventriculo, tridui spatro baesisse, verisimile est.

Also, Mapuhi was deeply interested by my telling him that at Marseilles a shark was caught in which was a man in complete armor. He had me describe a suit of armor as I had seen it in the notable collection in Madrid. He was struck by its resemblance to the modern diver’s suit.

“In the Paumotus,” he said, “the French Government forbids the use of the scaphandre because it cheated the native of his birthright. The merchants, the rich men of Tahiti, could buy and use such diving machinery, but the Paumotuan could not. The natives asked the French government to send away the scaphandre, and to permit the searching for shells by the human being only. I had one of the machines. I could go deeper in it than any diver in the world, so the merchants said. I would go out in my cutter with my men and the scaphandre. I did not put on the whole suit, but only the rubber jacket, on the brass collar of which the helmet was screwed. I fixed this jacket tightly around my waist so that no water could enter, and fastened it about my wrists. Then, with my legs uncovered, I jumped into the lagoon. I had big pieces of lead on my back and breast so as not to be overturned by the weight of the helmet, and an air-hose from the helmet to the pump in the cutter. I would work three hours at a time, but had to come up many times for relief from the pressure.

“One day I was in this suit at the bottom of the lagoon of Hikueru. I had filled my net with shells, and had signaled for it to be hauled up. I was examining a ledge of shells when I felt something touch my helmet. It was a sea-snake about ten feet long and of bright color. It had a long, thin neck, and it was poisonous. I snatched my knife from my belt, and before the snake could bite me I drove the knife into it. It was attacking the glass of my helmet, and not my legs, fortunately. That snake has its enemy, too, for when it lies on the surface to enjoy the sun the sea-eagle falls like a thunderbolt from the sky, seizes it by the back of the head, and flies away with it.

“Another time when I was in the suit, a puhi, a very big eel, wrapped itself about me. I had a narrow escape but I killed it with my knife. In the olden days in Hikueru I would have perished, for that puhi eel, the conger-eel, was taboo, sacred as a god, here and in many islands. To eat that eel or harm him was to break the taboo. More than eighty people of Fakaofa were driven from that island for eating the puhi, and they drifted for weeks before they reached Samoa. The vaaroa, the long-mouthed eel, is dangerous to the diver. It is eight feet long, and Amaru, of Fakarava had the calf of his leg bitten off by one.”

A week I could have listened to Mapuhi. I was back in my childhood with Jules Verne, Ballantyne, and Oliver Optic. Actual and terrifying as were the harrowing incidents of the diving related by the giant, they found constant comparison in my mind with the deeds of my boyish heroes. After all, these Paumotuans were children—simple, honest, happy children. The fate that had denied them the necessaries of our environment, or even the delicious foods and natural pleasures of the high islands, Tahiti and the Marquesas, had endowed them with health, satisfaction with a rigid fare, and an incomparable ability to meet the hardships of their life and the blows of extraordinary circumstance with fortitude and persistent optimism. They had no education and were happier for the lack of it. The white man had impressed their instincts and habits but shallowly. Even their very austerity of surroundings had kept them freer than the Tahitians from the poisonous gifts and suicidal customs of the foreigner. Their God was near and dear to them, and a mighty fortress in time of trouble.

While Mapuhi talked the canoe had returned with the currents nearer to his house, from which we had embarked. It was conspicuous over all the other homes on the motu, though it was a very ordinary wooden structure of five or six rooms. It was not a fit frame for Mapuhi, I thought. This son of the sea and lagoon was suited better to a canoe, a cutter, or the deck of a schooner. He had a companionship with this warm salt water, with the fish in it, and the winds that blew over it, exceeding that of any other man. He drove the canoe on the sand, and we stepped ashore. I lingered by the water as he walked on to his store. In his white, fluttering shirt, and his blue pareu, bare legged and bareheaded, there was a natural distinction and atmosphere of dignity about him that was grandeur. Kingship must have originated in the force and bearing of such men, shepherds or sea-rovers.