
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside
Canada, check your country's copyright laws.
IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY,
DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: The Pearl Lagoon
Author: Nordhoff, Charles Bernard (1887-1947)
Date of first publication: 1924
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: TAB Books, January 1960
Date first posted: 12 April 2011
Date last updated: 12 April 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #769

This ebook was produced by
David T. Jones, Ross Cooling, Al Haines
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

The printed edition used to create this ebook included a
cover illustration by Charles Beck, which has been omitted
from this ebook for copyright reasons.






_E MAO! A SHARK!_

"I leaned over with the rest, watching with acute suspense. . . . No--he
had seen Ofai and was turning back toward the deep crevice in which the
diver had taken refuge. . . .

"An exclamation of horror went up from the men. . . .

"Thirty seconds passed. My uncle had reached the limit of his endurance.
He spoke to Fatu sharply: "'Your goggles! That knife! The other
weight!'"

Priceless pearls lay beneath the lagoon's blue surface. A treasure only
for the brave.




About the Author


Charles Bernard Nordhoff broke into print at the age of 16 with an
article for an ornithological journal called the _Auk_.

"If I had my life to live over again, I should do the necessary
groundwork and become a professional anthropologist. All my life I have
loved shooting, fishing, sailing or traveling through the wild country
alone or with a single companion."

Love of far places took Nordhoff and his friend James Norman Hall to
Tahiti soon after they finished writing the history of the famous
Lafayette Flying Corps of World War I. Nordhoff, an early volunteer, won
the Croix de Guerre for his exploits.

In Tahiti Nordhoff and Hall came upon one of the famous sea stories of
all time--the story of cruel but courageous Captain Bligh. Out of this
research came _Mutiny on the Bounty_, _Men Against the Sea_, and
_Pitcairn's Island_.

Nordhoff married Pepe Teara. They had six children--four daughters and
two sons. He died in 1947 at the age of 60.

Into _The Pearl Lagoon_ Charles Nordhoff wove his love and knowledge of
the South Pacific islands and their people. It is his only story written
through the eyes of young people. Ever since its publication _The Pearl
Lagoon_ has won an ever-widening enthusiastic audience. The Teen Age
Book Club makes this favorite available in paperback for the first
time.




  By CHARLES NORDHOFF

  The Pearl Lagoon

  _Cover illustration by Charles Beck_


  A TAB BOOK

  Published and distributed by TAB Books, Inc., an affiliate of
  Scholastic Magazines, 33 West 42nd Street, New York 36, N. Y.




  To
  WALTER AND SARAH C. W. NORDHOFF
  Dear Parents and Understanding Friends
  Whose Grandchildren, I Hope, Will
  One Day Read This Book

         *     *     *     *     *

  Copyright 1924 by The Atlantic Monthly Press

  This unabridged edition is reprinted by arrangement with Little, Brown &
  Company, by whom the work is published in association with The Atlantic
  Monthly Press. Published in 1955 by Teen Age Books, Inc. for
  distribution through the Teen Age Book Club.


  Printing History

  1st printing        January, 1956
  2nd printing          April, 1957
  3rd printing        January, 1960

  Printed in the U.S.A.




  CONTENTS


  _CHAPTER_                              _PAGE_

   1. The Coming of the Schooner             1

   2. The Pearls of Iriatai                 13

   3. Aboard the Tara                       30

   4. At Faatemu                            46

   5. Iriatai                               59

   6. The End of the Shark                  74

   7. South Sea Fishermen                   86

   8. I Turn Pearl Diver                    95

   9. The Cave of the Shark God            114

  10. The Cholita Comes to Iriatai         121

  11. Piracy                               141

  12. "Boarders!"                          152

  13. Tahiti                               168




  Other Books by Charles Nordhoff


  THE FLEDGLING
  PICARO

  (with James Norman Hall)

  THE LAFAYETTE FLYING CORPS
  FALCONS OF FRANCE
  MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY[1]
  MEN AGAINST THE SEA[1]
  PITCAIRN'S ISLAND
  THE HURRICANE

[Footnote 1: _TAB Club Selections_]




  1. The Coming of the Schooner


We lived on the coast of California, on the Spanish grant my grandfather
had purchased from the mission which still stands, deserted and
crumbling, in the Santa Brigida Valley. Our house, built long before the
Civil War, overlooked the lower end of the valley, from a knoll above
the salt marshes at the river mouth. The house was built in the form of
a hollow square, surrounding a paved court. The walls were of
adobe,--sun-dried bricks of clay, mixed with a little straw,--four feet
thick, and pierced by small grated windows, designed for loopholes more
than for the admittance of light and air. The beams and rafters were of
roughhewn pine, carried down from the mountains by the Santa Brigida
Indians, a tribe long since extinct, and the same patient workers had
moulded and baked the old red tiles of the roof.

My father and my uncle Harry Selden had been brought up to the
half-Spanish life of old California. For ten miles along the coast and
six miles inland the land was theirs, and in those days three thousand
head of cattle, bearing my grandfather's brand, grazed on the mesas and
filed down in long lines to drink. When the brothers were young, the
grizzly still lingered around the hills, tracks of deer and mountain
lion were everywhere, the quail trotted in thousands along the river
bottom, and in the winter months the plains along the seacoast were
clamorous with flocks of wild geese, feeding on the rich grass. But
times were changing, and little by little, civilization was creeping in.
A church and a schoolhouse were built in the township north of us; taxes
were raised; and finally a party of surveyors appeared, running a line
for the new railway. My grandfather abhorred the idea of a railway
passing through his land; he made a bitter fight and would not give in
till his own lawyer showed him that if he refused to accept what was
offered for the right of way, the law would force him to do so for the
public good. He died a short time after the trains began to run.

The brothers were young men at that time, and as their mother had been
dead for many years, their friends supposed that they would carry on the
ranch in a sort of family partnership. But Uncle Harry, in his love of a
wild and independent life, was my grandfather over again. He announced
that he had had enough of civilization, persuaded my father to buy out
his share of the Santa Brigida, and bade his brother and his friends
good-bye. I remember, when I was very small, how eagerly we looked
forward to the letters my father used to read aloud to us: accounts of
African gold-mining; of wanderings in Central America and Mexico; of
great cattle-ranches--_estancias_, Uncle Harry called them--in the
Argentine; of voyages along the barren Chilean coast; of storms and
shipwrecks among distant archipelagoes. In the end he settled as a
trader, a buyer of copra and pearl-shell, in the South Seas.

As for my father, he was content to marry and to stay at home, but he
clung to his cattle stubbornly, refusing to farm or to sell an acre of
his land and growing poorer with each year that passed. He often said
that we would never starve and that our land was constantly increasing
in value, but at such times my mother used to rise from her chair with a
sigh and walk out alone among her roses in the court. She was a patient
woman and she loved my father dearly, but I knew that the sale of only a
few acres among all our thousands would have provided her with many
things she craved. What with dry years and low prices, our taxes ate up
nearly all the profits from the cattle. We could never afford a
motor-car or the occasional trips to San Francisco of which our
neighbors' children gave me glowing accounts, yet outside of such
luxuries, I must own that we had little need of ready money. Our own fat
steers provided us and our men with beef; my mother was superintendent
of a garden which furnished more vegetables than we could eat; and in
the fall and winter game was still plentiful enough to be a real
resource.

Our circumstances had made me a rather serious boy, fond of solitude and
given to endless daydreams--dreams of returning from vague goldmines or
speculations in land with a fortune, to be invested in the ranch and to
provide my mother with travel, and rest, and pretty clothes. On my rides
to school along a five-mile stretch of coast, where the pearly fog
billowed about the hills and the Pacific broke lazily beyond the dunes,
I lived in a world of pure fancy, from which the sight of San Isidro,
with its single dusty street, its stores, and hideous frame schoolhouse,
recalled me daily with an unpleasant start. All through the week I lived
only for the coming Saturday, when I would be free to shoot, or fish in
the surf, or ride out with our men to track down some band of half-wild
steers, hidden in the thick oak scrub of the foothills.

It was on a Saturday that my uncle came. I was fifteen that winter, and
ten years had gone by since he had visited us last, but I had not
forgotten his lean powerful figure, or the black eyes lighting up a face
tanned to an unfading brown, or the stories he had told a wondering
youngster of five, sitting on his knee by the fireplace.

The month was February, as I remember it, for the wild mustard was tall
and green on the hills and scattered cock-quail were perched on the
fenceposts, filling the air with the long sweet whistle of their
mating-time. We were early risers, all of us, and at dawn, as I was
eating the breakfast my mother had prepared, she asked me if I would
take my gun and try for some wild duck on the marshes. There would be
guests from San Isidro tomorrow, and a few brace of duck would be a
treat for people from the town. I assented joyfully, for such a request
meant that ammunition would be furnished from my father's store, and I
loved nothing more than the long lazy hours in a blind, where one could
watch the strings of wild fowl trailing across the sky.

I had good sport that morning, hidden close to a shallow pool behind the
dunes. As I waded across the marsh, carrying my gun and half-a-dozen
wooden decoys, a cloud of teal rose quacking from the grass and headed
seaward on beating wings. The redhead were beginning to fly northward
from their wintering grounds on the lonely Mexican lagoons; small flocks
of them, led by drakes with heads glinting like burnished copper in the
sunlight, rose from the creeks ahead of me and sped away, low over the
sand hills. At the place that I had chosen for my shooting, I unwound
the anchor-lines of the decoys, tossed them far out into the pool, and
built myself a rough shelter of pickle-weed, strung on stakes pounded
into the mud. I found an old piece of board for a seat, loaded my gun,
laid out a box of cartridges within easy reach, and settled myself
luxuriously to wait.

Next moment I glanced upward and crouched down lower than before,
cocking my old-fashioned hammer-gun. High in the air above the marsh, a
flock of sprig was descending in great spiral curves, the wind humming
musically through the rigid flight-feathers of their wings. Lower and
lower they swung, while my pulse raced as I peeped over the edge of the
blind. I could see the snowy breasts of the drakes, the feathers of
their long forked tails, and their heads turning this way and that as
they scanned the marsh warily for signs of danger. They had seen the
decoys, and as they swept past me, still out of range, I called to them,
imitating the feeble quack of the hen bird. Then, while I held my
breath, they turned again, low over the pool, and came sailing straight
at me--necks up and feet dropping to settle among the decoys. My hands
were trembling a little, but I took careful aim at the old
white-breasted leader, pulled the trigger, and saw him crumple and
strike the water with a mighty splash. Wild with alarm, another drake
came towering above my head, and leaning backward till I nearly fell off
my seat, I let drive with the left barrel and watched him fold his wings
and come down plunging to the grass.

I can recall that warm winter morning as if it were yesterday: the
steady thunder of the breakers, the perfume of the salt marsh, the wisps
of cloud drifting across a soft blue sky. Flock after flock of wild fowl
came speeding in from the sea, circled the marsh, set their wings to
alight, bounded upward, scattering, at the reports of my gun, and headed
back for the ocean--fast-vanishing dots above the dunes. Once a wedge of
geese passed at a great height overhead, flying northward with slow
steady wing-beats, thrilling me with the hoarse music of their voices.
My life seemed cramped and narrow as I gazed at these free rovers of
the sky, travelers beyond the far rim of the horizon north and south.

The warm sun and the drowsy chirping and buzzing of insects in the grass
brought on a nap that caught me unaware. It must have been mid-day when
I awoke with a little start, to sit up and rub my eyes, wondering for an
instant where I was. Unloading my gun, I waded out after the decoys and
strung my dead birds on a thong of leather. Then, yielding to a habit of
those days, I climbed to the top of a sand hill, for a look at the
beach. Next moment I nearly shouted aloud in the excitement of what I
saw.

Close inshore, not far beyond the outer line of breaking seas, a
two-masted schooner was rounding into the wind. She was painted white
and her sails shivered crisply in the light air. One needed small
knowledge of ships to appreciate the beauty of the little vessel: the
high sharp bows, the graceful sweep of sheer, the slender masts, the
taut lines of shroud and stay. The sight of a ship was rare along our
stretch of coast. At long intervals we saw a trail of smoke far out to
sea--the steamer trading between San Francisco and the west coast of
Mexico--but this was the first time within my memory that a vessel of
any kind had passed so close to shore. And she was not merely passing,
for I saw now that her crew was sliding a long double-ended boat over
the rail. Three men sprang into the whaleboat: a pair of oarsmen who
seated themselves and began to pull toward shore, and a man in blue, who
stood in the stern, holding a steering-sweep with one hand and waving
good-bye to a gigantic figure at the schooner's wheel. The giant raised
his hand in an answering wave; the schooner bore off, her sails filled,
and she headed out to sea, heeling gracefully to the breeze.

There had been a storm in the north and the swell was high that day.
Even from my perch on the dune, the approaching boat was invisible each
time it swung down into the trough. It was just beyond the breakers now,
and as it rose on the crest of a wave I saw that the oarsmen had ceased
to pull and that the man with the steering-sweep had turned his head and
was watching the rearing seas astern. The ground swell, as I have said,
was very high, rolling shoreward a good ten feet from trough to ridge,
and I began to wonder how these three men would win the beach through
the turmoil of white water ahead of them. Rearing and tossing as the
water shoaled, three or four great waves passed under the boat and
crashed forward, racing toward the beach in walls of foam. Then, clear
above the thunder of the surf, I heard a vibrant shout--a command in
some strange foreign tongue. The men on the seats tugged with a sudden
desperate effort at their oars; the man astern, with a single heave of
his sweep, turned the boat straight in toward where I lay. He was
smoking a cigar, and I felt a thrill of admiration at the easy, careless
way he stood at his post. A tremendous comber, with patches of foam
beginning to appear along its crest, lifted the boat high in air and
swept it forward tilting on the brink of a foaming wall. The wave
tumbled and crashed and came rushing far up the beach.

The boat grounded with a gentle shock and the two oarsmen leaped
overboard to hold her against the strong backwash. They were brown men,
I saw: great brawny fellows more than six feet tall, with handsome
good-natured faces and teeth that flashed when they smiled. The
steersman sprang out on the damp sand and gave an order, at which his
men dropped a pair of light rollers on the beach and began to drag the
boat up beyond highwater mark. Then he came strolling toward the sand
hill where I lay hidden in the grass.

He was dressed in blue serge--a double-breasted coat with brass
buttons--and a blue yachting-cap with a white crown. His age must have
been forty or forty-five, but he was straight as an Indian and carried
himself like a boy. His face, of a humorous and rather reckless cast,
was tanned almost to the shade of the brown sailors toiling with the
boat, and his black eyes were the most brilliant I have ever seen.

His eyes betrayed him. He tossed away the burned-down cigar, folded his
arms, and came walking slowly toward my hiding-place, gazing about him
with a half-smile on his lips, as if this lonely beach recalled a train
of pleasant memories. I was peering down over a clump of rank salt grass
when he glanced up and looked directly into my eyes.

"Uncle Harry!" I shouted as I came sliding and tumbling down the steep
face of the dune. His strong hands seized me and lifted me to my feet.

"You're Charlie, eh?" he said, when he had looked me up and down with a
smile that took me back to evenings by our fireside, ten years before.
"You've done well to remember me all this time! By Jove! I'd never have
known you in the world! Here, let's have another look. A chip of the old
block, I reckon--you're going to have your grandfather's mouth. Well, I
never liked a soft man. How are you all? Did you sight me from the
house? Been shooting, eh--let's see your birds."

I led him across the dunes to where I had left my gun and string of
duck. At his request I undid the throng about their necks and laid them
out on the sand, while he took them up one by one, spreading a wing to
admire the changing colors of the speculum, or smoothing the feathers of
a glossy head. At last he sighed, as he cut the end of a fresh cigar and
looked up at me.

"Ah, Charlie, it takes me back," he remarked. "Many and many a time
I've shot over this pond! I had an old muzzle-loader, twice the weight
of that gun of yours. On a Friday night your grandfather used to say:
'Which one of you is going down to the marsh to-morrow to get me a mess
of duck?' and I always landed the job. Your daddy liked to work with the
cattle; he reckoned shooting was a chore, like splitting kindling, or
driving the milk-cows in from pasture. But it's time for _kaikai_, and
I'm keen to see Ben and Mary after all these years. And Marion--she'll
be seventeen now, eh? Ill bring my boys up to the house for a bite; the
swell was too high to drop anchor, so I told the mate to stand off and
on till I came out."

He turned toward the beach and called the sailors in his strong vibrant
voice: "_E Ivi! E Ofai e!_" A moment later I saw the two brown men
trotting across the dunes. Their feet were bare and they wore sailor
jackets and trousers of dungaree. Their round caps bore the schooner's
name, Tara, woven in silver thread upon the bands.

"Good lads," remarked my uncle, as they drew near. "Paumotu boys from
Rangiroa--they've been with me since the Tara was built. Shake hands
with them before we start." He spoke to the sailors in their own tongue,
telling them that I was his brother's son, and they smiled as they gazed
at me with the frank curiosity of savages. At a word from Uncle Harry,
one of them picked up my gun and birds, and I led the way around the
marsh to the Santa Brigida road.

We had not walked more than half a mile when we met my father, who had
sighted the schooner and was now riding down to the beach.

"Harry!" he exclaimed, his bearded face transformed by an expression I
had never seen; and in an instant he was off his horse and wringing my
uncle's hand. "It's like you to drop in this way, without an hour's
warning, but your welcome will be all the warmer for that! It's good to
see you, old fellow! You're looking well--your cannibal islands must
agree with you. What do you think of this uncle of yours, eh, Charlie?
He wouldn't for the world drop me a wire a day or two ahead, or arrive
by train or motor-car, like a civilized man. Nothing will do but to come
in a schooner and land like a pirate on the beach! But come along to the
house and bring your men; I can't offer them missionary, if that's their
usual diet, but we killed a steer yesterday, and there's plenty of fresh
beef."

"Well, Ben," said Uncle Harry, still clasping my father's hand, "ten
years haven't changed you, after all! I can't tell you how good it is to
be back on the Santa Brigida again! Your boy says that Mary and Marion
are well--come, I want to see them; let's be getting along. Ill bring my
sailors, if I may. No need to ask how you are--rugged as an old grizzly,
eh?"

At sight of Uncle Harry my mother forgot her cares, and only the joy of
preparing dinner for him persuaded my sister Marion to leave his side.
We dined at midday in the old-fashioned manner, and that afternoon we
lingered long at table, until a whispering buzz of talk from the
courtyard told us that the news had spread--that my grandfather's old
retainers were assembling to greet the boy they had known so many years
before. Motioning us to keep our places, Uncle Harry rose from his chair
with a smile and walked out through the door to the sunny court beyond.

I heard a chorus of exclamations in Spanish: "Don Enrique! Patroncito!
Ay, Dios Mio!" and the voice of old Juana, the white-haired woman who
had nursed him as a child, sobbing aloud as she murmured over and over:
"My child, my child--you have not forgotten old Juana, no?" He had an
almost uncanny faculty for winning people's love.

We sat late that evening about the fire of oak logs in the living-room.
Even to-day the scent of wood smoke brings back the picture of that
long, dim-lit room, with its ceiling, so lofty that parts of it were
lost in shadow, crossed by great roughhewn beams, blackened by half a
century of smoke. The heads of antelope and deer and bighorn looked down
from the walls, and close to the chimney my grandfather's silver-mounted
spurs and old Sharp's rifle hung from a peg. The floor was covered with
the skins of animals that he had shot: wildcat and mountain lion;
grizzlies from San Gorgonio and Temescal; a moth-eaten buffalo-robe from
the days when he had crossed the plains.

At last we rose to bid my mother and Marion good-night. Eager to hear
what my uncle would have to say, I seated myself inconspicuously in a
high-backed chair, and at that moment my father turned and noticed me.
"Bedtime, Charlie," he said in his firm, kindly way. But Uncle Harry was
of a different mind.

"Let him sit up for once," he put in, with a twinkle in his dark eyes.
"I want to have a yarn with you, and I want Charlie to hear what I have
to say. Don't complain if I keep you up the best part of the night, for
this is my only chance. I am going to tell you a story, which will
explain why I must leave tomorrow, and why I ask you to let Charlie go
with me when I sail."

"Sailing tomorrow!" exclaimed my father, sitting up suddenly in his
chair. "And you want to take Charlie away! That's a deuce of a thing to
tell me the first time I've seen you for ten years! Why in the world
must you rush away so fast?"

My uncle smiled a wry smile.

"It's hard to leave so soon," he said. "I wish I could spend a month or
two with you, wandering over the old place and having a bit of sport.
But I'm short of time. I've been in San Francisco, having a motor
installed in the Tara, and the people at the shipyard were slow. I would
have communicated with you, but I didn't want to make any rash promises,
and it began to look as if I wouldn't have time to put in here at all.
Ill be up next year for a real visit--on my word; but tomorrow I must
sail; I'm going to take Charlie with me if I have to sit up all night
persuading you."

Uncle Harry gave me one of his brilliant glances, tempered with a wink,
and I felt my heart beat with excitement at the prospect opening
suddenly before me. He rose to his feet, took a pair of long thin cigars
from his case, offered one to my father, and sank back into his chair,
cocking his heels high against the rough stone of the fireplace.

"Now," he went on, blowing a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, "if
you're not too sleepy, I'm going to tell you how I came to hear of the
pearls in Iriatai Lagoon."




  2. The Pearls of Iriatai


"Iriatai," my uncle began, "is an atoll in the Paumotus--a narrow ring
of land nowhere more than a few yards high, surrounding a lagoon ten or
twelve miles across. The island has a curious history, for its people
were the last to remain savages among all the eighty islands of the
group. It is a lonely place, far out to the eastward where trading
schooners seldom pass, and long after the missionaries had civilized the
other atolls, Iriatai remained unknown--no white man had landed on its
beaches, or laid eyes on the wild people whose village was screened by
the dense bush along the shore.

"In those days there was a famous Catholic school on Mangareva in the
Gambier group, and one year, at Christmas time, a brig set sail from
Tahiti for the South, with a cargo of trade, and half a dozen children
of wealthy half-caste families, sent to be educated by the Church. A
week after the brig's departure, a gale came roaring down out of the
northwest--a storm so fierce and long-continued that old men speak of it
to this day. On Tahiti there was great anxiety for the vessel's safety,
and no one was surprised when many months later a schooner came north
from Mangareva, with word that the brig had never arrived. It was an
old story,--another ship lost somewhere in the lonely spaces of the
South Pacific,--but there was one woman on Tahiti who refused to believe
that the vessel was lost. She was a rich widow whose only child, a
flaxen-haired girl of eight, was missing with the others, and she
offered great rewards to anyone who could bring her news of the ship.

"One day a trading skipper came to her with a clue. On his last trip
through the Paumotus he had been blown far out of his course, and while
hove-to in a heavy sea, he had raised an island only vaguely marked on
the charts. He ran in to take shelter in the lee, and as they stood off
and on, close to the leeward reef, the lookout had reported people
ashore. Taking up his glass, the captain made out a crowd of savages
standing on the beach. They brandished spears and were dressed in
girdles of pandanus leaf, but two or three of them wore about their
shoulders pieces of cloth which the skipper took to be of European make.
He was an old-timer in the islands, and he was certain that no trader
had ever visited the place.

"The widow lost no time in fitting up an expedition at her own expense.
The skipper who had seen the savages on Iriatai was given command; the
old man is living in Papeete today--I had the yarn from him. He picked
up half a dozen Rangiroa boys and armed them with rifles in case of
trouble, though they were instructed not to shoot unless attacked.

"After a fortnight of beating about, they raised the palms of Iriatai,
sailed in through the pass, dropped anchor a stone's throw off the
village, and went ashore. There were canoes hauled up on the beach,
fishing tackle lay about as it had been dropped in haste, and the
thatched huts seemed to have been inhabited within an hour past, but
saving a dog or two and a few half-wild pigs, no living creature was in
sight. The captain heard a shout from one of his men who was exploring
the far end of the village, and the others hastened to the place where
the Christian boy was pointing with horror to the ground. There, close
to the temple of the islanders,--a long platform of rude coral
blocks,--was the _umu tagata_: the oven in which human bodies were
roasted whole. The bones of men, clean-picked by the cannibals of
Iriatai, were scattered on all sides, and hundreds of Chilian silver
dollars--current throughout the Pacific in those days--were arranged in
neat patterns about the cooking-place. A few yards off, mounted on
sharpened stakes along the coral wall, a row of heads was drying in the
sun, and one of them--a small head from which hung wisps of long flaxen
hair--made the whole story clear. The widow's daughter had been found.

"The skipper was sickened--if he had caught the people then, he told me,
he would have slaughtered them like sheep. Calling to his men, he set
off recklessly through the bush, resolved to shoot down the savages at
sight. Hour after hour the searchers struggled through the dense green
bush, scratched by thorns, streaming with perspiration, stumbling over
the sharp coral underfoot. It was a hot still day, and the jungle was
lifeless and strangely quiet. No leaf stirred, no bird sang, and the
drooping fronds of palms hung motionless overhead. Nothing moved
anywhere saving the small white sea-birds which circled eerily, high
above the tree-tops. The oppression of the bush cooled the skipper's
anger and lowered the spirits of the searching-party; no word had been
spoken for half an hour when they sat down in silence to rest, close to
a pile of jagged coral blocks. Leaning against a tree-trunk, with his
rifle between his knees, the captain was in the act of filling a pipe
when one of the men touched his arm, signing him to make no sound. To
one side of them, in the bleached mass of coral, there was a faint
scratching noise, and presently, as they watched, a brown hand and arm
appeared for an instant in a crevice of the rocks.

"'That is their hiding-place,' the native breathed into the skipper's
ear. 'I have heard my own people speak of such caverns, where they took
refuge in the old wars.'

"The captain thought for a moment before he spoke. 'Go alone to the
mouth of the cave,' he whispered to the boy beside him. 'Our rifles will
protect you. See if you can talk to the savages, and if they understand
you, try to persuade one or two of the men to come out.'

"The native rose and stole away, and soon they heard his voice calling
softly in the Paumotan tongue. He seemed to be in conversation with the
people underground. When he returned there was an odd smile on his lips.
'It is strange,' he said, 'those people speak a tongue such as our old
men use. They are like beasts or cruel children, killing because they
know no better, or are afraid. I do not believe that they are evil men.
There is no entrance to the cave--only a little hole in the rock,
through which a man may thrust his hand and arm. The place is sacred in
these people's eyes and on the ground close to the hole there is an
offering of food. They feared it might betray their hiding-place; the
man we saw was trying to reach it from within. There is another way out,
they said, knowing that I could never find the place. To reach it, they
swim beneath the water of the lagoon. We cannot get in from above; all
our strength would not suffice to move the rocks. They are afraid to
come out, but perhaps I might persuade them if I could show gifts such
as they have never seen.'

"The captain collected a few bright trifles among his men: a mirror or
two, a gaudy bandanna handkerchief, a clasp knife with a glittering
blade. The native returned to parley with the savages, and while he was
gone the skipper gave instructions to his men--they were to scatter a
little and lie hidden; if the wild people found courage to leave their
cave, and they were not too many, they were to be seized and bound at
once.

"An hour passed. Then, without the warning crackle of a twig, two
savages stepped from the bush and came toward the native who awaited
them, holding out gifts and speaking encouragingly. They were naked save
for light girdles of grass, and their shocks of hair were tied in high
knots upon their heads. The captain whistled, and a moment later the two
men of Iriatai lay triced and helpless on the ground.

"The schooner sailed for Tahiti the same night, carrying the prisoners,
whose evidence--the story, freely told, of how the wrecked brig had been
plundered before she broke up, and how every soul aboard had been
massacred--was placed before the French authorities. A few months later
a man-of-war was sent to Iriatai, with one of the prisoners as
interpreter, and the people of the island were carried off to Tahiti to
be civilized. In the end, the chief was executed in reprisal for the
island's crime, and his people were taken away to distant atolls of the
group.

"Only one of them, so far as I know, ever returned to Iriatai--Turia,
the chief's daughter, a girl of eleven or twelve when she was carried
off aboard the man-of-war. Her beauty and intelligence attracted the
notice of a half-caste Tahitian, who adopted her and gave her an
education at the Sisters' School. At seventeen she married the Baron von
Tesmar--an Austrian nobleman, a man of wealth and taste, brought up
among the capitals of the Old World. He was well-known in all the
outlandish ports of the Pacific; for reasons of his own, of which he
never spoke, he had chosen to shut the door on the past. He traveled on
his own yacht with a Kanaka crew, and during a visit to Tahiti he ran
across Turia, the girl from Iriatai. A month later she sailed away with
him, with a marriage certificate, all legal and shipshape, stowed away
in her camphorwood box. I suppose she must have been the Baroness von
Tesmar--By Jove, a funny world!

"The natives have a quality I like: each one of them loves his own
island in a way that we can scarcely understand. Turia was no exception,
but unlike the rest of her people, she ended her days on Iriatai. A
short time after he married her the Baron became interested in
pearl-culture and--at her suggestion, no doubt--they settled on the
island where her savage forefathers had lived and died.

"To give you an understanding of the story from now on, I must tell you
one or two things about pearl-shell, which furnishes the mother-of-pearl
used all over the world for buttons and ornaments and the handles of
knives. In the Paumotus where I trade, the pearl-oysters are of a kind
called 'black-lipped,' valuable as mother-of-pearl but rather barren so
far as real pearls are concerned. Out to the west, about Celebes and in
the Sulu Sea, there is another variety, richer in pearls and far more
valuable as shell, called 'gold-lipped,' because the edges of the shell
are golden-tinted. Von Tesmar was a man of some scientific attainments,
and he suspected, far ahead of his time, that the growth of a pearl in
the oyster was caused by a parasite, which it might be possible to
transmit by artificial means. In order to carry out his experiments, he
had his schooner fitted with a kind of well, through which the sea water
was allowed to circulate, and brought shipments of live oysters from
distant parts, to be transplanted in Iriatai Lagoon. He may have had an
idea that the gold-lipped oysters, in this new environment, would prove
more susceptible to infection--to the little-known parasite believed to
cause the pearl.

"The Baron's career, his studies of the pearl, and his new settlement on
Iriatai were all ended by the hurricane of 1881. The island had been one
of the finest of the Paumotus, with dense groves of coconuts and a deep
soil on the higher spots, but when I first landed there, in ninety-six,
it was a waste of sand and tumbled coral-blocks, clean-swept from end to
end by breaching seas. On an islet, far down the lagoon, a small clump
of palms remained--the only living things, save Turia and her child, to
survive the fury of the sea.

"The settlement was at the weather end, and when the seas began to
breach across into the lagoon, von Tesmar's schooner was anchored fifty
yards offshore. Both cables snapped and she disappeared in an instant
among the driving clouds downwind. She must have piled up at the leeward
end, or perhaps she was carried clean over into the open sea beyond. At
any rate, no man of her crew was ever seen again. The people of the
settlement--a dozen natives with their wives, brought by von Tesmar to
labor in the oyster-beds--had no time to chop off the tops of the palms
in which they took refuge. A pair of old palms, eighty feet high,
flexible and tough as whalebone, stood close beside the house. High up
on the bole on one, the Baron tied himself, and Turia swarmed up the
other, her three-year-old boy lashed to her back.

"It is useless to try to describe a South Sea hurricane. One after
another, the houses were carried away. Each frothing comber seemed to
rush over the land more fiercely than the last; the wind came in gusts
that bent the palms like reeds. With a sound audible above the uproar
of the hurricane, a palm-bole snapped, and its top, with two human
beings clinging among the fronds, sped off to vanish in the wrack.
Turia's was the last to withstand the wind; she watched the others
go--men, women, and babies at their mothers' breasts--and finally a
faint, splitting report close by told her that von Tesmar's palm had
given way. Next moment her own refuge went, and still clinging to the
upper bole, she was sailing above the torn white surface of the lagoon.
How she survived the impact, disentangled herself from the wreckage, and
lived through miles of angry water is a thing that I have never
understood. When she struggled ashore on the islet which was the only
land above the sea, her child was still alive. No one but a Paumotan
could have done it, and no woman of any other race could have lived and
supported her child--as Turia did for many weeks--on coconuts and the
fish she was able to catch with her bare hands. In the end, the lookout
of a passing schooner saw her signal-smoke."

My uncle's cigar had gone out and he rose for a moment to scratch a
match against the fireplace. The lamp was turned low; the glowing logs
on the andirons sent waves of light flickering among the shadows of the
room. My father stood up to stretch his legs. Standing with hands
clasped behind his back, he gazed quizzically at his brother, seated in
the deep old leather chair.

"That's a good story of yours, as far as it goes," he observed; "but
what has all of this to do with you, or with the fact that you can spend
only one day with us?"

"No wonder you're growing impatient," said Uncle Harry, with a smile.
"It must seem an interminable yarn, but it's all linked together, as you
will see. I came into it about ten years ago, when I took a lease on
Iriatai. It was just after my last visit here. A friend suggested that I
have a look at the island with a view to planting coconuts--they thrive
wonderfully in the coral of the atolls. I had heard half-legendary
accounts of von Tesmar and his pearls, but such experiments are not
taken seriously in the islands, where so many cranks have tried this
scheme or that, and failed. The lagoon had never been a place for shell.

"I met Turia when I landed there. Von Tesmar had left her a little money
in the Papeete bank, and after a year of civilization, she had been
overpowered by the homing instinct of her race. Her husband had
relatives in German Samoa--the directors of a great Apia
trading-house--and she took her child to them before she set out to end
her days on Iriatai. Then she chartered a small schooner and sailed away
with a couple of poor native families and a stock of provisions and
seed-coconuts. I found her happy in a lonely sort of life, settled in a
one-room cottage, surrounded by groves of fine twelve-year-old palms.
The place was furnished with a bed, an accordion, and a chest of
camphorwood; a portrait of von Tesmar, in the uniform of an officer of
dragoons, hung on the wall. There must have been a human side of this
man's character, for his widow remembered him with a devotion hard to
match.

"She was the only claimant to rights in the island, and I had no
difficulty in gaining her consent. Within a year I obtained from the
French Government a long lease on Iriatai and now there are sixty
thousand young palms on the island, some of them already beginning to
bear. Another hurricane? We can't afford to think of that--they strike
an island not more than once in every hundred years. During the visits
when I carried labor and supplies to Iriatai, Turia used to spin me
yarns about the hurricane. She was an interesting woman, as those of the
pure old blood are apt to be. When I knew her she was straight and
handsome still--no darker than a woman of southern Spain. Sometimes she
showed me letters from her boy, growing up in far-off Samoa with his
relatives. I did not meet him till after she was dead.

"I needed a rest last year, and as I didn't have time for a run up to
see you all, I decided to take a vacation among the islands--a short
cruise through the Tongan and Samoan groups. One night in Apia, the
German port, I had been dining at the consulate, and as I walked along
the moonlit beach to where my boat's crew awaited me, I was stopped by a
young half-caste, dressed in soiled white duck. He spoke English, and he
looked so miserable, so poor and ill that it needed a thicker skin than
mine to pass him without a word. His body was no more than skin and
bones, and when he turned in the moonlight, I saw the wreck of what had
been a handsome face, ravaged by quick tropical tuberculosis. He spoke
in abrupt sentences, gasping for breath and stopping at intervals to
cough.

"'You English?' he asked. 'No? American, eh? I speak German, French--not
much English. That Tara your schooner? They tell me you go Tahiti
tomorrow. Give me passage, eh? I cook--wash dishes--cabin boy--anything!
I want go Tahiti too much!'

"He turned away from me and leaned over with a hand to his chest,
coughing frightfully; when the paroxysm had passed he stood gasping and
unable to speak. It was impossible not to be sorry for the poor devil.

"'I'll let you know tomorrow,' I told him. 'I'm sailing at sundown. Come
to the beach at four or five o'clock.'

"Next morning, strolling with the American consul, I pointed out the
half-caste, asleep in the shade of a beached canoe. 'Oh, that fellow,'
said the consul. 'Yes, I know him; von Tesmar's his name. Doesn't look
much like a nobleman, does he? As a matter of fact, he's a baron of the
Austrian Empire--when he's drunk enough he'll show you the papers to
prove it! Odd story. His father married a Paumotu woman years ago and
was lost in a hurricane, back in the eighties. The mother brought her
child out here--old Madame Lichtenstein, of the Hamburg Concession, was
the youngster's aunt. The old lady was good to him, sent him to the
Protestant school and finally shipped him off to Europe with plenty of
money to spend. But the cold winters were too much for his native blood,
I guess; t. b. got him after the second year, and as happens so often in
the islands, consumption led to drink. Then one day he turned up here, a
yellow skeleton with a craving for alcohol. The Germans took pity on him
and pensioned him off for a time, but he was sinking rather low, and
finally they cut off the money and ceased to recognize him at all. One
can't really blame them much!'

"I didn't say anything, but I was interested, I'll admit. So this was
Turia's son--the child of the hurricane on Iriatai! He had traveled a
long road since those days; but I suspected that the end was near. Why
should he want to go to the eastern islands? The old instinct of his
mother's blood, perhaps, calling the wanderer home at last to die.

"I gave him a passage, at any rate. He was willing enough, but it was
absurd to talk of working his way--when we'd been out three days I knew
that his eyes would never see another landfall. I put him in a berth in
the spare stateroom. He'd picked up his English on the beach, but in
French you'd have been surprised to hear the fellow talk. With the
interest one cannot help feeling in a dying man, I spent a good deal of
time yarning with him, and finally told him that I had heard something
of his story and had known Turia on Iriatai. He was in a steady low
fever by this time, and our talks seemed to excite him; he asked
endless questions about his mother and her life--the island--the lagoon.

"One night, when I was at the wheel, the cabin boy came on deck, rubbing
the sleep from his eyes, to say that von Tesmar wanted to see me at
once. There was something of great importance to tell me, it seemed. We
were in the middle of the wide, lonely reach of sea that stretches from
Rose Island to the Leeward group. The moon had risen about eleven
o'clock; there was not a cloud in the sky, and a steady breeze blew warm
and fair from the northwest. I had taken the wheel at moonrise and I
hated to go below, but the half-caste's message seemed so urgent that I
called the man on watch to take my place.

"I found von Tesmar gasping in his berth. He had gotten up to undo a
bundle he carried with him, wrapped in a piece of native cloth, and when
I pulled the curtain aside, he held out to me a tattered sheet of cheap
ruled notepaper.

"'For you,' he whispered breathlessly, in the French he had picked up
during an edifying year in Paris. 'Ah, _mon ami_, this is the end--now I
must die, and a glass of your excellent rum would help me to die
gracefully. _Merci bien_--you are kindness personified! I wonder why:
there is so little, in your eyes, that I can do. Yes, this is the end. I
cannot complain--I have had my fun and paid for some of it, at least.
Never again shall I watch the faces passing my table on the boulevard,
nor sit with the brown people in a bush-clearing far from the church,
while the drums throb and the sleek young girls twist and flutter their
hands in the torchlight. No doubt you are thinking that I am a _drole de
type_, and so I am, by training and by birth--half savage, half
_boulevardier_. But the time is short and I weary you with idle
reflections; _allons_, to business! You can read the native Tahitian,
eh? It is difficult for one who knows only Samoan dialect. I had hoped
to keep that paper to myself; the doctors say that men with my malady
are always optimists. But you have treated me as one white man treats
another--keep it, read it, and do as you please. Perhaps it is worth
another glass of rum, _n'est-ce pas_? Another rum for Monsieur le Baron!
They called me that in Paris, at the Grand Hotel--Ha, ha! Noble on both
sides, _bon Dieu_!--my mother a cannibal Princess--Monsieur le Baron von
Tesmar, Prince of Iriatai! How's that for a title, _hein_?'

"At five o'clock, when the moonlight paled before the first flush of
dawn, he turned his face away from me and died. I blew out the light and
went on deck to give orders for his burial. Then, when I had my coffee,
I lay down in my berth and unfolded the paper he had given me. It proved
a quaint document--a letter in the native language from Turia to her
son, written a few days before her death. Here it is--it is worth
translating for your benefit:--

    This from your dear mother, who loves you and prays that God's
    blessing may bring you prosperity and health. _Amen._ I am ill,
    and though the woman who tends me has made medicine, I think
    that I shall soon die. Do not weep for me--I shall be happy to
    be again with your father, whom I have always loved. Now pay
    attention, for there is a thing that I must tell you. Your
    father was a wise man, and his work was to bring pearl oysters
    from foreign seas to this lagoon. After the hurricane, when I
    swam so far with you clinging to my back, I believed for many
    years that the oysters must all be dead, but that was not true.
    In the far end of the lagoon, where no one goes today, I have
    found where the strange shells with edges like gold lie on the
    coral in thousands, not more than fifteen fathoms deep. Many
    times I have gone alone in my canoe to dive for them, and I have
    found fine pearls, great and small. These are true words. The
    white man called Seroni, who brings people to plant coconuts on
    Iriatai, is a good man and my friend, but I have said nothing of
    the pearls to him. They were your father's work, and you will
    want them, since you live in the white man's land. The oysters
    are on coral bottom, midway between the islet and the reef.
    Beware of a great brown shark when you come here to dive; he
    comes sometimes to that end of the lagoon, and twice he has
    nearly had me when I was intent upon my work. I think he is the
    old god of my people, worshiped when I was a child. Farewell, my
    dear son--I shall not see you again.

      _On Iriatai, from Turia, to her son, Arno von Tesmar_

"Somehow, as I read this letter, I was convinced that what the woman
said was true. There are nearly a hundred square miles in Iriatai
Lagoon, and though my men did a good deal of fishing, a shell-patch of
the largest size might have escaped their notice for years. No one in
the Eastern Pacific had ever succeeded in acclimatizing the gold-lipped
shell, but that did not prove that it could not be done. If Turia's
words were true, von Tesmar's eagerness to reach the group was
justified. It might prove a rare chance, and I resolved to investigate
at once.

"Fatu, my big mate, is a man that I can always trust. He is a
first-class diver, and when the Tara was anchored at Iriatai, I told him
the story and explained that he must hold his tongue. We took a big
canoe and made camp on the islet at the far end of the lagoon. Even with
Turia's directions, it took us four days to find the shell, but when
Fatu began to bring up the gold-lipped oysters in both hands, I saw that
the dead half-caste had paid his passage a thousandfold.

"My man reported the bottom covered with shell for acres on either
side--a little fortune in mother-of-pearl alone. And pearls--By Jove, I
could scarcely drag Fatu away!

"I didn't dare to linger--there was danger of causing talk. It would
need a dozen or fifteen divers to work the patch properly; the news
would travel like a whirlwind, and I hadn't the shadow of a claim on the
shell. The open lagoons--I must explain--with passes through which a
vessel can enter from the sea are Government property, and during the
legal season any native may dive and keep what he obtains. Unless I did
some careful planning, half the schooners in the South Pacific would
soon be anchored at Iriatai. Well, I headed for Tahiti and did my
thinking on the way. The Governor of French Oceania is a friend of mine.
When we reached Papeete my plans were made and I put the matter up to
his common-sense: By pure chance, in one of the atolls under his
administration I had discovered a brand-new patch of shell. (I said
nothing, of course, about von Tesmar, or the fact that the shell was
golden-lipped.) If properly preserved and worked, this patch might in
the future prove a valuable asset to the Government. As things were, I
could not legally profit by my discovery--any Kanaka diver had as much
right as I to exploit the new lagoon. If I held my tongue, a hundred
years might pass before another man stumbled on the place. In view of
all this, therefore, wouldn't it be fair to give me one season's
exclusive rights, in return for adding a new pearl-lagoon to the five or
six already under French control?

"It struck me as a fair thing to ask, and I had little difficulty with
the Governor. Within a month the papers were delivered to me all signed
and sealed: a year's rights to the shell and pearls of Iriatai. I had
always wanted an engine for the Tara and now I felt that I could afford
one. In the Paumotus, with reefs and five-knot currents and frequent
calms, a motor is better than a dozen insurance policies. Now the
engine's installed and I am heading back without a day to waste. It will
take time to find the men, to build canoes, and get the diving under
way."

       *     *     *     *     *

As he finished his story, my uncle rose and began to pace back and forth
before the fireplace. My father lay in his chair, smoking and making no
comment; I fancy that the glimpse of an adventurous life on the other
side of the world had set his thoughts to wandering. Though it was long
past midnight, I was wide awake.

All at once my uncle stopped beside his brother's chair and stood
looking down at him, with a half-apologetic smile.

"See here, Ben," he said, "I want you to let Charlie come along. A few
months out of school will do no harm and I'll give you my word to have
him back in the fall. I've come to the age when a man feels the need of
youngsters, and yours are all I have. There'll be plenty of work--I need
someone I can really trust. He'll have his share in what we get, of
course, and he'll earn it--I'll see to that. Be a good fellow, and let
him come!"

My father looked up and sighed before he spoke. "Ah, Harry," he
remarked, "you're a lucky man! All your life you've been a
rainbow-chaser and now you seem to have caught up with one at last. It's
hard not to envy you when I hear a story like the one you've told! I
didn't realize what a dull old stay-at-home I had become. As for the
boy, I'm tempted to let him go; but you're asking a good deal! You live
in a rough part of the world, if the stories one hears are true. There
must be men down there who would make it hot for you if the news of your
pearl-lagoon leaked out. Even in California we used to hear of the
exploits of Bully Hayes."

My uncle smiled and shook his head.

"Those days are past," he said. "Pease and Hayes are dead, and they've
left no successors in the Eastern Pacific. So far as I know, there's
only one scoundrel of that type left in Polynesia and he operates far
out to the west: 'Thursday Island Schmidt'--ever hear of him? I don't
know him myself, and I'm not hankering to make his acquaintance until
this job is done. But he's never been east of Samoa, and even old
Thursday Island would hesitate to tackle a barefaced holdup nowadays.
Warships and the wireless have ended all that. Let the boy come--I'd be
the last man to drag him into any scrapes."

"He can go, then," said my father, rising from his chair. "I only wish
I'd had such a chance when I was a youngster. But you'll have to talk
his mother around--I wash my hands of that! We'll leave that for
tomorrow, eh? Come, you must be tired; we'd better turn in, all three of
us."

And so the matter was left, while I wandered in a daze to my room and
lay down to spend a night made sleepless by mingled anxiety and
happiness.




  3. Aboard the Tara


It must have taken a deal of talking to win my mother's consent, but
Uncle Harry proved equal to the task. When we had breakfasted he sat
with her for an hour in the courtyard, and afterward, when I saw her
alone, she kissed me and told me that I was to go.

We had guests that day--old friends who had known my uncle when he was a
boy. I sat at dinner with the others, but all I can remember of the meal
is that Uncle Harry praised my ducks. I was still dazed at my good
fortune: my dreams of adventure and of distant wanderings were to come
true at last! A cruise on the Tara in the South Seas--a quest for pearls
in a tropical lagoon--a part in the sequel of my uncle's tale--indeed,
the prospect was enough to intoxicate any boy of fifteen. Iriatai! There
was magic in the word alone, and I repeated it under my breath while the
older people about me spoke of commonplace things.

The sun was low over the Pacific when we said good-bye. The others
accompanied us to the beach: my father and mother, Marion, and our
guests; and in a little group of people from the Santa Brigida I saw old
Juana sobbing, with a shawl pulled over her head. The two sailors
rolled the whaleboat into the wash of the sea; after the final
handclasps, Uncle Harry and I took our places in the stern. The ocean
was calmer than on the day before. Ivi and Ofai watched their time, ran
the boat out in a lull, leaped in to seize their oars, and pulled
seaward through the gentle surf. The mate of the Tara had seen us with
his glasses and the schooner was headed toward the land. Presently we
came alongside, scrambled over the rail, and helped the sailors haul the
boat on deck. My uncle shouted a command; the sheets were slacked away,
and the Tara bore off to the southwest.

I turned for a last look at the watchers on the beach, already so far
distant that they were no more than a patch of color against the dunes.
There was a lump in my throat--it was the first time that I had been
away from home.

"I hate to leave," remarked Uncle Harry, who was standing at my side,
"but we're off now; in the morning we'll be out of sight of land. Come
below and have a look at your quarters. I think you'll like the Tara;
she's my only child!"

The Tara, as I have said, was schooner-rigged--a vessel of a hundred
tons, fast, comfortable, and designed to ride out any sea. A glance
convinced me of her owner's love. The sides were snowy with fresh paint;
the decks of white pine were holystoned till they gleamed spotless
against their seams of pitch; the masts and spars were newly varnished,
and no spot of mildew stained the sails. On the after deck a shallow
cockpit contained the wheel and binnacle. Forward of the cockpit, the
companionway led down to the saloon, where a pair of curtained doors
gave on staterooms to starboard and to port. The woodwork was of bright
mahogany. On either side of the saloon there was a leather-upholstered
lounge, and half a dozen chairs were screwed fast to the floor about a
handsome dining-table. Forward of the saloon was the engine-room, shut
off by a bulkhead from the main hold where burlapped bales and
packing-cases were piled high between decks. The galley was on deck, and
the forecastle was placed far up in the bows, furnished with a
deal-table and berths made of piping on which lengths of heavy canvas
had been stretched.

My uncle's was the larger of the two staterooms. It was fitted with a
washstand and a single berth; a few framed photographs hung on the
walls, a large porthole gave a view of the sea outside, and a steel safe
was built into one corner of the room. The cabin opposite was assigned
to me--it was here that the half-caste son of von Tesmar had breathed
his last.

"You're not afraid of ghosts, eh?" my uncle asked me with a smile. "The
poor devil died in that very bunk, but he's never troubled us since, and
if he did appear, he'd be harmless enough. Come--I want you to know my
boys; excepting the cook I shipped in 'Frisco, I've known them all for
years."

They were Kanakas--brown Polynesians of the islands, akin to the
Hawaiian people and to the Maoris of far-away New Zealand. Ivi and Ofai
I already knew. Fatu, the mate, was a huge silent fellow with a smile in
his quick dark eyes--a nobly proportioned giant. The engineer, Pahuri,
was an elderly Rarotongan with a passion for fishing: a small man, gray,
wrinkled, and talkative. He had followed the sea since boyhood and had
visited many parts of the world on whaling vessels and on merchant
ships. His heart was kind, but he possessed a biting tongue and his
travels had made him cynical. Then came Rairi, the half-caste cook my
uncle had found stranded in San Francisco after a voyage before the
mast. He was a shade lighter than the others, with a handsome, sullen
face: a tall man and powerfully built, though dwarfed in the presence
of the mate. Rairi spoke a little English, picked up along the
waterfront, and had a pleasant manner when he wished to make himself
agreeable, but at other times his features were of a forbidding cast. He
cooked, and cooked well, in his box of a galley, set on the forward deck
above the hold. Outside of his duties he had little to do with the men,
as if his strain of white blood caused him to hold aloof. Last of all
came Marama the cabin boy, who served our meals, polished brasses, and
made himself useful whenever there was an odd job on hand. He was a
brown lad of my own age, though larger and much stronger than I, and I
liked him from the moment we met. He was a cheerful worker, his black
eyes were bright with humor and intelligence, and he never lost his
temper when a lurch of the deck threw a potful of hot coffee over his
feet. His father, Uncle Harry told me, was a chief on Raiatea.

"We're heading straight for Raiatea," said my uncle as we sat at dinner
that night. "I want you to stop there while I run across to unload my
cargo at Tahiti. It's a fine island and the chief of Faatemu is a great
friend of mine. You can put up at his house; I'll leave young Marama to
keep you company. He knows a bit of English--that will help you at
first. By the way, you'll need to pick up the native as fast as you can;
the man who can't speak with them is handicapped. It's easy to learn;
why not work at it during our passage South? I'll help you and so will
any of the men; it always pleases them to find one of us interested in
their language. Try memorizing a few words a day at the start, then the
simple phrases will come to you, and before you know it, you'll be
yarning with the crew.

"The quieter we keep this business the less trouble we'll have, and for
that reason I'm going to pick up my men on Raiatea. There's a Paumotan
colony on the island--we'll have no trouble in getting all the divers we
need. They work two in a canoe, and we'll want fifteen canoes to be on
the safe side. They'll have to be built specially; I want you to stay in
Faatemu to see that they are ready when I return. It's a great place for
fishing and pig-hunting--you'll have a lot of fun!"

When dinner was over we sat on deck for a time, while my uncle smoked
one of his slender black cigars. The sails were furled, for the wind had
died away an hour after sunset. An oily swell was running from the west
and the pulsing of the Tara's engine drove us steadily away from land.
By the dim light of the binnacle I could see that Ofai, at the wheel,
was shivering. Finally he called to Ivi, and the other came aft with a
thick woollen jacket on his arm. Uncle Harry tossed the stump of his
cigar overboard; I heard it hiss for an instant as it struck the sea.

"Come," he said, "let's turn in before we're both frozen. My blood's too
thin for these chilly winters of yours!"

Next day we left the zone of coastwise calms and ran into the northeast
trade. The engine was stopped and the Tara headed southward with all
sails set, running almost free. It is a brave wind, the trade, and it
blew strong and fair, making the whitecaps dance on the dark blue
swells, and driving us southward day after day till we were within a few
degrees of the Line. Each day, at noon, my uncle fetched his sextant on
deck to observe the sun, and I watched him afterward, bending over the
chart in his stateroom, marking off our position with dividers and
scale. Finally, with a very sharp pencil, he made a tiny cross, and I
knew that this mark on the great blank spaces of the mid-Pacific was
where the schooner had been at twelve o'clock.

Sometimes the wind fell away at sunset and the engine chugged steadily
throughout the night; once, when the trade blew day and night without
abating, the Tara reeled off two hundreds knots from noon to noon.

The weather grew warmer day by day. Shoes, stockings, and warm clothing
were stowed away, and the men went about their work in waistcloths, with
brown chests bare. One morning Uncle Harry called me into the trade-room
at the after end of the hold, and handed me half a dozen
_pareus_--strips of cotton print, dyed in barbaric patterns of scarlet
and white, a yard wide and two yards long.

"If I were you," he said, "I'd put away my trousers from now on--shirts
too, if you're not afraid of the sun. My friends call me a savage, but
aboard my own schooner I dress as I please. The natives invented the
pareu, and it's the most sensible dress for this part of the world. It's
cooler than pyjamas at night, and in the morning you have merely to
hitch a fresh one around your waist and you're dressed for the day. Let
me show you the trick of putting it on." He wrapped the cloth about my
waist, tucked in the ends and made a tight roll at the top. "There," he
remarked with a smile, "that's quick dressing, eh?"

From that day we went barefoot and barechested as the sailors did, and I
was soon burned to a uniform deep ruddy brown, only a shade paler than
the native crew.

We were in the tropics now. The ocean was of a vivid blue that I had
never seen. Shoals of flying fish rose before the Tara's cutwater to
skim off above the waves, and sometimes the water about us was alive
with the predatory fish which rove the open sea. One afternoon Marama
showed me how to catch my first albacore in native fashion.

We were standing by the rail, on the after deck. Suddenly, close to the
schooner's side, a dozen great steel-blue fish flashed into the air,
leaping like porpoises. "Albacore!" exclaimed my companion, as he darted
away toward the forecastle. A moment later he was back, brandishing a
twelve-foot pole of heavy bamboo. To the small end of it he made fast a
length of strong cotton line, terminating in a lure of mother-of-pearl
tinted in iridescent shades of yellow and green and fitted with a
barbless hook of brass. The shell was cut and polished to resemble a
six-inch flying-fish, with a tuft of white horsehair projecting on
either side to represent the wings.

The albacore were still leaping and flashing alongside, now darting
ahead, now circling to follow in our wake. Marama tossed his lure
overboard and allowed it to skitter on the waves, holding the butt of
the rod strongly with both hands. There was a flash of blue in the sea;
the lure disappeared; the line snapped taut; the bamboo bent with the
struggles of a powerful fish. A yell burst from my companion's lips. He
braced himself to heave with all his strength, and a thirty-pound
albacore, vibrant and flashing in the sunlight, broke from the water,
sailed over the rail, and thudded to the deck.

"Quick!" shouted Marama. "You try! I kill this one--take him
forward--Seroni no like blood on deck."

My own blood was up and the hint was enough. In an instant the lure was
overboard and I was doing my best with unskilled hands to make it
skitter as the native boy had done. The fish had circled and were
following astern; I could see the spray of their leaping in the
schooner's wake. Then, as I gazed into the clear water, I saw a single
monstrous albacore rushing at my hook. His jaws gaped wide--there was a
mighty wrench; I found myself doubled over the rail, clinging to the rod
with all my strength and shouting for help. Marama had turned to come
aft and his quick eye took in the situation at a glance. He bounded to
the forecastle and came running along the deck, holding aloft a long,
four-pointed spear. "_Tapea maitai!_" he shouted--"Don't let go!" At
that moment, Seroni himself--for that was my uncle's native
name--appeared on deck. He seized the spear from Marama's hand and
sprang to the rail. I was beginning to learn that Uncle Harry prided
himself on excelling the natives in their own pursuits. His arm shot out
in a swift dexterous thrust which transfixed the wallowing fish, so
heavy that we could not lift it till a noose had been thrown over its
tail.

That night, for the first time in my life, I tasted the characteristic
dish of Polynesia: raw fillets of fish, soaked in vinegar and served as
an appetizer.

The trade wind held for sixteen days, and when it died away at last we
were only four hundred miles north of the Line. Then the Tara's sails
were furled and for three days and three nights the engine drove us
southward over a sea ruffled by light airs from the west. I shall never
forget those equatorial nights, when all the others, saving the
steersman and myself, were asleep on deck--the steady pulsing of the
Tara's motor; the calm sea, heaving gently as a sleeper's breast; the
Southern Cross, low down among the blazing constellations. Each day at
dawn the air cooled and freshened; presently the sky to the east began
to pale, the little clouds on the horizon grew luminous with rosy light,
and the sun appeared above the rim of the sea, a disk of dazzling
brightness, glaring like burnished brass. The sunsets, on evenings when
masses of cloud were piled along the western sky, were still more
beautiful. Long after the sun had sunk beyond the slope of the world the
clouds were tinted with opal and rose, and pierced by lofty shafts of
golden light.

We crossed the Line and met the southeast trade, blowing from the
far-off Chilean coast. Then the sheets were close-hauled and the Tara
began to beat southward, pitching and bucking into the head sea. Marama
brought racks to hold the dishes on our table; we moved about the deck
in short runs, grasping at the rail or a convenient stay; and for the
first time I felt a landsman's seasick qualms. The constant tossing made
all hands irritable, and brought on the trouble between Pahuri and the
cook.

I heard from Marama how the affair began. Fatu and the engineer ate
their meals forward with the men, old friends and natives like
themselves, with whom there was no occasion to enforce strict
discipline. Pahuri, the little Rarotongan engineer, was the oldest man
and the recognized story-teller of the crew. He had seen many strange
parts of the world, and no doubt, like other story-tellers I have known,
he was quite ready to describe others places he had never seen. No
matter how often the story had been told, nor how obviously embellished
by a resourceful imagination, the men always listened eagerly when
Pahuri began his tale. Rairi, the half-caste cook, was the only skeptic
of the lot, and his comment on the engineer's accounts of Sydney and
Wellington and Singapore, coupled with his own white blood and pretense
of superiority, caused daily friction between the two. There was soup on
the day of the trouble, scalding-hot soup, carried to the forecastle by
Rairi's own hands, and a plate of it, poured down the engineer's neck
when the Tara gave a sudden violent lurch, brought Pahuri raging to his
feet. Rairi was Paumotan on the native side; to a man of his kind no
epithet could have been more offensive than the engineer's angry: "_Uri
Paumotu!_--Paumotan dog!" But the mate's presence tied his hands and he
retired sullenly to the galley, trembling with rage. The sequel came
late that night.

Pahuri had been working on his engine and he came on deck, a little
after midnight, for a breath of air. He was leaning on the rail by the
shrouds when strong hands seized his throat and he heard a fierce
whisper in his ear:--

"Ah!--Pig of a Rarotongan!"

Pahuri was a wiry little man and he struggled frantically in the other's
grasp, for he realized at once that the cook intended to strangle him
into silence and heave him overboard. He twisted his body about, gripped
the shrouds like a monkey, doubled up his knees and drove both heels
into Rairi's stomach. The cook relaxed his hands for a moment with a
grunt of pain, and Pahuri managed to give a stifled shout. But the
half-caste's fingers tightened once more, and the engineer felt his
senses leaving him. His hands fell from the shrouds to which he had
clung, his body was lifted to the height of the rail, and he thought
numbly that the end was near. Then, suddenly as he had been seized, he
was dropped to the deck, where he lay gasping for a time before he
realized what had occurred.

The giant mate was standing over him, gazing down with an expression of
concern. There was a waning moon, and by its light Pahuri saw that Fatu
held the cook with one huge outstretched hand, the thumb and fingers
sunk in the half-caste's corded neck. He held him easily as one lifts a
puppy by the scruff.

"What is this?" the mate asked mildly, in his soft deep voice. "Has this
man tried to do you harm?"

The man at the wheel had given the alarm, and my uncle came on deck a
moment later, dressed only in a pareu, his chest and powerful shoulders
bare. I had been sleeping, but the noises of the scuffle awakened me,
and I followed close behind. Pahuri was able to speak when we arrived
and he told a story that left out no detail of the affair. For a
moment, no one thought of the half-caste, struggling weakly in Fatu's
mighty grip. Even in the moonlight, I could see that his face was
blackening--I pointed and touched my uncle's arm.

"Let him go, Fatu!" he ordered sharply. "You'll kill the man!"

The mate had been listening intently to Pahuri's tale, and at Uncle
Harry's words he dropped Rairi with an air of surprise, as if he had
forgotten him. The cook had fainted; we could not revive him until a
bucket of sea water had been dashed over his face. At that he sat up
feebly, groaning as his hands went up to feel his neck. My uncle glanced
down, his dark eyes burning with a glitter that made Rairi turn away his
face.

"Feel better now?" asked my uncle in a hard vibrant voice. "I'm glad of
that, for I've something to say to you. You understand English, eh? You
needn't do any talking--I know all about this affair. You tried to kill
Pahuri--an old man half your size and your superior on board. These boys
would like to heave you into the sea; I fancy they're right, it would be
a riddance of damned poor trash. The only difficulty is that I need a
cook. We're going to Raiatea first, and if you value your skin, you'll
stick close aboard. Then I'm going to Tahiti and I'll drop you there. If
you behave yourself from now on, I'll say nothing to the authorities;
but if you try any more tricks, if any member of the crew goes overboard
accidentally at night, or if anyone so much as falls ill before we reach
Tahiti, I'll feel it my duty to turn you over to the French, who know me
well. They guillotine their murderers down there--it's not a pleasant
way to die! Think it over. You can go forward now."

Rairi struggled to his feet and tottered forward with a hand on the
rail. At that moment, moved by a boy's emotion, I felt almost sorry for
him, but as he passed me I caught a glimpse of his face in the
moonlight--dark handsome features distorted by passion. I drew back as
if he had raised his hand to strike me, but the others had not seen what
I had seen, and I stifled the cry of warning which rose to my lips.

There was no more trouble with Rairi while he remained aboard the Tara;
he went about his duties in silence, ignored by the sailors and sitting
alone in his galley during the slack hours of the day. But I know now
that it would have been better for us, and better for him, perhaps, in
the long run, if my uncle had given his men their way--had let them
throw the revengeful half-caste to the sharks.

On the morning after the trouble we raised our first land--the western
islands of the Marquesas. At sunset we had seen flocks of birds flying
steadily southeast, and my uncle told me that if we followed them they
would lead us to the land. At dawn, when I came on deck, I heard the
ringing shout of landfall from aloft, and gazing eastward, I made out
the high silhouette of Hatutu, a faint outline against the flushing sky.
An hour later we drew abreast of Eiao, a saw-toothed ridge, falling away
gently at either end; and toward midday we raised the rock of Motu Iti,
and the long highlands of Nukuhiva, veiled in masses of black
thundercloud. At nightfall, in the darkling east, the pinnacled skyline
of Uapou faded and disappeared.

"A beautiful group," remarked my uncle, standing by the rail. "When I
was trading there I knew every bay from Hanavave to Tai-O-Hae. The
larger islands have a fascination--a gloomy beauty that gets into one's
blood. The people, though they were cannibals, were a fine savage race,
who had developed, during the course of centuries in their isolated
group, an interesting culture of their own. But their blood was too wild
to stand contact with our civilization, and when the white man came
they died off, as the Indian and the buffalo disappeared from our
American plains. Now the valleys where people once dwelt in thousands
are silent and deserted, the lonely burial-places of a vanished race. I
suppose I'm a heathen, but I can see the savage's point of view--he
asked no more than to be left in peace, a favor we white men have never
been willing to grant...."

Two days afterward I had my first glimpse of the coral islands. The moon
was bright that evening as we passed through the twelve-mile channel
separating the atolls of Rangiroa and Tikehau. I climbed to a perch in
the shrouds and lingered there as we coasted the western end of
Rangiroa; the night-breeze blowing off the land brought to my nostrils a
faint sweet perfume, the odor of pandanus blossoms. The line of palms,
growing on the low ring of land, stood out sharply in the moonlight, and
at times, when we passed a region of sparser vegetation, I had glimpses
of the great lagoon beyond, silvered by the moon and stretching away to
the horizon without land in sight.

It was close to midnight when the atoll dropped away astern and I
climbed down to the deck, stiff from my long vigil aloft. I found Uncle
Harry busy over some papers at the little desk in his stateroom. He
swung about in his chair and lit a cigar as I sat down on the berth.

"Been having a look at Rangiroa, eh," he remarked. "There's a kind of
beauty about the atolls, especially on a moonlight night. Iriatai is the
same sort of place, though on a much smaller scale. There's no other
group in the world like the Paumotus: eighty lagoon islands, some of
them of immense size, strung out northwest and southeast in a cluster a
thousand miles long. Darwin believed that they were the peaks of a
submerged mountain-range, on which the coral polyps have built, as the
mountains sank little by little beneath the sea. The lagoons are
accounted for on the ground that the polyps tend to die in calm water,
and thrive best in the froth and spray of breaking seas. As time went
on, you see, the ones on the outside would build higher and higher,
while the ones inside would die. Then, as the island continued gradually
to sink, with the live polyps all working in the wash of the sea along
the outer rim, a deepening lagoon would form inside--and there you have
your atoll. The passes are believed to be caused by fresh water, the
heavy rainfall of these latitudes, finding an outlet to the sea. Running
out at low tide over the lowest portion of the reef, it kills the
coral-builders and causes the slow formation of a pass, often deep
enough to allow large vessels to enter the lagoon.

"There was a day, perhaps, two thousand years ago, when the Paumotus lay
lonely and uninhabited, spread out like a vast net, a thousand miles
long and four hundred miles across, to catch the canoes of wanderers who
had missed the higher and richer islands to the west. The Polynesians
were daring seamen, but their methods of navigation were of the most
primitive sort--by the stars, the clouds, the trade wind, and the flight
of birds. Hundreds of their great double canoes with clumsy sails of
matting must have left Samoa for the eastern groups, and some of them,
missing the Cook Islands or Tahiti, of which they had only
half-legendary accounts, fetched up along this chain of atolls. The
Paumotan people of today are their descendants. The names of the islands
still show the wonder of those ancient wanderers at the strange sea in
which they found themselves, and the joy and relief the landfalls
brought--'The Spread-out Heavens'; 'The Place of Rejoicing'; 'The
Windward Rainbow'; 'The Land of Great Beacon-Fires.' But perhaps this
doesn't interest you very much--I have a way of preaching when I start
on the subject of the islands!" My uncle tilted his chair and smiled at
me through a cloud of smoke.

"The wind is shifting toward the north," he went on, "and with a little
luck we'll sight Raiatea before dark tomorrow night. As I said, I'll
leave young Marama with you; you're getting on well with the language,
but you'll need an interpreter for the present. I'll be gone a month, at
least, and when I return I'd like to be able to start at once for
Iriatai. You'll stop with Marama's father, the chief of Faatemu Bay. Ill
be careful to explain what I want to the old man, but remember that a
native hasn't the least notion of the passage of time. I'm leaving this
to you--if you don't keep after old Taura every day, the canoes may not
be finished for months. I want fifteen strongly made canoes of hibiscus
wood, about twenty feet long, and complete with outriggers, cinnet for
lashings, and a pair of paddles with each. Then we'll need twenty-five
or thirty pairs of diving goggles, with the glass set in wood or horn.
Some of the men will have their own, but they're always losing them, and
once his goggles are lost, a diver is no more use. I'll leave you the
glass and the diamond to cut it with; Marama will find you men who
understand this work. I have a store at Faatemu; you can take the keys
and advance a certain amount of goods to the canoe-builders, but don't
let them get too far ahead of you! Old Taura, the chief, is as good a
native as I know, and hell see that you enjoy your stay on the island.
You'll be swimming, and spearing fish, and hunting wild pig in the
mountains--I only wish that I were stopping over, myself!"

The north wind blew all night with sudden fierce gusts and squalls of
rain. The day broke wild and gray, but toward noon the sun shone out,
and presently the clouds were left behind, sinking along the horizon to
the north. At four bells land was in sight--the peaks of Huahine,
bearing a little west of south, minute irregularities on the line where
sea met sky. It was an afternoon such as one sees rarely in the tropics:
a cloudless horizon and an atmosphere clear as the air above our deserts
at home. An hour before sundown the Leeward Islands were all in view,
strung out in the shape of a great half-moon on the sea ahead of us. The
tall mountain rising abruptly in the north was Bora Bora; Tahaa and
Raiatea, sheltered within the same circling barrier-reef, lay straight
before the Tara's bows; and Huahine made the southern horn--beautiful as
some land remembered from a dream.

At midnight we saw the torches of fishermen on the Raiatea reef, and
dawn found us off Faatemu Bay. The sails were furled, Pahuri started the
engine, and we glided in through the Nao Nao passage, past the green
islet of Haaio, past Tuuroto Point, and into the deep inlet where the
thatched roofs of the village clustered beneath the palms.




  4. At Faatemu


I wish that I had space to tell more of the month I spent at
Faatemu--the story of all that happened in those days would fill a
thicker volume than this one. I was young, keenly alive, and set down
among strange and kindly people in a brand-new world. When the Tara set
sail at nightfall I felt a little lonely and forlorn, but before another
day had passed I was beginning to enjoy one of the happiest periods of
my life. No matter how far I wander, or how remote those dreamy island
days, I shall never forget the kindness of my friends, the brown Faatemu
villagers.

We had been sighted offshore and canoes were thick about the Tara when
her anchor dropped. Taura was the first man aboard--a stately,
gray-haired native, of a type not common nowadays. He was barefoot, but
his suit of drill was spotless and he wore a beautifully plaited hat.
His fat old wife Hina came behind him, her kindly face working and her
eyes full of tears; and Tetua, Marama's little sister, stood shyly at
her mother's side. Hina made straight for her son and clung to him for a
time, sobbing gently; Tetua kissed her brother bashfully; and finally
the chief, after he had shaken hands with the rest of us, sat down
beside Marama for the silent greeting of their race.

"Come ashore with me," called my uncle, as the ship's boat went over the
side. "There's some copra here and I still have room for a bit of deck
cargo. We must hurry if I'm going to get away tonight!"

The boat plied back and forth all morning, laden with bags of copra,
while Uncle Harry unlocked his store, showed me how to keep account of
the goods, and explained to Taura that I was to stop over and that the
canoe-building must be hurried as much as possible. The chief promised
to have the canoes ready in a month's time. As for divers, he believed
we could pick up all we needed on Raiatea--Paumotu men who had settled
in the Leeward group. My bag and light blanket were brought ashore and
installed in Taura's house, and toward evening my uncle bade us goodbye
and was pulled out to the schooner. It was dusk when she stole out
through the pass, before the gentle night-breeze which comes down from
the hills.

I lay awake long that night, in my bed in a corner of Taura's great
single room. The others had spread a mat on the floor and set a
turned-down lamp near by. Father, mother, and sister lay in a circle
about Marama while he recounted, in a low voice and with many gestures,
the story of his adventures in the north. I lay staring up at the
rafters under the lofty thatch, thinking of all that had happened since
Uncle Harry had steered his boat in through the California surf; of the
von Tesmars, father and son; of Iriatai, and what the future held in
store. The lamp flickered when the land breeze found its way through the
thin bamboo walls, causing the shadows above me to deepen and retreat;
Marama's rapid flow of words droned on monotonously; and at last sleep
closed my eyes.

Early next day, when Taura came to demand half a dozen axes for his men,
I did my first bit of trading. Then I closed the store, and Marama and I
went with the canoe-builders to select their trees in the valley far up
among the mountains. We followed the river up from the bay toward
Faaroa, the great central valley of the island. A dim path, along which
we walked in single file, led through the jungle, winding about the
trunks of fallen trees, across the rushing, waist-deep stream, high
along the mountain-side, at a place where the valley became a gorge. I
saw thickets of _fei_, the wild plantain, bearing great bunches of its
reddish fruit; jungle cock crowed shrilly among the hills; and once a
troop of wild pig, led by a gray old boar, crashed off, grunting,
through the undergrowth. It was strange to think that only three
generations had passed since Marama's ancestors, fierce brown warriors
armed with rude ironwood clubs and spears, had stolen along this same
path on forays against neighboring clans.

The wild hibiscus seldom grows large enough to furnish a log for a
twenty-foot canoe, and it took us the best part of the day to choose our
trees. All were close enough to be dragged to the river and floated down
to Faatemu, and while the work was going on Marama and I went out every
day with the men. First of all, the tree was felled and the branches
chopped off smoothly, flush with the trunk. Then a twenty-foot length
was measured along the straightest part of the tree and the ends cut
off, before the log was rolled and dragged to the riverside. Finally,
when our fifteen logs were ready, it took a strenuous day's work,
pushing over shallow reaches and swimming through deep pools, to float
them to the beach.

Once our logs were at Faatemu, Taura was for giving a feast and resting
for a day or two. But I urged haste, recalling my uncle's words to the
chief. Then the logs were laid out in the shade, close to the village,
and one man set to work on each, fashioning a canoe with axe and adze.
Day after day the builder chopped, while the chips flew and the form of
the canoe emerged--the curve of sheer, the rounded bilge, the sharp
lines of bow and stern. Sometimes a man stood off, squinting at his
handiwork with one eye closed--judging the symmetry of the slender hull.
When the outside was roughly chopped to shape, the log was turned over
and the builder began to hollow out the inside with his adze. At last,
when the walls of wood were of the required thickness, the process of
finishing began: a slow and laborious rubbing with hard bits of coral,
and a final smoothing with the rough skin of a stingray's tail, tacked
to a wooden block. Then a pair of narrow planks of hibiscus were sawn
out to make the raised gunwales, six inches high and of the same
thickness as the sides of the canoe. After long scraping and repeated
trials, these gunwales were made to fit so perfectly that no crack of
light appeared when they were set in place. At intervals of about a
foot, holes were drilled in the gunwales and corresponding holes in the
dugout-sides beneath. The planks were joined at stem and stern and
lashed to the canoe with cinnet--strong cording made of the braided
fibre of the coconut. Now, save for its outrigger, the canoe was
finished.

Round-bottomed and very narrow for their length, the native canoes would
capsize at once were it not for their outriggers--light slender logs
which float in the water alongside at a distance of four or five feet,
attached to the hull by a pair of transverse poles. When Captain Cook
first sailed among the islands, the natives marveled at the great canoe
which remained upright without an outrigger--more wonderful by far, in
their eyes, than the white man's cannon, or muskets, or axes of steel.
"_Aue!_" they exclaimed, in astonishment. "_E vaa ama ore!_"--a canoe
without an outrigger!

We made our outriggers of light _purau_ wood, twenty feet long, five or
six inches thick, and pointed at the forward end. The attaching poles
were of ironwood--_casuarina_ is the name of the beautiful,
pale-foliaged tree--lashed across the gunwales fore and aft, the bow
pole rigid, the rear one curved and flexible. At Taura's suggestion, I
gave orders that all the outriggers and their fittings be assembled, and
the canoes tested in the water before they were taken apart to be loaded
aboard the Tara. Thanks to the chief, they were ready some days before
the schooner came in sight, and our diving-goggles, made in the evenings
by the old men of the village, were finished and waiting at the store.

To the native fisherman, these goggles are nearly as important as his
spear. They are not unlike the goggles used by motorists at home: a pair
of glasses, set in wooden rims which fit tightly about one's eyes, and
held in place by an elastic around the head. With such glasses, well
fitted and watertight, one can see nearly as well in the clear sea-water
as in the air above.

I kept two pairs for Marama and myself, and we went out often, on
afternoons of leisure, to spear fish inside the reef. Paddling to a
place where the water was from five to ten feet deep, we moored our
canoe to a coral mushroom and set out, swimming for long distances or
wading as the water shoaled. Little by little I learned one of the most
difficult of native arts: to swim gently with my face under water,
holding the spear between my toes. I learned to distinguish the good
fish from the bad, the wholesome from the poisonous; to recognize the
holes where the fat black _maito_ hide; to see the octopus dart into his
cranny; to transfix my quarry with a well-aimed thrust. Sometimes we
were in the water for three hours at a stretch, but I never wearied of
admiring the strange beauty of this underwater world. The sunlight,
filtering through the clear lagoon and reflected from the bottom in
delicate tints of blue and green, revealed shoals of fish, colored like
jewels and of fantastic shapes, gliding among the branches of the coral
forest. In deeper water a gleam of vivid blue showed where the
tridacna--the giant clam--lay in his hole with jaws agape, and I learned
to swim down with a bar of steel and pry him from the rock.

Sometimes, on moonless nights, we took torches and went out spearing on
the reef. The Raiatea barrier-reef, about a mile offshore, is no more
than a low dyke of coral, half awash and breaking the landward run of
the swell. By night, when the torches flicker and flare, and mighty
combers, bursting on the outer edge, come foaming waist-deep across the
jagged rock, the reef is an eerie place, not without dangers of its own.
Under cover of darkness, strange monsters have been known to crawl up
from the depths on the seaward side--the huge decapods on which the
sperm whale feeds, and nameless creatures of which the natives speak
with whispered dread. There were tales of fishermen who had paddled out
at nightfall, never to return. . . . Nothing would have tempted me to
fish on the reef alone at night, though when several of us went out
together, armed with machetes and heavy spears, there was a wild charm
about the sport.

We walked abreast in a line that reached from lagoon to sea, each man
bearing in his left hand a torch of dry bamboo. At times, a cry from the
seaward man caused us to brace ourselves for the big sea he had seen
rearing in the torchlight. Then with a roar and a crash the wave would
break, sending a wall of white water across the barrier. Sometimes a
shark came thrashing across with the wave, to be speared before he
could reach the deep water of the lagoon. Sometimes a series of shouts
went up as a great silver cavally swept by us so fast that man after man
missed his thrust. When the wave receded there were spiny crayfish to be
caught in the pools, and enormous pink-spotted crabs to be held down
with a spear-shaft till one could take a safe grip, out of reach of the
menacing claws.

One day, when the sun was bright and the current in the pass was slack,
Marama showed me a pleasanter and lazier kind of fishing. He had caught
a great quantity of hermit crabs the night before, and at daybreak I
found him on the beach, picking up the pebbles used for sinkers and
tossing them into the bottom of the canoe. He had brought a line fitted
with strong hooks on wire leaders, and his water glass--a small wooden
box, open at the top and with a bottom made of a pane of clear glass. We
paddled to the passage and anchored the canoe on one side, where she
could swing out over the wall of coral, shelving almost vertically into
deep blue water. Then Marama began to crack the shells of his crabs,
smash the claws and bodies between two stones, and toss this ground bait
over the side of the canoe. I took the glass and watched the fragments
of crab-meat eddying down beside the seamed and crannied wall. The water
was so clear that every detail of the scene was visible: the strange
fish drifting along the face of the cliff; the mouths of the caverns
from which larger fish looked out; the sandy bottom beneath us, scoured
clean by the current of the pass. At first, only a shoal of small fry
gathered to gobble up the bait, but suddenly they scattered in terror as
a pair of parrot fish, bright blue and a yard long, with horny beaks
instead of mouths, moved leisurely from their hiding-place. There was so
little wind that my companion had seen them without his glass. He baited
his hook with the soft body of a hermit crab, tied a pebble to his line
with the curious hitch that allows the sinker to be released by a jerk,
and dropped hook and stone over the side. I watched the pebble rush down
toward the bottom; saw it halt below the drifting bait; saw the line
jerk and the sinker drop off and disappear; watched the baited hook rise
slowly to the level of the parrot fish, that were beginning to feed in
their deliberate way.

Now Marama's bait was eddying among the other morsels of crab, and I
almost shouted as I saw it disappear in the beak of the larger of the
big blue fish. The native boy struck sharply and began to haul in his
line, cutting the water in crisp zigzags this way and that. A final
heave brought the twenty-pound fish tumbling into the canoe, a blow of a
short club ended its struggles, and I examined it at leisure while
Marama baited his hook once more. It was the first that I had seen--a
strange and beautiful creature, covered with scales larger than a
fifty-cent piece, scales of a vivid iridescent blue with a green spot at
the base of each. A nip of its horny beak would have severed a man's
finger clean. Later that day when I ate my share of it, steaming-hot
from the oven, I understood why the parrot fish was prized so highly.

When Taura's family assembled for a meal, all of their cooked food came
from the native oven, under the shed behind the house. Their method of
cooking seemed to me--and still seems, when I think of those dinners at
Faatemu--the finest in the world, preserving as it does all the juices
and flavor of fish or fowl or meat. The native cook's equipment consists
of a heap of waterworn pebbles, picked up along the beach, a pile of
large green leaves, and a supply of firewood. Fish and chicken and pork
are cut into pieces of convenient size and made into little leaf-wrapped
packages. Yams, sweet potatoes, plantains, and bananas are selected for
cooking and laid out beside the packages of meat. Then a shallow hole is
scraped out in the earth--perhaps a foot deep, and two feet across--and
a hot fire is built inside. When the fire is blazing well, the pebbles
are heaped on the wood and left till they are heated almost to a glow.
At this stage the hole is raked out clean, the food put in and covered
with hot pebbles, and the whole overlaid with a thick layer of leaves
and earth. An hour later the oven may be opened, the baked vegetables
peeled, and the packages of fish and meat removed from their clean leafy
wrappings.

As time went on, it seemed to me that my friend Marama possessed more
useful accomplishments than any lad of his age at home. The fishing
excursions in which I was always eager to join were in reality his work,
for we supplied more than half of the household's food. My friend could
read and write, but otherwise he had no education in our sense of the
word. He knew nothing of history, algebra, or geometry, but his mind was
a storehouse of complex fishing-lore, picked up unconsciously since
babyhood and enabling him to provide himself and his family with food.
And when you come to think of it, that is one of the purposes of all
education.

The habits of the fish in the South Pacific are regulated by the moon,
and Marama knew what kinds were to be found on any night of the native
lunar month. On nights of bright moonlight we cast a white fly for the
small rockfish which frequent patches of live coral; on dark nights we
gathered the mollusks abounding in the lagoon. During the week of the
new moon's first appearance, we went out at dawn to fish for tunny in
the pass. Sometimes Tetua, the twelve-year-old sister of Marama, took me
with her to spear prawns in the Faatemu River. Carrying torches and
armed with small barbless spears, we slipped and clambered over the wet
rocks, scanning the pools for the little fresh-water lobsters which soon
filled our pail. Sometimes I took a paddle in one of the long narrow
bonito-canoes and went with the men on trips that took us far offshore,
following the birds above the leaping schools. I grew hard and browned
by the sun, and the native language came to me surprisingly.

Once on a Saturday, when my uncle's work was done, Taura took us to the
mountains to hunt for pig. The chiefs two lean dogs ranged ahead, and
far up in the Faaroa Valley they started a bristling gray boar, fierce,
old, and fleet of foot. He led us a long chase over the rough stream-bed
and through dense thickets of tree-fern and hibiscus. In the end we
heard a fierce uproar of snarls and yelps and grunting, and knew that he
had turned at bay. Taura was too old to run as we did, and by this time
the chief was a good half-mile behind. We had no weapons, and when I saw
the angry brute, foam dripping from his jaws as he faced the dogs with
his back to a great tree-trunk, I wondered what we were to do, now that
we had come up with him. But Marama did not share my hesitation.

"Take care!" he warned me--unnecessarily, I thought. "He is a bad pig!
If he runs at you, jump into a tree!"

He took a clasp knife from the tuck of his pareu, cut a limb of
hibiscus, and peeled off a length of the tough bark--the strongest of
natural cord. Then he shouted encouragingly to the dogs, and while their
attack diverted the boar's attention, he stole quickly around the
sheltering tree-trunk. I saw his brown hands shoot out to seize the
boar's hind legs, and the next moment--grunting and struggling
ferociously--the old brute was thrown heavily upon his back. I rushed to
lend a hand and our combined strength was enough to hold him while we
tied his legs with strips of bark. Taura found us lying exhausted
beside our captive, while the dogs lay in the cool stream, with heaving
flanks and tongues lolling in the water.

That evening, when Marama had recounted the details of our hunt, his
mother told us one of her tales of heathen days--the story of how the
first pigs were given by the ancient gods to mankind. Many of her words
I understood; at times her son whispered a translation in rapid broken
English. We were lying on a wide mat, spread under the palms close to
the beach. A new moon was setting behind the point and the evening was
so calm that only the faintest of murmurs came from the reef.

There was a time--so the story ran--many years ago, when there were no
pigs on any of these islands. In those days men ate only fish, and
sometimes, in seasons of famine, the flesh of rats. The clans of the
different valleys were constantly at war, for there was no one
government over the island--no family of Raiatean chiefs. Men lost heart
for the planting when villages were destroyed and crops burned on every
hand, and many of the people left their lands to live in hidden caves
among the hills.

In this bay of Faatemu lived a feeble old man, blind with age and
weeping, for his wife and all but one of his children had been
slaughtered in the wars. He was called Vatea, and the name of his young
son, who cared for him, was Tamatoa. They lived in a rude thatch-shelter
the boy had built. It was a time of famine; a war-party from Tahaa had
burned the village, and there were no plantations of yams or sweet
potatoes. The men of Tahaa, as was their custom, had chopped down all
the coconut palms, and Tamatoa feared to go after plantains. By day the
father and son kept to their hidden shelter, and each night the boy came
cautiously to the seaside, to catch what fish he could. Since he dared
not use a torch, that was not much; on many occasions his patience was
rewarded by no more than one small fish. Then he would make for himself
a poor dish of scraped banana-stalks, not fit to keep the life in a man,
and after preparing his single fish, he would carry the food to where
blind old Vatea awaited him. "I have caught only two small fish," he
told the old man at these times; "one for you, and one for me. Now let
us eat!" And while the hungry father devoured his fish, the son would
make a great noise of smacking his own lips over the wretched scrapings
of banana stalk.

Each day the fish were smaller and more difficult to catch, and finally
the old man was starving, though Tamatoa gave him all the real food that
he could find. As happens at such times, Vatea grew suspicious of his
son, thinking that the boy was taking advantage of his blindness to save
the best morsels for himself. One day, when the son brought a small raw
fish and his own dish of grated banana-stalk, the old man spoke. 'Fetch
me a calabash of cool water from the stream,' he said; and when the boy
was gone, he felt his way across to where his son's food lay in a wooden
bowl. Then his tears fell, and his heart was heavy with remorse.

That night, as they lay side by side on their mats, old Vatea spoke to
his son. "Listen carefully to my words," he said, "and forget nothing
that I say. Tomorrow I shall die; when I am dead, bury me by the great
rosewood tree yonder in the valley. Then, every morning, you shall go to
my grave at the hour when the sun first strikes the ground. Watch
closely; take what you find and use it wisely--it will make you a
powerful man."

Next morning old Vatea died, and his son, who was a dutiful lad, did as
the father had instructed. For two days, when the first rays of sunlight
touched his father's grave he was watching by the rosewood tree, and on
the third morning his eyes saw a strange thing. The earth cracked and
heaved, and he heard a new sound, the sound of grunting, as a pair of
pigs came out of the dust--the first pigs that any man had seen.
Marveling greatly, Tamatoa took them home and cared for them, and only a
day or two later, peace was made among the clans, and a bountiful run of
fish entered the lagoon.

Litters of young pigs were born as time went on, and the fame of Tamatoa
went abroad among the islands--to Huahine, to Bora Bora, and even to
distant Maupiti. Then the high priest of Oro, at the Opoa temple, was
seized with a frenzy, and through his lips the chiefs learned that
Tamatoa, the favored of the gods, was to be made ruler of the island.
Thus Tamatoa became king, and the race of swine was given to furnish
food for men.

       *     *     *     *     *

As she finished the story, Marama's mother heaved herself to her feet
and led the way to Taura's steep-roofed house. The moon had set, and as
I followed through the warm darkness, I thought drowsily of my uncle and
wondered when the Tara would return. I might have slept less soundly if
I had known that she was then within twenty miles, and that in the
morning she would anchor in Faatemu Bay.




  5. Iriatai


I was awakened at daybreak by a noise of shouting, and running out of
the house, my eyes still heavy with sleep, I saw the Tara standing in
through the Nao Nao Pass. I called to Marama. We launched our canoe and
paddled out as the schooner rounded to and dropped anchor with a
prolonged rattle of chain. My uncle was standing at the wheel--a tall
bronzed figure in a scarlet waistcloth; he called out a jovial greeting
as we paddled alongside. Ivi and Ofai were busy with the whaleboat; Fatu
waved an enormous hand at us; I saw Pahuri standing by the rail, smiling
his cynical and wrinkled smile.

"Come aboard, boys," my uncle shouted. "Eh, Charlie, the islands agree
with you, I see! You're brown as a native and an inch broader than when
I saw you last! Hello, Marama! _Mai ai oe?_ How's the work coming on?
All the canoes ready?"

It seemed like returning home, to breakfast once more in the Tara's
saloon. Uncle Harry was in high spirits at the prospect of an early
start. Everything had been arranged in Tahiti; the Tara's cargo had been
unloaded, and a fresh cargo--all our supplies for the diving-season on
Iriatai--taken aboard.

"An odd thing happened," remarked my uncle as we sat down. "I lost a lot
of papers from my desk. Remember the letter I translated to you at
home--the one about Iriatai, from the old native woman to her son? Well,
that was among them; it's of no use to anyone, of course, now that we
have the lagoon tied up. A piece of spite-work, I think. Rairi, that
precious cook of ours, boarded the schooner one day while I was
ashore--said he'd forgotten a bundle of his things.

"I wish you'd been with me," he went on, "you'd have had a look at a
famous schooner and the most picturesque scoundrel in the South Seas.
Ever hear of Thursday Island Schmidt? Oh yes, I remember--I mentioned
him that night at the ranch. Well, this was my first glimpse of him, and
I'll own that I was interested. A week ago he brought his little
schooner into Papeete with a load of shell from the Gambier Islands.
She's as pretty as her reputation is black, and the way he handled her
was a treat to watch. She's flying the tricolor now; he transferred her
to French registry in Noumea, last year. They know less than the British
about her past! She's dodged Russian gunboats when Schmidt was
seal-poaching in the foggy North Pacific; she's kidnapped wild bushmen,
out in the Solomons and New Hebrides; she's posed as an Australian
revenue-boat to hold up the Malay pearlers in Torres Straits, where her
skipper got his name. I saw Schmidt in the club that afternoon--he's a
big German, with a full beard and a pair of cold blue eyes. They say
he's a cashiered naval officer--a great talker at any rate, and speaks
English like a professor.

"Papeete's a gossipy place! After Schmidt had left the club, I heard
some queer yarns. There's a rumor that he has a prisoner aboard the
Cholita--someone who's never allowed ashore and whom visitors are never
allowed to see! The traders have nothing to think about but the price
of copra, and other men's affairs!

"One night on the water-front I saw Schmidt walking with a man I thought
was Rairi, but the native turned away before I was close enough to make
sure, and old Thursday Island gave me a long stare as I passed under a
street lamp. By Jove! It set me to thinking, you know! Suppose Rairi has
the letter--he may be cooking up some deviltry with the master of the
Cholita! I'll be nervous as an old woman till I get that shell safely
stowed away! But that's nonsense--we're living in the twentieth century,
and even if Rairi knows more than is good for him, Thursday Island
wouldn't dare try any of his old tricks nowadays.

"Come," concluded Uncle Harry, who had been talking as I breakfasted,
"we must be getting ashore. Fatu can bring the canoes out and stow them
away while we have a yarn with the chief. I hope he has found me some
divers."

Taura had sent word to the small Paumotan settlements scattered around
the island, and for a week past the divers had been drifting in to
Faatemu, traveling by cutter or sailing-canoe with their women, their
children, and their household goods. My uncle went to their camp to
select his men, and soon the bay was a lively place, echoing with
laughter and shouts as the laden canoes plied between the schooner and
the beach. The Tara, once smart as a yacht, took on the aspect of a
floating menagerie: pigs grunted disconsolately on deck; dogs barked;
hens clucked; roosters crowed. A swarm of Paumotans lay about, smoking,
chattering in high-pitched voices, playing accordions. The decks were
littered with their mats and bedding, on which small brown babies lay
asleep, unconscious of the uproar of departure.

Late in the afternoon Marama and I made our parting gifts to the family
and paddled out to where the Tara lay, her engine going and her anchor
up. We clambered over the rail; old Taura stood in the canoe, waving his
hat while the schooner got under way and glided out toward the pass.
Months were to pass before we saw the gray-haired chief again.

My uncle laid his course due east, to pass between the great atoll of
Fakarava and Faaite, the smaller island to the south. The fair weather
held while the Tara threaded her way through the strange Sea of
Atolls--the dangerous archipelago, dreaded by mariners since the Pacific
was first explored. We passed the southern end of Fakarava, a lagoon
like an island sea, surrounded by a narrow ring of palms, passed Katiu
and Tuanake, turned south to skirt the treacherous reefs of Makemo, were
swept eastward by the current racing between Nihiru and Marutea, and
breathed freely once more as we turned north, past Reka Reka, the Island
of Good Hope. Sometimes a low smudge of palms lay along the horizon;
sometimes, with no land in sight, the Tara battled with the fierce
uncharted currents of this maze of reefs; and there were days when a
green glimmer in the sky told of the presence of some huge lagoon,
hidden from our eyes by the curving slope of the world. In the open sea
to the east of Reka Reka, the bad weather began.

The wind veered to the northwest--the storm wind the natives call the
_toerau_. Black clouds closed above the Tara like a canopy; for two days
and two nights she made heavy weather through squalls of wind and rain.
My uncle spent much of his time at the rail, binoculars raised to scan
the empty horizon east of us.

"We must be close to Iriatai," he said to me on the morning of the last
day, "but in these shifting currents, and without a chance for a shot
at the sun, it's hard to say just where we are! Risky business, this
knocking about at night--if we don't raise the land today, I'm going to
heave to."

I had been gazing idly at the clouds drifting overhead, and had noticed
several flocks of sea birds, passing high above us, all heading
southward. As my uncle spoke, another flock appeared in the north. He
saw them, too, and shouted a command to alter the schooner's course.

"That's the third lot of birds I've seen this morning," he remarked.
"There's a chance that they are coming from Iriatai. We'll beat up to
the north a bit, and have a look."

An hour later I heard a long-drawn cry from the crosstrees, and soon
from the deck I made out the familiar atoll-landfall--a level dark line
of palm-tops, low on the northern horizon. It was Iriatai.

The island differs from most of the atolls in that the pass is on the
weather side. The lagoon is nearly circular, ten miles long and about
eight across, and the surrounding land is composed of three long curving
islands, separated by short stretches of reef over which the sea washes
no more than knee-deep on a calm day. A dense growth of young
palms--planted by my uncle--covered the islands, and just inside the
pass, where von Tesmar's settlement had stood before the hurricane, I
saw the loftier tops of the trees planted by Turia, the dead Paumotan
woman. From a perch high up in the shrouds, gazing with the glasses
toward the far end of the lagoon, I could make out the tall old palms of
the islet where the woman and her child had fetched up in that long-ago
storm. We were at the end of our voyage: somewhere between the islet and
the reef lay the patch of gold-lipped shell planted by the strange
Austrian wanderer!

That night we anchored the Tara off the village of my uncle's laborers,
natives established on the island to plant and to make copra as the
trees began to bear. Next morning, with a dozen fresh helpers gossiping
on deck and a man at the masthead to give us warning of shoals, the Tara
sailed the length of the lagoon and found a berth close to the high
islet at the farther end. Our divers made their camp on that ten-acre
dot of land, shaded by old palms which survived the hurricane.

While the divers floated their canoes ashore and set to work to lash on
the outriggers, the other men launched the boats to transfer the
schooner's cargo to the beach. The women and children went ashore at
once, stacked their belongings in individual heaps, and busied
themselves with plaiting the palm-fronds with which their houses would
be thatched.

The younger women and some of the boys swarmed up the trees like
monkeys, machete in hand, and soon the green fronds were crashing to the
ground on every side. Their older companions chopped off the heavy butts
and split each rib down the middle, making a pair of tough strips of
fibrous wood, fringed along one side with the narrow leaves of the
coconut. Squatting on their heels, while their fingers worked with
marvelous rapidity and skill, the women braided these leaves together to
form strips of coarse green matting, a foot wide and eight feet long. As
each piece was finished it was stacked on the growing family pile. By
nightfall the last of the canoes was assembled and all were hauled up in
a line on the beach. The men were now ready for their task of
housebuilding. In two days our village on the islet was complete.

They began by clearing the chosen site, a couple of acres in extent.
There was a dense growth of wild hibiscus under the coconut palms, and
as they chopped this away with axe and bush-knife, they took care to
save the long straight poles which would be of use. Then each man
selected the place for his house and set to work by himself. With the
help of his wife and children he dug four holes and set the
corner-posts, forked at the top to receive the long poles corresponding
to plates. Midway between the corner-posts at each end of the house, a
much taller post was set, to support the ridgepole. Then plates and
ridgepole were laid on their forked supports and lashed in place with
strips of tough hibiscus-bark. Next, the rafters were made fast at a
steep pitch, laid at intervals of about a foot, and a similar light
framework was lashed to the gable ends. At this stage the house was
ready to be thatched.

Now the entire family went to the far end of the islet to cut armfuls of
bark for tying on their thatch, and when a supply of this natural cord
was on hand, they set up light temporary scaffoldings of poles and took
their places,--the woman outside, the man inside the roof,--to lay the
thatch of plaited fronds. Working from the eaves toward the ridgepole,
the strips were laid on like shingles, each one overlapping by four or
five inches the one beneath, with the split midrib tied firmly to each
rafter that it crossed. After the roof, the gable ends were thatched; a
doorway was framed on the leeward side, and a rustic siding of hibiscus
wands, placed vertically as close together as they would go, was set up
from ground to plates. Then the family gathered the snowy coral gravel
on the beach and spread it several inches deep to make a floor. The
house was finished--cool, airy, and weatherproof, beautifully adapted to
an environment where lumber and corrugated iron were out of place.

But lumber and iron were necessary for our water supply, and while the
natives were busy with their housebuilding, we set to work to build a
long low shed, with a gutter along the lower edge of the roof, from
which tin piping would conduct the rain water to a series of large
connected tanks. The drinking-nuts would never suffice for such a
gathering, and fresh water was the one important thing the islet lacked.
We relied on the rains to furnish our supply, and the shed was to serve
as a store, and as a warehouse for our shell, when that had been cleaned
and sacked.

The building was finished on a Saturday, and that night the men went out
in their canoes to fish. They were all Christians and they kept the
Sabbath more religiously than most of us at home. The missionaries who
had converted them were of the strict old Calvinist school, which taught
that it was sinful to fish, or plant, or to do any kind of work on the
day of rest. My uncle respected the divers' beliefs, but he had
communicated his own restless energy to the members of the Tara's crew,
and on that Sunday, while the Paumotans dozed in the shade of their new
houses, we took the whaleboat on an excursion to explore the
diving-grounds. When we returned at sunset the others shook their
heads--in their eyes we had reaped the reward of sacrilege, for our
boating-party had come near to ending tragically.

The lagoon was calm that morning, calm as an inland lake, its surface
ruffled at intervals by faint catspaws from the north. Looking back
toward the pass, there was no land in sight--the blue water met the sky
in an unbroken line. Ahead of us, at the northern end of the atoll, the
seabeach was little more than a mile away, and the thunder of the
breakers was borne to our ears, now loud, now soft, on flaws of air. My
uncle stood in the stern and I sat beside him; Fatu was in the bow, Ivi
and Ofai at the oars. Once or twice Fatu motioned my uncle to change his
course, to avoid the coral mushrooms rising to within a few inches of
the surface, but in general the depth of the lagoon varied from six to
twenty fathoms. Gazing down through the blue translucent water, I could
see the strange forms of growing coral far beneath us; and sometimes, as
the bottom turned sandy and the water shoaled, the lagoon shaded to
purest emerald green. Clad only in a scarlet pareu, with his bronzed
back and shoulders bare, Uncle Harry was leaning over the side, gazing
intently at the bottom through a water glass. He had given the word to
go slowly, and the men were resting on their oars.

"This is the place," he said. "We'll anchor here and let Ofai go down
for a look."

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 opened 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 today, 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
near 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
today, 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 tomorrow, 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."




  6. 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 tomorrow--today,
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; well have the boys cut the line and make the end fast to
the coral. Tomorrow 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 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 a 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 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 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 practiced
among the atolls of the Paumotus.

The men we had brought with us from Raiatea, re-enforced 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.

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
mantel, and tossed the body of each mollusk into the open kerosene-tin.
My companions seemed excited.

"_Au!_" 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 eels' 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 today,
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 today, 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 tomorrow--I'll give you the small canoe and
whatever gear you need."




  7. 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 albacore, 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 iron wood, 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,
over-hauled 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?"




  8. 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.

"We can always get plenty when the weather is calm," I said, "in fact it
only takes a third of our time to catch more fish than the Tara can use.
We were speaking of this today and wondering if you wouldn't let us go
out with the divers in our spare time; Marama says he has often been
down to twelve fathoms, and offers to do the diving if I will open
shell. I wish you could let us go--it would be fun and somehow I feel
that we'd be lucky. Of course, if you'd let me, I'd like to try a little
diving myself." My uncle looked at me with a twinkle in his dark eyes.

"I knew you'd ask me that sooner or later," he said. "As a matter of
fact I ought not to let you do it--I'm responsible to your father, after
all, and old Taura's a good friend of mine. Diving is always a dangerous
business, though I don't believe there are any more bad sharks in the
lagoon. Still the other men do it every day, and you two are old enough
to take the same risks. If I had youngsters of my own, they'd have to
take their chances with the rest--otherwise they'd miss their share of
good times and hard knocks, and become the helpless sort of men and
women who are no use in the world. Yes, you may go, and dive too, if you
wish. But, for my sake, keep your eyes open and be as careful as you
can!"

That evening, when the day's work was over and the people lay on mats
before their houses, smoking and gossiping in the brief twilight, we
went ashore. My uncle led the way to where old Maruia lived with one of
her nephews: Teura, a pleasant and amusing boy, who paddled her canoe to
the diving-grounds and opened the shell that she brought up. Her house
was surrounded by a fence of stakes, inside which a pair of pigs
wandered, rooting up the earth. As we opened the gate, I heard her voice
give the hospitable shout of "_Haere mai!_--Come in!"

"I have come to talk with you about Tehare, my nephew," said Uncle
Harry, when a mat had been spread and we had taken our places on it,
native-fashion. "He and Marama have become so clever at the sea fishing
that we are glutted with fish and time hangs heavy on their hands. Today
they have asked me if they might go out and dive for shell with you
others; they are strong boys and well grown--it is in my mind to let
them go. What think you of the plan? Is Iriatai a lagoon overdangerous
for boys?"

The old woman shook her head as she replied.

"There is little danger here," she said. "Ten fathoms would not hurt a
child, and the great shark you killed was the only evil shark in the
lagoon. And he was not a shark, as I and all the others know! For the
rest, we have seen neither _tonu_ nor conger eel in all the days we
have been diving, though it is well to watch closely, for a tonu is an
ill thing to meet! But let them go--they will come to no harm; perhaps
they will find a pearl like mine, and in any case the white boy will
have strange tales to tell when he returns to his own land. I myself
will show them where there is shell in seven fathoms of water--not so
much as where we dive, but a good place to begin. Let them beware of the
clefts and crevices where an eel might lurk, and avoid the dark caverns
in the coral, for it is in such places that the tonu lies in wait. There
seems little to fear in Iriatai, but one is never sure. As for pearls,
watch always for the great lone oysters crusted with coral and misshapen
with old age--_parau tahito_, we call them, and every diver knows that
they contain the finest pearls."

When the divers went out next morning Marama and I went with them, our
canoe equipped like the others with basket and weight and line. Maruia,
smoking a cigarette in the bow of her canoe while Teura paddled, showed
us the way to a patch of shell she had found in shallow water, a quarter
of a mile east of where the others were diving. "Drop your anchor here,"
she said, bending over the gunwale to examine the bottom. "The depth is
seven fathoms and there is enough shell to keep you busy, though not so
much nor of such great size as in the deeper water where we work. Now I
must leave--stay here, you two!"

I weighted the basket with a heavy stone and lowered it till it rested
on the bottom, while Marama tucked up his pareu, adjusted his goggles,
and fastened the glove on his right hand. Then he went overboard, a grin
on his brown good-natured face. I passed him the weight; at the signal,
I let go the line and watched him shoot down into the blue and green of
the depths. After all, seven fathoms were more than forty feet. I pulled
up the lead, coiled the line for the next dive, and waited, watching
the figure of my companion, seen dimly in the twilight beneath the
canoe, as he moved along the bottom with deliberate motions of the arms
and legs. Once I thought I saw him place something in the basket, and
finally, when more than two minutes had elapsed, he seized the upright
line and pulled himself to the surface. But he gave no shout of
exultation as he raised the goggles from his eyes.

"Au!" he exclaimed, shaking his head, "it is more difficult than I had
thought! The oysters are there, but I have not the eyes to see them, nor
the art to twist them off the rocks. There is no need to pull up the
basket; I got only two oysters, though in all my life I have never
stayed longer beneath the water. But I shall learn!"

All through that morning Marama dove with increasing success. It was
well for me that he did not send up as much shell as the older divers,
for I was clumsy at opening it and so afraid of missing a pearl that I
wasted a great deal of time in useless fumbling under the fringes of the
oysters. At midday I had found no pearls, but the shell Marama had
brought up was opened and neatly stacked amidships, and the soft bodies
of the oysters were thrown into our kerosene-tin for inspection in the
evening.

"I am going to dive this afternoon," I announced to Marama, as we lay
resting after lunch.

"That is well," he answered. "I am not accustomed to being so long in
the water--my bones are chilled! I will open the shell and you can try
your hand as I have done. It is strange down there, and very beautiful,
with the coral colored like flowers and the great fish passing close at
hand. At first I was a little afraid. Do not let yourself grow
discouraged; the shell is hard to see and harder still to wrench off
until you learn the trick. Remember that the old divers never look
upward--to gaze into the blue water overhead gives one a horror of the
depth!"

At last, with a beating heart, I made ready for my first dive. I loved
the sun, which had burned my back and shoulders to the color of
mahogany, and I wore nothing but a pareu. This savage garment I hitched
about my waist as I had seen the others do, before I polished my glasses
and fastened the glove tightly on my wrist. Once in the water, I held
the lead-line with my left hand and the toes of my left foot, adjusted
the goggles to my eyes and gave the signal to let go. I saw Marama's
answering grin--felt the water close over my head. Then, gripping the
line tightly, I plunged down into a strange purple twilight.

An instant later there was a gentle shock and the line slackened in my
hand. I had reached the bottom. My ears ached and the pressure on my
chest and stomach made my body feel as if it were being squeezed flat. I
could understand now the curiously deliberate movements of the divers,
for my limbs seemed weighted with lead--the same feeling I have had in
dreams, when to my horror I have found myself unable to avoid the attack
of some nightmare monster. I swallowed as I had been instructed, then
held my nose and blew. The pains in my head ceased at once.

Frightened and ill at ease, I let go the line and saw the weight
ascending through the deep bluish purple of the sea above me, which
seemed, like the earth's atmosphere, to extend upward into infinity.
There was no sign of the surface--nothing to catch the eye in the break
between sea and air. For a moment I was in a panic; it seemed to me that
I should never reach the air again, never feel the friendly warmth of
the sun nor see the bright sunlit world above. Then I saw the bottom of
the canoe, close over my head. Fifteen or twenty seconds had passed,
and though far from feeling at home, I had gained enough assurance to
gaze with interest at the strange new world in which I found myself.

Though not so dark as the greater depths I visited later on, there was
far less light than I had supposed. The floor of the lagoon, here at
seven fathoms, was bathed in a sort of purplish twilight which enabled
me to see as clearly, I should say, as on an average moonlight night
ashore. But instead of being silvery, like moonlight, the light was
purple, and tinged with changing shades of green and blue. The bottom
was of dense reef-coral, which dies when sheltered from the breaking
sea, but a hundred fantastic varieties of still-water coral grew on the
dead madrepore, as vegetation grows on the inanimate earth, and its
forms were those of vegetation. Close beneath me I saw little coral
plants, fragile as violets or anemones; on a level with my head were
leafless shrubs, marvelously colored and perfect in trunk and limb and
twig; yonder a giant mushroom, ten feet across and growing on a tall
thick stalk, towered above the undergrowth. Shoals of small fish, gay as
the bird life of the tropics, drifted through the coral foliage or
darted into the shelter of the mushrooms when larger fish passed
overhead.

The floor of the lagoon was irregular, seamed by gullies and rising in
rough hillocks here and there, and my weighted basket lay at the edge of
one of these ravines. By swimming slowly in a horizontal position I
could move from place to place without great effort, and hoping to find
at least one oyster before I was forced to rise for air, I swam along
the brink, scanning the coral sharply for the pearl oysters I knew to be
plentiful at this place. A great silver cavally, four feet long and with
goggle eyes as large as dollars, darted out of a gloomy cleft, halted to
gaze at me for an instant, passed within a foot of my face, and
disappeared in the shadows. The fish gave me a start; in the flurry I
let go a good half of my breath, which rose in a string of bubbles
toward the air. My lungs were cramped. I had reached the limit of
endurance.

I made for the line, seized it with both hands, heaved strongly and felt
myself bounding upward like a cork. When my head broke water and I
raised the goggles from my eyes, I saw that the native boy was bending
over me with an air of concern.

"Another moment," he said, "and I would have gone down after you. You
were long on the bottom--I feared that you had been seized with cramps."

"It is strange down there," I answered, a little apologetically, "the
pressure--the dim light--I was so interested that I nearly forgot to
look for shell and when I did look there was none to be seen."

"It was the same with me at first," declared Marama, smiling, "but if
you look closely in the rough places, on piles of coral and along the
edges of the gullies, you will see the oysters there by hundreds. It is
easy to mistake them for lumps of rock--coral and barnacles grow on them
as on the rock itself. They lie open like the _pahua_ (the tridacna
clam), but that helps you little, for their fringes are not blue and
yellow like the clam's tongue."

I did not waste my strength by climbing into the canoe, but lay in the
water resting as I had seen the natives do. When five minutes had passed
I put down my glasses and went to the bottom again, and this time I saw
two pearl oysters. I found them at the edge of the gulley, when I was on
the point of giving up in despair of seeing the elusive things. They
looked for all the world like irregular lumps of coral, projecting like
hundreds of other lumps from the rocky wall, and I would have passed
without a second glance if one of them had not moved. Though they have
no eyes, in our sense of the word, all bivalves which do not habitually
lie buried in sand or mud seem to possess a subtle sense of light. As my
body passed over the oyster, shutting off the light, the creature was
thus mysteriously warned, and instantly its shells closed with a smooth
swiftness. Looking more closely, I recognized the outlines of the
_margaritifera_, the pearl oyster, beneath a protective growth of
parasites, and grasping it with my gloved hand, I endeavored to wrench
it from its fibrous moorings. As I struggled to free it from the coral,
the water must have been agitated, for another rough lump closed with
the same smooth swift movement, revealing a second great oyster. By this
time I had been under nearly a minute, and though I tugged with all my
might I was unable to wrench the shell free before I rose.

"I have seen the oysters," I told Marama, as I lay resting in the
sunlight, "but try as I would, I could not tear one loose!"

He picked up an opened shell from the bottom of the canoe.

"Take hold thus," he instructed me, "and turn the oyster with a sudden
wrench. It is useless to pull. Ah--your left hand is bleeding--take care
to use the gloved hand only, for the coral cuts like a knife, and
oftentimes the wounds are poisoned."

By the third time down I had gained confidence and was beginning to feel
at home on the bottom. Now I remembered the trick of which the Paumotan
diver had told me, and when I had been half a minute under water I began
to let the air out of my lungs. The native had spoken truly; each little
string of bubbles brought its moment of relief and enabled me to go
about my work more calmly.

I was beginning to see the oysters now: my eyes were growing accustomed
to the dim light. This time I managed to tear off a couple of oysters
and put them in the basket before I rose for air. Three dives filled the
basket, and when Marama pulled it from the water with its
coral-encrusted load, I gave an imitation of the exultant native
shout--a cry which brought a grin to my companion's face.

"We are learning," he said mockingly, "but it will be time to shout when
we can fill the basket at one dive!"

That afternoon, when we joined the little fleet of canoes to paddle
home, Maruia stood up, craning her neck for a look at our catch. "You
have done well," she remarked, a smile wrinkling her brown face, "not
badly for the first day's diving! I have seen grown men do worse. No
pearls? Never mind--you will find them surely. Beginners always have the
luck!"

From that day onward the fishing occupied less than a third of our time,
and the balance was put in on the lagoon. We learned fast, as boys do,
and gradually worked our way into deeper water till we were diving with
the rest. Within a few weeks we were bringing in as much shell as the
Paumotans, and my uncle was enthusiastic over our success. He could dive
with any native, and once or twice, when he had leisure, he sent Marama
out alone to fish and accompanied me to the diving-grounds. On those
days my uncle's share of the shell went to the native boy's
account--growing into a round little sum.

As for me, the diving fascinated me more each day: the beauty and
strangeness of the underwater world; the spice of danger--small, but a
reality, nevertheless; and the thought of money I was earning; the
daily, even hourly, hope of finding a rich pearl, perhaps worth a small
fortune. From time to time we found a few small pearls, but when at
last good fortune came to us, it came hand in hand with tragedy.

As the nearer shell-patches became worked out, the canoes moved
gradually northward, taking the cream of the shell without diving enough
to exhaust the beds at any one place. One morning, in the latter part of
July, Marama and I anchored close beside Maruia's canoe, on new and very
promising grounds. It was my turn to open shell. The Paumotan woman, not
ten yards away from me, was loafing that day--letting her nephew dive,
for once. Teura was a boy of twenty or twenty-one, a favorite among the
natives because of his skill as a musician and his jokes. I had grown
fond of him since we had been thrown with the divers, and often went
ashore in the evening to chat with old Maruia and listen to her nephew's
songs, accompanied by wild native airs on his accordion.

I remember that morning as if it were yesterday. The bottom was at about
eleven fathoms, rougher than any part of the lagoon that we had seen.
Here and there pinnacles of coral rose to within a few yards of the
surface; in the shadowy depths below, the bottom was seamed with
crannies and pitted with the mouths of caves. The look of the place, in
fact, was by no means reassuring, but the men sent out to survey the
bottom reported that the lagoon there was fairly paved with shell.

It had become my habit to take a water glass in the canoe, for by now I
was expert at opening the shell, and I found it interesting, in leisure
moments, to watch my companion at his work. The depth was too great to
see clearly, but I watched Marama plunge feet-first into the shadows,
and a moment later, a second string of bubbles told me that Maruia's
nephew had followed him down. Vaguely in the depths I could see Marama
moving about, a dim moving shadow when his body passed above a patch of
sand. Then, before half a minute had passed, the canoe lurched suddenly
and sharply--the native boy was pulling himself up the line in desperate
haste.

His head broke water. With a heave and a spring that nearly capsized us,
he threw himself into the canoe.

"Ah, the great tonu--he nearly had me!" he panted, trembling with
excitement. "Au! Teura! Where is he?"

I snatched up the water glass, and side by side, with our heads close
together, we gazed down into the blue water. Hearing the boy's words,
Maruia had seized her own glass. Next moment a sudden sharp wail came
from her lips. Then I saw the figure of her nephew, mounting his line
with great heaves of both hands--and rising deliberately beneath him a
monster hideous as a nightmare memory. It was a huge fish, eight or nine
feet long and of enormous bulk. Its great spiny head, four feet across
and set with a pair of eyes like saucers, terminated in jaws larger than
a shark's; its rough body was spotted and brindled in a way that
rendered it almost invisible against the coral; its pectoral fins,
frilled and spiny as the fins of a sculpin, spread out like wings on
either side. It had the look of an incredibly old and gigantic
rock-cod--to which family, indeed, I have been told that the tonu
belongs.

We watched with terrible suspense, all three of us. Teura was nearing
the surface; in another moment he would be safe. The tonu seemed
undecided, as if it were following the man out of curiosity rather than
pursuing him. I began to breathe more freely. Then when the diver was
within twenty feet of us the fish reared itself suddenly and came
rushing up, huge jaws agape.

In a twinkling it was beneath us, so close that the water beneath the
canoes swirled with its passage. The next instant the monster flashed
downward and the man was gone.

The tonu halted, four or five fathoms down, and lay with gently moving
fins. It was then I saw, to my unutterable horror, that Teura's feet and
the calves of his legs hung from the creature's twitching jaws.

Another spectator was close at hand. "Au!" cried old Maruia bitterly,
in a choking voice. "Teura is gone! But I shall kill that devil as he
has killed my boy!"

She had been baptized--she was a churchgoer and a keeper of the Sabbath
day; but now I heard her half-chanting a strange invocation, in loud and
solemn tones. "She prays to the heathen gods," muttered Marama in an
awed whisper, "to Taiao, and to Ruahatu, the old shark-god of her
people!"

I glanced up. The woman was standing in the stern of her canoe. She wore
her usual diving-dress, a loose gown of cotton over a pareu worn as the
men wore theirs. The goggles were on her eyes and she had taken up a
heavy fish-spear from its place on the outrigger-poles of the canoe. It
was a formidable weapon, a haft of tough black wood tipped with a yard
of steel: a tapering lance sharpened to a needle-point. I turned my head
to look into the water glass. The great fish lay beneath us, a monstrous
vision in the blue twilight below; but now the man's legs had
disappeared.

Maruia's canoe came alongside. I heard the outrigger knock softly
against our own. Then both canoes rocked violently, and we started at
the sound of a heavy plunging splash.

Without a word to us or an instant's hesitation, Maruia had leaped
overboard. One hand held a leaden diving-weight and the other gripped
the spear, point downward. The fish scarcely moved at the turmoil in the
water; the hideous lord of the lagoon was making his meal. Our hearts
beat fast as we watched what followed, gazing through our little pane of
glass. Swift and straight, the woman went down head-first till she was
within two yards of the tonu's back. She let go the weight, which
plunged down out of sight among the shadows; she drew herself together
and struck--struck squarely where the head joined the misshapen body, a
foot behind the monstrous goggle eyes. I saw the steel strike deep--saw
Maruia raise herself upright in the water to drive the spear home with
both hands on the shaft. The fish started; its jaws gaped wide--the
sprawled and mangled body of Teura eddied down toward the coral forty
feet below. The wounded monster turned on his side, the shaft of the
spear protruding from his spiny back, and swam feebly and aimlessly to
the surface, where the divers, now gathering from all sides, put a quick
end to his struggles.

Then I heard the eerie diver's whistle close beside our canoe and the
voice of Maruia calling to us. "I am going home," she said. "Lend me a
hand to put Teura in the canoe." She had been nearly four minutes under
water and had brought up with her the body of her boy.

The natives did no more diving that day. Anchors came up, gear was
stowed away, and one after another the canoes fell in behind old Maruia,
while the wailing of the _tangi_, the native mourning for the dead,
floated across the lagoon. I reached for our own anchor-line, but Marama
stopped me with a gesture.

"Wait," he said seriously, "we will go back soon, but first there is
something I must tell you."

"Let us go to the Tara," I answered, "and tell Seroni what has happened.
This place makes me shudder. I have no more heart for diving today."

The native boy looked at me solemnly.

"Like you, I am afraid," he confessed, "but I have seen what moves me
more strongly than fear. And I know that our fears are baseless, for my
grandfather, who was the most skilled fisherman of Raiatea, has told me
many times that where one tonu lives, another is never to be found close
by.

"Watch well," he went on, "and move the basket if there is danger, for I
am going down once more. In the cave where I first saw the tonu, are two
_parau tahito_--the old oysters of which the divers speak. They are
covered with barnacles, very old and huge, and perhaps they hold
pearls--great pearls that will make rich men of you and me. But that
cave is an evil place! Teura went down with his back to me, and I saw
him reach the bottom close to the entrance of the cavern, which he did
not see. Then I looked in, and my heart beat fast as I saw that pair of
old oysters, just inside. I looked more closely, and there in the
shadows were the eyes of the tonu watching me, and his great jaws
opening as he made ready to rush out. For a moment my limbs were
paralyzed! The rest you saw."

I was becoming infected with my companion's excitement. Ever since we
had begun to dive I had heard stories of famous pearls, taken throughout
the group in years gone by, and the pearls which fetched the greatest
sums and made immortal the names of their finders had always come from
these huge, old, and sickly-looking oysters, growing apart from the
rest.

Marama had picked up his goggles and was making ready to go over the
side, when a saying of my uncle's flashed across my mind. "Never let one
of your men do a job you're afraid to do yourself!" Then all at once I
knew that I should have no peace unless I acted quickly.

"Stop," I said--a little shakily, at the prospect of the task before me.
"You have been down once. Now it is my turn!"

All my life I have found that the more one fears a thing, the quicker it
should be done. Without heeding Marama's protests, I snapped on my
glasses, tucked up my waistcloth, and went overboard. Next moment I
seized the lead-line and signaled Marama to let go.

Never, before or since, have I been more afraid than on that day, as the
weight took me plunging down into a bluish gloom. The bottom, as I have
said, was at about eleven fathoms,--close to seventy feet,--and since
the coral was of the dark-purple kind, the light was very dim. When my
weight struck the coral my heart was beating so that I nearly choked; I
lost my bearings and wasted half a minute before I found the entrance of
the tonu's cave. Suddenly, five yards ahead of me, I perceived the dark
mouth of the cavern, like a low wide doorway, fringed with pink coral
and gently waving weeds. As I stared into the darkness which seemed to
fill a vast chamber, I felt a prickling at the roots of my hair--what if
the tonu had a mate!

Then, dimly in the gloom, I made out the forms of the two great oysters,
their barnacled and crusted shells agape. I moved forward to wrench them
from the rock. With one in each hand I swam toward the basket, glancing
back fearfully as I went. There was no shout of triumph when I reached
the surface--I flung myself into the canoe and lay there while Marama
pulled up the basket.

"You got them?" he inquired eagerly, without turning his head in my
direction.

"They are in the basket," I said, "but if I had not found them, I would
not have gone down again!"

"My stomach was cold at the thought of it. Come--let us open the shell
and leave this evil place. I can scarce wait to see what is inside!"

"You take one," I suggested, "and I will open the other."

"Yes!" he answered, with a boy's eagerness to prolong the moment of
suspense. "I will open mine first, and when we have seen what it
contains, you can look into the other one."

He inserted his knife close to the hinge, severed the muscle connecting
the shells, and laid the great oyster open on the bottom of the canoe.
His fingers, skilled with long practice, went under the fringing mantle
where nearly all pearls are found, searching rapidly and in vain. He
felt more carefully--uttered an exclamation of disgust.

"There is nothing," he said mournfully, "not so much as a blister
pearl!"

I took my knife and opened the oyster he had handed me. It was very old
and diseased; the shells seemed half rotten, pierced with the holes of
borers, and the flesh of the creature inside had a sickly, greenish
look. My forefinger went under the mantle--felt something hard and
smooth, which moved loosely at the touch. Next moment I laid in Marama's
hand a magnificent pearl, the size of a marble, round, flawless, and
glimmering with the sheen of perfect orient.

We gazed at it, awed by our good fortune. A man might spend years among
the atolls without laying eyes on a pearl one half so beautiful! My
fingers had gone back to the oyster to complete the habitual inspection
when Marama found his voice.

"With such a pearl," he said softly, "a man could buy a schooner like
the Tara, or an entire island for himself! Not one of the divers has
ever seen its match, nor--"

I interrupted him with a frenzied shout, as I laid in the palm of his
hand, beside the first pearl, a second one--its twin in size, in color,
in lustre, and perfection of form.

"Marama," I said when we had grown a little calmer, "we must say
nothing of this to anyone except Seroni. I know little of pearls, but
the value of this matched pair is too great to be made known! The sight
of them would tempt a man to things he might regret."

Our mood of exultation was quenched by the wailing of mourners as we
passed the islet, and the sight of my uncle's sober face when he met us
at the Tara's rail. "I'm glad you came in," he said. "This has been a
bad day and I'm feeling anxious and depressed. Teura--poor devil; he was
one of the best of the lot; I've known him since he was a lad at school.
This business won't stop the diving, of course--it's all part of the
day's work to them--but it's a pity that such a tragedy has come to
spoil our season at Iriatai. I've been jumpy as an old woman since the
canoes came in--a silly idea that you might have gone on diving and that
there might have been another of those damned tonus about!"

"We want to have a talk with you, Uncle Harry," I said. "Can we go down
to your stateroom--all three of us?"

I followed my uncle and Marama into the stateroom and closed the door
behind me. Then I unrolled the tuck of my pareu, opened a knotted
handkerchief and laid on the table the twin pearls of the tonu's cave.
My uncle's dark brilliant eyes opened wide, his eyebrows went up, and he
whistled a soft and long-drawn note. Without a word he took up first one
pearl and then the other, turning them in his fingers and letting the
light play over their gleaming and flawless surfaces.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed at last. "You take my breath away! I reckon this
is the most beautiful matched pair that ever came out of the
Paumotus--by long, long odds! In Paris, on the Rue de la Paix, the
jewelers would fight one another for a chance to bid on them! You can't
set a price on a pair of pearls like these. One of them by itself would
make you independent in a small way; the fact that they're matched
probably doubles the value of each." He turned to the native boy. "Eh
Marama," he said to him, in his own tongue; "you are a lucky boy! This
morning's work will make you the richest man of Raiatea, with a fine
house, a cutter, and plantations enough to keep all your relatives in
plenty. But say nothing of this, for not all men are good at heart.

"Of course they are yours," he went on in English, "to do with as you
wish; but I advise you two to let me handle this matter for you. They
must be sold as a pair, and I know a man on Tahiti who will give us the
top of the market. He is buyer for one of the largest firms in Paris,
and in a case like this, something more than money is involved. These
pearls will make history, you will see; I haven't a doubt they'll end
among the jewels of some European court. Sikorsky knows me and knows
that I know the game; it will be a matter of naming our own price,
within reason, for the acquisition of such a pair of pearls would be a
tremendous feather in his cap. Come, we must christen them, for pearls
of real importance are always named. What do you say to calling them the
_Marama Twins_? Marama means the moon, and their orient has the pure,
pale glimmer of moonlight. What beautiful things! If I were a rich man
I'd take them off your hands myself!

"See--we'll put them in cotton-wool in this tobacco-tin, and stow it
away in the safe. The less said the better, I fancy, even among
ourselves. Such a temptation might prove too much for almost any man!
But tell me about Teura--his aunt was too much cut up to talk."

Marama left us to go on deck while I told my uncle the story of the
morning's happenings. He shook his head when I told of how the canoes
had gone home, and of our resolution to go down after the two old
oysters Marama had seen. Then I spoke of my feeling that I must be the
one to dive, and how I had gone down to bring up the oysters from the
tonu's cave.

"I know what you mean," he remarked, as I concluded, "and you did the
right thing; but don't take such chances very often! You'll have to keep
on diving for a few days, if only for the sake of public morale, but I
wish you'd slack off gradually and give it up altogether in a week or
two."




  9. The Cave of the Shark God


I went on deck that night and lay alone in the warm darkness, building
castles in Spain. Every lad has dreamed of all that he would do for his
parents when he had gone out into the world and made his fortune, and
now my dreams seemed to have come true at last. I thought of my mother,
and the things I might do to brighten the dullness of her life; of
Marion, and how my good fortune would send her to the Eastern school she
longed for; of my father, who had dreamed for years of improving and
restocking the ranch. The old Santa Brigida where I had been born and
where I hoped to end my days--a sudden understanding came to me, a rush
of gratitude for my father's determined clinging to our land. I realized
as never before how I loved the valley, the brown hills, the lonely
stretch of coast. A home to go back to--that was the best thing in life!

Teura was to be buried in the morning, and no man on the islet slept
that night. After the native fashion the divers were assembled at
Maruia's house, and all night long their wild and melancholy songs
floated out across the water. The hymns of the islanders have a power
to stir one strangely: the voices of the women wailing in a minor key,
the deep, chanting refrain of the men--gradually, under the influence of
their music, my thoughts wandered, and I fell asleep.

The natives observe Sunday with a strictness unknown among more
civilized Christian races. Saving a few unavoidable tasks like cooking,
no work of any kind is done on that day, and the man bold enough to
break the rule would make an outcast of himself. If he went fishing,
they believe that his fishing would be accursed; if by any chance he
caught a fish, its flesh would be poisonous; and in all probability a
shark would be sent to overturn his canoe and make an end of the impious
Sabbath-breaker. White men are a law unto themselves, of course, but my
uncle had warned me long since that it would be a mistake to urge Marama
to break the rules of his religion. Our Sundays, therefore, were what
Sundays should be--days of rest and change from the occupations of the
week.

Marama and I often persuaded the cook to put up a cold lunch for us, and
set out in our canoe to explore the distant portions of the lagoon. To
amuse ourselves, and for easier traveling on these occasions, we had
rigged a sail--a bamboo mast, a big leg-of-mutton sail of unbleached
cotton, and a spar of tough light wood. We selected from the Tara's
stock of lumber a long two-inch plank, and when we set out for a day's
sailing this plank was lashed to the canoe--one end to the outrigger,
the middle to the gunwales, and the other projecting up and out, six
feet on the starboard beam. We carried a tremendous spread of sail for
so small a craft, and the long narrow canoe, with a fresh breeze astern
or on the beam, skimmed the lagoon at a speed that delighted our hearts.
One of us managed the sheet and steered with an oar from the whaleboat;
the other took his place on the plank, changing sides when we tacked,
and crawling out on the weather beam when the wind freshened and the
canoe lay over--bounding forward to rush through the water with a
tearing sound.

On the Sunday after Teura's burial, we took our lunch and set out for an
all-day sail, and toward the middle of the afternoon the trade wind fell
away and died. We were on the west side of the lagoon, a mile or two
north of the village of the copra-makers, built on the site of the
ancient Paumotan settlement It was the first time that we had passed
close to the place where the shark had met his death, and as we paddled
slowly along the coral cliffs rising almost to the surface, we watched
for the opening of the cave.

Finally, through the calm blue water, not more than ten or twelve feet
down, we saw the mouth of the cavern where the monster had taken refuge.
The palms along-shore almost overhung the lagoon at this place. The
fringing reef which fell away in a line of submarine cliffs was only a
few yards wide, and beyond it lay the highest land on Iriatai, the path
of an ancient hurricane where the breaching seas of centuries ago had
piled great blocks and masses of coral to a height of eight or ten yards
above the sea. Marama dropped his paddle and took up a pair of water
goggles.

"Hold the canoe here a moment," he said. "I am going overboard for a
look. There was only one shark and I do not believe that a tonu would
live so close to the surface."

Next moment he was over the side and swimming down toward the
cave-mouth, into which I saw his body disappear. Presently, with
leisurely strokes, he swam into sunlit water and rose to take breath,
with a hand on the gunwale of the canoe. "Have patience a little
longer," he said with a smile, as he pulled down his goggles for the
second time. "I am going down once more."

Again he disappeared, and again I waited idly for his reappearance. A
minute passed; a minute and a half; two minutes. I began to be alarmed.
Three minutes were gone. I knew that never before had my friend stayed
down so long. Four minutes--

I hauled up the canoe in the shallows, snapped on my glasses and plunged
down to the entrance of the cavern. As I peered in anxiously, I saw that
there was a strange glimmer of light where only darkness should have
been. Suddenly the light was blotted out, and Marama emerged from the
tunnel and rose with me to the surface of the lagoon. When we had taken
breath, his hand went up to interrupt my hasty demand for an
explanation.

"Aue!" he exclaimed in an excited voice, "but that is a strange place!
The hole in the coral rises as it runs inward, and seeing light ahead I
thought that I would swim in a little way. The light grew stronger; all
at once my head was out of water and I was breathing air. When I pushed
up my glasses to look about me, I found that I was swimming in the midst
of a great pool, arched over with a low ceiling of rock. At the farther
end a single ray of sunlight shines through a crack between two
wedged-in boulders, and beneath the light I saw a broad ledge, sandy and
high above the water. On that ledge, where a hundred might stand
together, are things of the old times: a heathen god, spears, stone
axes, the whitened heads of men. I am afraid, but I will go back if you
desire to see."

A sudden memory flashed into my mind--the scent of wood-smoke; the long,
shadowy living room at home; my uncle lying in a rawhide chair with his
feet against the stones of the fireplace; the missing brig; the savages
of Iriatai; the story of the searching party--beyond doubt we had
stumbled on the cave where the cannibals took refuge on that day so long
ago!

"There is nothing to fear in old bones," I said. "Lead the way, if you
are not weary, and I will follow close behind."

Marama ducked under like a rolling porpoise, to swim down the face of
the cliff with long easy strokes, and I swam after him down the cliff
and into the faintly luminous gloom. The light grew stronger as we
advanced; twenty yards from the entrance my head came out of water and I
breathed the welcome air again. We were swimming in a black pool which
half filled a long shadowy cavern, illuminated by a beam of sunlight
filtering in through a cranny in the rocks. Stalactites of fantastic
shape hung from the low roof, and I saw the broad ledge of which the
native boy had spoken. We were in the hidden refuge of the savages, the
lurking-place of the terrible carcharodon, the shark which had come so
near to making an end of my uncle during our early days on Iriatai!

It was an eerie place. We swam to the far end, and my heart was beating
faster than usual when my feet touched bottom and we walked out, side by
side, upon the ledge. A glance showed me that the place had been a
heathen temple of some sort. Under the hole which admitted light stood a
small platform of roughhewn coral blocks, a kind of _marae_, like others
to be found throughout the Polynesian islands. On the platform, with his
misshapen back to the ray of afternoon sunlight, squatted a hideous
little god of stone, leering and monstrous, with hands folded on his
belly and with a grinning mouth. A semicircle of crumbling skulls lay
about the idol, and leaning against the rocky wall I saw carved
warclubs, beautifully fashioned spears, and axes of polished stone.
Marama touched my arm.

"Let us go," he whispered. "This is an ill place, indeed! I have heard
the old men's tales of the days when there were still wild people in the
Paumotus; without doubt that _tiki_ is Ruahatu, to whom you heard old
Maruia pray. These heads are the heads of men slain here in
sacrifice--their bodies were offered to _Atua Mao_, the shark god. Let
us go!"

That night, when I was telling my uncle of the cavern, Maruia came
aboard to show him a pearl that she had found. Her eyes gleamed as he
translated to her the story of our adventure, and she nodded her head
violently in confirmation of each fresh detail.

"Aye," she remarked at the end. "It was thus in the old days among the
Paumotan people. On my island, Matahiva, we had such a place; my father
has told me how in his childhood the women took refuge there when the
warriors went out to meet the men of Rangiroa, raiding in their great
canoes. And that stone god was Ruahatu, the Lord of Sharks. For know
that the shark you killed was not a shark, nor would you have killed him
had you not been a white man! You smile--but I am speaking true words.
For a hundred years, two hundred, since time beyond reckoning, perhaps,
he has lived in that cave and fattened on the bodies of men, cast to him
by the priests. Yet his own people might swim about him fearlessly, for
he knew them, and they were of his clan. One of my own ancestors, after
his death, took on the semblance of a shark!"

       *     *     *     *     *

"You'll have an interesting yarn to tell at home," said my uncle, when
the woman was gone. "I've heard of these Paumotan refuge-caves, but I
never knew a man who had laid eyes on one. Some Sunday we'll run down
for a look. I'd like to get those weapons for my collection in Tahiti."




  10. The Cholita Comes to Iriatai


In those days Marama and I were accounted among the skilled fishermen of
the island, and a few weeks after we explored the shark's cave, we
decided to make an expedition after a fish seldom captured in the South
Seas--the dolphin, or dorado, which the natives called _mahimahi_. He is
a noble fish, swift, predatory, and difficult of approach, a rover of
the open sea, where his pursuit requires no small degree of hardihood
and skill. And the dolphin's flesh is delicate above all other fish--a
feast for island kings before the white man came. Pahuri, the Tara's
wrinkled engineer, gave us the idea of dolphin-fishing: we were
listening to his yarns one night when he chanced to speak of the
mahimahi.

"Aye," he said, as he twisted a bit of tobacco in a pandanus-leaf,
"there is one fish that you have never caught! How many men on this
island have tasted of the dolphin? Not you--nor you?" We shook our
heads.

"When I was a boy in the Cook Islands," he went on reminiscently, "that
fish was often in the oven at my father's house. In those days the men
had not grown lazy and timid, clinging to the land. For it needs a man
to bring the dolphin home: he is not to be found in a few fathoms of
water close to shore! The mahimahi is the swiftest of all fish and the
most beautiful, with his colors of blue and green, changing like flame.
He ranges far out to sea in little bands--three or four males and as
many females together. You will know them apart easily, for the male
will often weigh a hundred pounds, while his mate is never more than
half his size. How can you find the dolphin? Listen and I will tell
you--I have forgotten more of fishing-lore than these others will know
in all their lives!

"Paddle offshore a mile, two miles, three miles, and wait in the early
morning calm, when the birds fly out to feed. When you see the _itatae_,
the small, pure white tern, watch carefully! Remember that the brown
noddy-tern, which follows the bonito, never circles above the mahimahi.
But if you see four or five white birds circling low and fast above the
waves, hasten to that place and make ready for the dolphin-fishing. As
for bait, flying-fish is good, but I will tell you a secret. Above all
other food, the mahimahi loves the lobster! Take with you the white meat
from the tails of the lobsters, and when your canoe is close to the
birds throw this bait into the water directly under them. Then watch
closely and you will see the dolphin dart up from the depths like a
living flame! Let your baited hook sink slowly and presently a fish will
seize it, but you must handle him gently, for he is very swift and
strong. If one is taken, the others will stay about the canoe, and you
will catch them all. You are going to try? I would go with you if I had
time--it is work from daybreak to darkness!"

That night we made torches of dried coconut-leaves, bound in long
bundles, and paddled out to the reef separating the two islands north of
camp. There was a new moon, by good luck--the best time of the month for
lobsters and other dwellers on the barrier. We wore rope-soled shoes to
protect our feet from the sharp spines of sea urchins, and when we had
anchored the canoe in shallow water we walked abreast along the outer
edge of the reef, brightly illuminated by our torches. When a comber
toppled and crashed, sending a foaming rush of water across the coral,
we halted and waited till the water cleared in the interval before the
next breaker came rolling in. Then we walked slowly, bending to scan
each weedy crevice and hole. Sometimes a lobster darted like a flash
from his refuge and was gone; sometimes the torchlight reflected from a
pair of stalk-eyes betrayed our quarry in time for us to press a foot
down on the lobster's back, seize him warily from behind, and toss him
into the gaping sack. In an hour we had more than we could use.

The stars were shining and there was only the faintest glimmer of dawn,
when we dragged our canoe over the reef and shot out seaward through the
breakers. Gradually, as we left Iriatai behind us, the eastern sky
paled, grew luminous, flushed a rosy pink. The sea changed from black to
gray, and from gray to blue--a new day had begun. Around the vast circle
of the horizon, saving in the west, where masses of dark cloud towered
to a great height, light scattered trade-wind clouds hung above the line
where sea met sky.

"I do not like the look of the weather," remarked Marama, glancing
westward. "There is wind in those clouds, and if they draw nearer we
must return in haste. But the sea is calm, so let us go about our
fishing for an hour or two."

We were perhaps four miles offshore. The palms of Iriatai lay like a low
smudge along the horizon to the south of us. Singly and in twos and
threes, the birds had left their roosting-places ashore and were flying
this way and that over the sea, on the lookout for schools of fish.
There were boobies and noddy terns in plenty, and a few of the small
snow-white terns on which we kept a special watch. Suddenly, a quarter
of a mile from us, a pair of noddies began to circle and dive; other
birds came flapping hastily from all directions, and soon hundreds of
them were wheeling and plunging through the air.

"Bonito," said my companion, heading the canoe toward the school. "Let
us make sure of not returning empty-handed!"

It was an old game to me, but one of which I never wearied. We bent our
backs and dug our paddles into the sea. The light canoe flew over the
swells at a pace that left a wake of foam. I heard Marama drop his
paddle; knew that he had turned to face the stern and taken the long
bamboo pole from its place on the outrigger-supports. "_Hoe! Hoe!_" he
cried. "Paddle your hardest--the school is turning, and in a moment we
shall be among them!"

Now the birds were all about us, and the sea was alive with the small
fish on which birds and bonito feed, leaping and flashing by thousands
in a frenzy of fear. A bonito leaped with a heavy plunge, close to the
canoe--another--another; next moment an acre of sea was churned into
foam as they fell upon their prey like wolves. I was in the bow place,
and now my efforts were redoubled, for everything depended on keeping
the canoe in rapid motion. Marama was seated on the stern thwart, facing
the rear. In his right hand he held the butt of the rod, braced against
the thwart. As the sun was bright, he had selected a dark lure,--a piece
of greenish-black mother-of-pearl, fashioned in the shape of a four-inch
minnow,--and it skittered along behind us in an extraordinary lifelike
way. Cupping his left hand, Marama leaned over the side and began to
throw water over the lure, five yards astern--a custom believed to
attract the fish. I heard a shout--a fat bonito came tumbling through
the air and thumped into the bottom of the canoe. Next instant the hook
was free and over the side again, and the native boy was calling:
"Paddle! Paddle! You are letting them draw away from us!" For a quarter
of an hour, with aching muscles and a dry throat, I held the canoe on
the outskirts of the school. At last the pace became too much for me,
and I dropped my paddle as the rearmost birds left us in their wake.

We sank into the bottom of the canoe and lay there panting. Marama was
worn out, for bonito-fishing is a strenuous sport. In fifteen minutes,
after paddling five hundred yards at racing speed, he had hooked and
swung into our canoe nearly a score of fish, averaging seven or eight
pounds each! It was still calm, and the dugout rose and fell gently on
the swell as we lay there resting. The bank of black clouds was moving
imperceptibly toward us, blotting out the horizon with an ominous violet
gloom. It was time that we went home and I was about to speak when I saw
Marama was pointing eastward.

"The dolphin!" he exclaimed, as my eye caught the glint of half a dozen
small white birds circling rapidly above the sea. "Shall we paddle out
yonder for a try, or shall we leave the mahimahi for another day?"

"Let us chance it," I suggested. "Pahuri knows, and from what he said
there must be dolphin yonder. It may be a long time before we see the
white birds circle again!"

We were young and far from prudent. In spite of the approaching squall,
we headed the canoe away from land and strained at our paddles anew.
When first sighted, the birds were not more than half a mile distant,
but they were moving slowly away from us, and twice, before we caught
up, the fish must have sounded, for the terns ceased their feeding and
flew about uncertainly till they fell to circling again. At last the
birds were diving fearlessly about the canoe--beautiful little
creatures, smaller than a pigeon, with pointed wings and dark, incurious
eyes. Remembering Pahuri's advice, I baited my hook and stood up in the
bow to throw out morsels of lobster. Then I swung the line around my
head and cast far out in front of the canoe.

"_Te mahimahi!_" cried Marama excitedly; and I saw a great fish,
gleaming with the colors of a fire opal, dart up from the depths, seize
a morsel of bait, and disappear. At that instant the line tautened with
a jerk that cut the skin of my hand: I was fast to my first dolphin.

He seemed strong as a wild horse. Fathom after fathom of line hissed
over the gunwale and into the sea, at a speed that brought a shout to
Marama's lips. Then the fish turned and shot up to the surface, rushing
this way and that--a streaking flame of azure in the sea. As the line
shortened, Marama leaned over the side, long-handled gaff in hand. The
dolphin was growing weary; still fighting, but at a slowing pace, he
passed close to the side of the canoe--and the native boy's arm shot
out. The dugout lurched and nearly capsized as he brought the fish
alongside, the gaff deep-buried in the gleaming back. A stroke of the
club, a dying quiver, and we seized gills and tail to drag the fish
aboard, exclaiming in excited admiration at the play of gorgeous color
on his sides.

I had forgotten the impending squall, and now, as I glanced back toward
Iriatai, I saw that there was no land in sight. Sea and sky were merged
in a thick gloom; the air stirred uneasily; the black clouds were almost
overhead. Marama was cutting short lengths of fishline to make fast the
loose articles in the canoe; the fish-bulb, the baler, the gaff. He
passed me a bit of line. "Tie one end to the thwart and the other to
your paddle," he said, "and remember that if we swamp there will be no
cause for fear--there is small chance that the sharks will find us.
Three times have I been swamped at sea, and each time we lay in the
water till the waves had calmed, and reached the land without mishap.
Look well to the outrigger-lashings forward there--a turn of hue might
make them more secure."

I doubt if any other type of craft as small and light would have
weathered what our canoe went through in the half hour that followed.
Long before the wind reached us we could hear the moaning sound of it
and see an unbroken line of white advancing across the face of the sea.
Then, after a sharp preliminary gust, the squall was on us, shrieking
and raving out of the west.

A spume of torn salt water, white and stinging like sleet, drove from
crest to crest of the seas, mingling with horizontal sheets of rain
which blinded us as we fought desperately to hold the plunging canoe
bow-on. It was then that I began to realize the wonderful seaworthiness
of the Polynesian canoe--light, sharp, and high-sided, balanced by its
outrigger of hibiscus wood, buoyant as cork. In riding such a sea there
were sudden fierce strains on outrigger and outrigger-poles--strains
which would have snapped the tough wood in an instant, save for its
strong and flexible cinnet-lashings. Each time a sea came rearing high
above us the bow tossed up to meet the slope of broken water--rose up
and up, surmounted the wave, and plunged into the seething trough
beyond.

"Bale!" Marama was shouting in a voice that came to me faintly above the
screaming of the wind. "Bale, or we shall be swamped!"

As I leaned back to take up the baler I saw that the canoe was a third
full of water--mingled sea water and rain. I set to work in a panic,
while Marama fought to hold us head-on to the seas, with clenched teeth
and a steady eye ahead. Working at top speed to throw the water out, I
perceived with a sinking heart that the task was beyond his strength; we
had done our best, but in another moment the canoe would fill and swamp.
Three times, with a sweep of the paddle that knotted his muscles as
though cast in bronze, Marama saved us by a miracle. A white-crested
roller seized us with a fierce caprice, spinning the canoe about.
Marama's paddle dug deep to swing our bows to meet the oncoming sea and
then, with a crackling sound audible above the wind, the haft of hard
black wood snapped clean in two.

Next moment the wave burst over the gunwale, and we were struggling in
the sea.

For a time I felt that the end was near. The water was warm and I was
clinging to the outrigger-pole, but it seemed impossible to breathe. I
think I should have suffocated, without my long experience of diving at
Iriatai. My eyes were filled with water, and each time I strove to get a
breath, the sea broke over me to fill my nose and mouth. Little by
little I learned to watch my chance, to fill my lungs hastily at moments
when I could get a gulp of air.

Marama worked his way along the gunwale of the swamped canoe and took
hold beside me, on the forward outrigger pole. The buoyant wood
supported our bodies in the water, and our weight at the forward end
held the long hull bow-on. The clouds were breaking to the west; the
squall was passing suddenly as it had come. The ocean was calming
rapidly, steep breaking seas giving place to a long swell, though for
the time being there could be no thought of baling the canoe. Before
long we were able to speak of our predicament, and I remember that
neither of us mentioned sharks, the subject uppermost in both our minds.
It is curious that the white man, like his savage cousins, brown or
black, is still the prey of an ancient instinct of the race: Never
speak of the evil thing you dread!

If the sharks had found us that day, our end would have been a sudden
and a ghastly one.

Toward noon the sun shone out through the last of the storm clouds and
the sea had gone down so much that Marama made ready for an attempt to
get the water out of our canoe. "You have seen it done at Faatemu," he
said. "I will watch the waves carefully till our chance comes--and then
you must do your best!"

We swam aft and took our places on either side of the stern, holding the
canoe head-on while two or three long swells rolled by. Then, at the
beginning of a lull, the native boy gave the signal, and we put all our
weight on the stern, sinking it deep. "Now!" cried Marama, and we dove
down, pushing it still deeper and thrusting forward as our hands let go
their hold. The canoe shot into the air, leaping forward as the light
wood bounded to the surface; the hull smacked down on the sea, and a
rush of water tumbled forward and poured in a cascade over the bows.
Piloted by Marama's skilled hands, she took the next swell without
shipping a cupful, her gunwale four or five inches clear of the sea.

"Hold on with one hand and bale with the other," ordered my companion,
"and I will swim forward to keep her head-on till she is dry."

There were still a good fifty gallons of water and my task was a weary
one, but at last she floated high and one after the other we clambered
in gingerly over the stern. Without a word Marama stood up, balancing
himself with one bare foot on either gunwale as he gazed out intently to
the west.

"There is no land in sight," he said.

I felt no great concern at his words, for I believed the squall could
not have carried us many miles offshore and though we had only one
paddle between us, a few hours would bring us within sight of the palms
of Iriatai. I learned afterward that we were in the clutch of one of the
uncharted currents of the Paumotus--a current which swept around the
north end of Iriatai and was carrying us father and farther into the
vast stretch of ocean between the coral islands and the South American
coast.

Toward three o'clock, while I paddled and Marama scanned the empty line
of the horizon from his perch in the bows, he gave a sudden shout. "_E
pahi!_--a ship!" he cried, and presently I made her out, a two-masted
schooner, hull down in the north. Could it be the Tara, come out in
search of us? But no--this was not the first time we had spent a day
away from camp; by evening my uncle would begin to feel anxiety, but for
the present he would think we had been caught in the squall and forced
to land--a stove-in canoe, perhaps, and a weary journey on foot through
thorny bush and over sharp and broken rocks.

A light steady breeze ruffled the sea that afternoon, and anxious
minutes passed before we made certain that the schooner was heading
south. When she was still miles away I saw that she was not the Tara.
She carried a pair of lofty topsails, a rare sight in these seas; and
unlike the schooners in the island trade, the stranger's mainsail
sported a gaff, cocked at a jaunty yachting angle. As she came closer,
her towering canvas drawing every ounce of power from the air, she made
a picture to delight more critical eyes than mine. The Tara had a sturdy
beauty of her own, but she was a "bald-headed" schooner, without
topmasts, and she would have had the look of a barge beside the tall,
graceful vessel approaching us, skimming the sea like a cup-defender
under her press of sail.

Presently she was within hailing-distance and we saw her native crew
along the rail. The brown men began to shout questions at us, after the
fashion of their race: Who were we--whence did we come--where were we
going? Then I heard a command, in a roaring voice that made the sailors
spring to their posts. The schooner shot into the wind with a crisp
shiver of canvas, bobbing and ducking into the head sea as she moved
forward and lost way close alongside. Lines were passed down, strong
hands came out to help us; the next moment our canoe lay on deck and we
were standing beside it, surrounded by good-natured islanders who were
chattering, gesticulating, grinning with flashes of their white teeth.

Again the roaring voice boomed out from astern: "Back the fore-staysail!
Eh, Tua! Send the Kanaka forward and bring the white boy aft to me!"

Tua, the mate, a tall native with a handsome determined face, touched my
arm. Walking aft while the schooner filled away again, I had my first
look at the helmsman, a white man of herculean build. He wore a suit of
drill, freshly starched and ironed, snowy yachting-shoes, and a Panama
of the finest weave. The lower part of his face was concealed by heavy
moustaches and a thick blond beard, but the skin above his cheek-bones
was smooth as a woman's. His eyes were of a blue I have never seen
before nor since: dark and sparkling when his humor was good--in anger,
glittering with the cold glare of ice. In some subtle way the eyes
reflected the man's whole personality, at once virile, magnetic, daring,
unscrupulous, and cruel. But I was young and his cordial manner disarmed
me; for the time, my eyes were not open to the evil in our rescuer. He
smiled and stretched out a hand to me--an enormous hand with fingers
like so many bananas.

"Well, young man," he said, his deep voice and the order of his words
carrying a foreign hint, "from where are you come? In that direction,
South America is the nearest land!"

I had asked for water as I stepped aboard, and now a black man with a
great shock of hair came aft to hand me a pitcher and a glass. The
captain watched me, smiling behind his beard as I drank the water to the
last drop. Finally I set down the glass.

"Excuse me, sir," I said, "I was very thirsty! It was lucky for us that
you happened to pick us up. We went fishing this morning and our canoe
was swamped in a squall. Afterward, when the clouds passed, the land was
out of sight, and we've been paddling ever since." He glanced down at a
chart unrolled before him on the cockpit floor.

"From Iriatai you are come, then," he remarked. "That is strange, for
the island is marked as uninhabited. Well, it is not far out of my
course--I am bound for Mangareva to load shell."

His courteous manner and lack of curiosity made me feel that it would be
boorish to be reticent. I had no suspicion that he was feeling me out
for information. And my uncle had nothing to conceal.

"My name is Selden," I told him, "and I have been on the island several
months. My uncle, Henry Selden, has leased Iriatai from the Government
and planted coconuts. Last year he discovered a patch of shell in the
lagoon, and the French have granted him a season's diving-rights."

I was going to say more, but a sudden sound interrupted my words. The
ship's bell rang out two sharp and measured beats, paused, and sounded
twice again. It was six o'clock. The watch was changing, and at a word
from the captain the tall mate came aft to take the wheel.

"Keep a man aloft," the skipper said. "It grows dark, but within half an
hour you will raise the land." He turned to me. "Come below," he
suggested, "you will be hungry after your day at sea. When we have
dined, I shall be interested to hear more of your island."

He followed me down to the saloon, where the table was set with shining
glass and porcelain. A young woman rose as we appeared, a slender,
graceful girl, with sullen eyes and a great bruise disfiguring one pale
brown cheek. She wore a loose gown of scarlet silk; crescents of gold
were in her ears; and her dark hair, dressed in a single braid thick as
a man's arm, hung to her knees. I learned afterward that she was a
half-caste from the Carolines. The captain spoke to her and glanced at
me.

"Madame Schmidt," he said in introduction; and as I took her hand, I
realized suddenly how I must have appeared. It was months since scissors
had touched my hair, which stood on my head like a Fijian's, tangled and
bleached by the sun. My skin was tanned to a sort of saddle-color, and I
was naked save for the torn and faded pareu about my waist. The captain
seemed to divine my thought.

"Eh, Raita!" he ordered. "Get out for our guest some clean clothes. He
will feel more at ease."

I slipped into a stateroom to put on the garments the woman laid out for
me: an enormous pair of trousers I rolled up at the bottom, and a coat
in which Marama and I could have buttoned ourselves with room to spare.
The meal was served by the captain's body servant, the black,
shock-headed savage I had seen on deck. He was an evil-looking creature,
like some fierce ape masquerading in a sailor's clothes. Several times
during the meal Schmidt gave him orders in an outlandish jargon I had
never heard, and once, when the captain told him to fetch wine, he asked
his master a question in a shrill chatter, grimacing with his eyebrows
like a monkey. The woman ate sullenly, without once raising her eyes;
when she had finished, she rose and left us without a word.

It was still daylight outside, but the swinging lamp above the table was
lit, and under its light I had an opportunity to study the features of
my host. I began to change my first opinion of him, for the scrutiny was
not reassuring: the more I looked, the more he puzzled me and the less I
trusted him. When the black man set cups of coffee before us Schmidt
began to question me. How long had we been on Iriatai? How many divers
were at work? Was there plenty of shell? Was its quality good? Had we
been lucky with pearls? But by now I was on my guard, and returned
evasive answers, feigning the stupidity of weariness--a deception which
did not require much acting on my part. A long-drawn shout from above
brought us suddenly to our feet.

"Land ho!"

When I came on deck the western sky was glowing with a fiery sunset, and
under the crimson clouds I could make out the long dark line of Iriatai.
Puzzled and vaguely uneasy in my mind, I was leaning on the rail when my
eye fell on a handsome dinghey, slung on davits close to where I stood.
Her stern was toward me, and there, neatly lettered on the bright
varnished wood, I saw the word, "Cholita." So Schmidt's vessel was
called Cholita--a pretty name for a pretty schooner--and then I
remembered with a sudden start. My thoughts flashed back to the morning
when I had paddled out to breakfast with my uncle in Faatemu Bay--to his
account of Thursday Island Schmidt. My uncle's words came back to me:
"His schooner's as pretty as her reputation is black, and the way he
handled her was a treat to watch."

So this was the Cholita, and I was the guest of the famous Thursday
Island Schmidt!

I felt a touch on my shoulder. Marama was beside me, a serious
expression on his face. "Listen!" he said in a hurried whisper. "I must
go forward before the captain returns. If we approach the land tonight,
let us slip overboard and swim ashore. Seroni must be warned, for I
think that there is evil afoot. Do you remember Rairi, the Tara's cook
who tried to kill old Pahuri that night on our passage south? He is
aboard--I have seen him, though his face was turned away from me. He has
been ordered to keep out of your sight. This schooner was bound for
Iriatai before she picked us up. The mate, who is a good man and
beginning to fear for himself, has told me as much."

The captain was approaching with a noiseless step; when I glanced up he
was not four yards off. He halted and looked at Marama in angry
astonishment. "Get forward," he bellowed, in a voice that made the
sailors turn their heads, "_verdammt_ Kanaka cheek!" He turned to me,
the former suavity gone from his manner. "And you," he ordered--"go
below!"

I obeyed him, choking with anger and a sense of impotence. The
half-caste girl was sitting on the lounge, she had been sewing, but now
her hands were clenched and her work lay where it had dropped to the
floor. There was a look of apprehension in her eyes. When she saw that I
was alone she beckoned me with a swift gesture.

"Come here, boy--me want talk with you," she whispered in quaint broken
English. "Me hear Schmidt say 'Go below'--he too much bad man! _Guk!_ Me
hate him!--Suppose we go near land tonight, me jump overboard, swim
ashore. You come too--we go hide in bush."

Her fierce eyes blazed as she pointed to the bruise on her cheek.

"Schmidt do that yesterday," she went on. "Me like kill him, but too
much 'fraid! Before, me think him good man. My father white man--same
you. Me, my mother, live Ponape, Caroline Island. One day Cholita
come--everybody think Schmidt good man--spend plenty money--have good
time. Every day he come my house. By and by he say: 'Tomorrow I go 'way;
you my friend--give me orange, pig, drinking-coconut. Tonight you bring
old woman aboard--we have big _kaikai_.' My mother think he good man--we
go. Schmidt bring us aboard schooner--we eat, play accordion, have good
time. Pretty soon hear noise on deck. My mother stand up. 'What that?'
she say. Then Kwala hold old woman--Schmidt throw me in stateroom--lock
door. Outside reef he throw my mother in canoe--tell her go ashore.
Porthole open--me hear old woman crying--Guk! Schmidt never let me go
ashore. In Tahiti--Noumea--me 'fraid--he say suppose me swim ashore,
send police fetch."

Her quick ear caught the sound of a footstep on deck and she signaled me
hurriedly to move away. Next moment Schmidt came down the companionway,
glancing at the woman sharply. Without a word he motioned me into the
stateroom, slammed the door behind me, and turned the key.

I heard Raita's voice raised in protest, and the captain's gruff reply.
Then the companionway creaked under his weight as he went on deck again.

Until now I had viewed the Cholita and her master in an adventurous
light; but as I lay there in the dark behind a locked door I began to
feel anxious and a little afraid. Little by little, as realization grows
at such a time, I put together the scattered recollections in my mind:
what my uncle had said of Schmidt; the half-caste girl's story; the
presence aboard the Cholita of Rairi, our former cook; the old letter,
telling of the gold-lipped shell in Iriatai lagoon; Rairi's stealthy
visit to the Tara after his discharge; Schmidt's treatment of me;
Marama's words, and the brutal stopping of our conversation. There was
small room for doubt--each detail fitted perfectly into the story taking
form in my mind.

While the schooner lay alongside the Papeete wharf (I thought),
discharging the load of shell of which my uncle had spoken, Rairi must
have made the acquaintance of Schmidt. Our one-time cook had looked
through the papers snatched up in hope of doing my uncle an injury, and
had come upon Turia's letter, written to her son. It was a chance in a
thousand, but how was Rairi to make use of it? Then, meeting Schmidt and
knowing something of his character from gossip along the waterfront, the
vengeful Paumotan must have seen his opportunity. A few cautious
questions to feel out his man, increasing confidence, the final
disclosure of Turia's old letter--and the compact made. It would be a
daring bit of robbery in these modern days; I wondered how Schmidt could
hope to keep out of trouble in the long run. He might scuttle the Tara,
of course, and leave us marooned on Iriatai, but our whereabouts was
known to many people, and before many months had passed someone was
bound to set out with a schooner to see what had become of us. But he
was a resourceful scoundrel, from all I had heard; he must have weighed
his chances before embarking on such a piece of barefaced piracy. And
robbery was the Cholita's errand. I knew it now as surely as if Schmidt
had disclosed his plans to me.

As I lay there in the berth, tired and frightened, I began to blame
myself for not having played a more cunning game. Now that my chance had
gone, I saw that I might have played the part of a talkative and
unsuspecting lad, answered Schmidt's questions freely, and perhaps have
kept my liberty until we drew near the land. Then I might have gone
overboard in the darkness, made my way to my uncle and given him warning
of the Cholita's approach. Now it was too late. They would take the
Tara by surprise. There might be bloodshed. A terrible thought flashed
into my mind--Uncle Harry stretched out on his schooner's deck--

I sat up in the berth, clenching my hands. I had no dearer friend in the
world. But at last excitement and weariness overcame my anxious
thoughts, and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

When I awoke the morning sun was shining through my porthole, and
looking out, I saw that we lay close to the beach, just inside the pass
of Iriatai. A noise of thumping and scrubbing overhead told me that the
decks were being washed down. We were at anchor, I knew, for the
schooner lay motionless, though the current at this place was strong. An
hour passed and as I craned my neck out the port I saw the Cholita's
dinghey approaching us from the north. The handsome little boat drew
near and I saw Rairi in the stern, a Winchester across his knees and a
bandolier of cartridges over one shoulder. Schmidt's shock-headed black
was at the oars and at his feet a man lay in the bottom of the
dinghey--an elderly native, bound hand and foot, his gray head matted
with blood and unsheltered from the sun. It was Pahuri--I knew with a
sudden breathlessness that they had taken the Tara and that Rairi was
enjoying a savage's revenge.

The dinghey passed out of my sight around the schooner's stern. I heard
the thump of a body flung down roughly on the after deck, Rairi's voice
raised in a sharp command, and the creak of the davit-blocks as the boat
was hoisted to the rail. Then, for a long time, all was quiet. Rairi had
gone below for a rest and a nap, leaving the black on guard, for most of
the crew were new men whom neither Rairi nor Schmidt would trust too
far. Finally the silence was broken by a weak voice--old Pahuri begging
monotonously for water. Heavy steps came aft over my head and I heard
the mate order the black man to give water to his prisoner. But the
savage chattered a refusal in his own uncouth tongue; he had a rifle and
he was under orders from Rairi, so Tua strode forward angrily, muttering
to himself. Then suddenly I heard a rapid whispering at the keyhole of
my door. It was Raita.

"Eh, boy!" she said. "Listen--you asleep?"

"No," I whispered back.

"Last night," she went on, "Schmidt take your schooner--Rairi bring back
old man he no like. I sorry that man--head hurt--too much blood. Rairi
leave him in sun--no give water. Schmidt stop aboard your
schooner--suppose wind come up, Cholita go there. Native boy, your
friend, swim ashore last night. Me think go too, then think no--me stop
aboard, maybe help you. Ah--me hear Rairi--me go!"

I heard her move away, quickly and softly, from the door. Her words
added little to my anxiety, for Pahuri's presence told me that Schmidt
had captured the Tara, but the thought of my uncle tortured me: Where
was he--captured, wounded, perhaps dead? I glanced out the porthole. The
palms were swaying to the first of the trade wind, heralded by long blue
streaks outside the pass. Presently there were sounds of activity on
deck; shouting and creaking of blocks as they hoisted the foresail, the
deep-voiced chant of the sailors at the windlass. Then, heeling a little
to the freshening breeze, the Cholita filled away on the port tack,
turned to leeward as she gathered way, and slacked off for the long run
across the lagoon.

When we drew near the islet, toward midday, I saw that the Tara's
anchorage had been changed: she was lying fully a quarter of a mile off
shore. Eight bells struck as we rounded into the wind beside her; I
heard the anchor plunge overboard and the prolonged rattle of the chain.
Then the bellowing voice of Schmidt hailed us, shouting orders and
instructions. A moment later the key turned in the lock of my door and
Rairi entered to grasp me by the arm.

"Come," he said roughly, "Schmidt want you aboard Tara!"

He half dragged me up the companionway and across the deck, where I had
a glimpse of our engineer lying bound in the sun, his gray hair clotted
with blood. Rairi motioned me into the dinghey alongside, sprang in
after me and signed to the oarsman to pull us across the Tara. Schmidt
was standing by the rail.

"Where's the Kanaka boy?" he asked.

"Swim ashore last night; maybe shark take him--no matter."

"Let him go--no harm can he do us. Wait for me."

I clambered over the rail in obedience to Schmidt's gesture, and he
followed me below. My uncle's stateroom was open and in great disorder.
We halted opposite the door of my own cabin. The German drew from his
belt a heavy Colt's revolver, cocked it, unlocked the door quickly, and
pushed me inside. As I stood there, dazzled by the bright light of the
porthole, I heard the key turn behind me, and then my uncle's quizzical
voice.

"Well, old fellow," he remarked, "it's good to see you safe and sound.
We seem a bit down on our luck, eh?"

He was lying in my berth, quietly puffing one of his long, thin cigars.




  11. Piracy


For a moment I was overcome by astonishment and relief; my mouth half
opened and tears came into my eyes. My uncle stretched out his hand.

"Cheer up!" he said, smiling at my long face. "We're not beaten yet!
Before I tell you my side of the yarn, let's hear how our friend
Thursday Island happened to pick you up."

Speaking in a low voice, I told him of our fishing, of the squall, how
the canoe was swamped, how we had baled her, and how Schmidt had picked
us up. His only comment was a soft whistle when I spoke of how I had
nearly drowned before the sea went down. Then I told him of the Cholita:
her captain, the half-caste girl, Rairi, and the story I had pieced
together. As I finished, Uncle Harry nodded his head.

"That's it," he remarked--"not a doubt! That scoundrel Rairi--I wish I'd
handed him over to the authorities as I was tempted to do! I wish also
that I hadn't built my stateroom doors so well; they're solid oak, an
inch and a half thick, with hinges and locks to match! And Schmidt took
care to clear away everything movable: even the water-bottle's gone! But
I must tell you about last night.

"You know the family next door to Manila's house--their baby died
yesterday, and when dinner was over I gave the men permission to go
ashore for the singing. It was careless, of course, but we've never
stood an anchor watch since we've been here. Pahuri stopped aboard--he
was asleep up forward--and I was in a pareu, working on my ledger. I
keep the books in the safe, you know, and the door of the safe, like the
stateroom door, was open. At about eleven o'clock I heard a boat bump
softly against the Tara's side, but Fatu was due to bring the men aboard
and I paid no attention to the sound. I glanced up from my work a moment
later, and there was Mr. Thursday Island Schmidt in the doorway, with a
big revolver cocked and aimed at my chest. He requested me, very
politely, to hold up my hands and keep them there, and as my own gun was
in a drawer behind me, I could see no way of refusing him!

"The only men with Schmidt, I believe, were Rairi and some sort of
outlandish bushman. All I saw of the black man was a glimpse of his
fuzzy head outside the door, but Schmidt still keeping me covered,
ordered Rairi in to go through the contents of the safe. He wanted to
get me out of the way, but he saw that the safe was open and he was too
wise to turn his back on his partner, even for a moment. He's a cheeky
devil, Rairi: he gave me a sour grin that must have done him good. First
he pulled out the little drawer where I keep my loose money for
emergencies--about a thousand dollars in gold. He laid it on the table,
and as Schmidt glanced down I was tempted to have a go at him. But I
knew his reputation, and I knew that Rairi was aching for a chance at
me. At that moment, when I was half decided to try to knock Schmidt out,
I was distracted by a glimpse of something that escaped him altogether.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rairi's hand shoot out suddenly
behind his back and come up to his waist, where he seemed to fumble for
an instant with the tuck of his pareu. I looked more closely--one of the
small round tobacco-tins was missing from the row on the shelf! Rairi
stooped down as though he had just perceived them, gathered the little
boxes in a double handful, and stepped across the room to lay them on
the table beside the drawer of gold. 'Pearls, perhaps,' he said.

"Schmidt showed signs of interest at that. He ordered Rairi to open
them, and gave each lot a glance, one after the other, but he never
relaxed his watch on me. Thursday Island is not a man to trifle
with--he's proved that over and over again! 'A nice lot of pearls, Mr.
Selden,' he observed, grinning behind his beard. 'There will be a
sensation on Tahiti when they learn that the gold-lipped shell has been
acclimatized. The Government will owe you a debt for the discovery.'

"I'd been keeping an eye on the pearls and when the last tin was opened
I saw that the Twins were missing: by the purest chance, Rairi's
thieving hand had landed on their box. I was on the point of telling
Schmidt that the pearls he had seen were not bad, but that the finest of
the lot were in the tuck of his partner's waistband. I don't know why I
didn't speak--they might have had a row which would have given me my
chance--but for some reason I kept my mouth shut. When Rairi had made a
bundle of my papers and made sure that there was nothing else of value
in the safe, Schmidt told him to clear all the loose stuff out of the
stateroom across the way. Then he invited me to make myself at home here
until his business was done. He spent some time in assuring himself that
the door and lock were strong. 'It may ease your mind,' he said, polite
as a dancing-master, 'to know that your nephew is safe; I picked him up
yesterday at sea; he'll join you presently.'

"They must have overlooked Pahuri when they first came aboard. As the
German left my door I heard a racket up forward: that half-caste,
mauling the old man in a way that made me see red. I was fool enough to
try to break down the door until Schmidt bellowed out something that
stopped the noise."

My uncle held up his hands to show me the knuckles, bruised and clotted
with blood.

"The noise must have given the alarm to Fatu," he went on, "for a few
minutes afterward he put off with Ivi and Ofai in the boat. The current
had swung the Tara around so that I could see what followed out of the
porthole. Schmidt heard them launching the boat and called his men. He
had a powerful electric torch and when he flashed it toward the land I
saw my boys taking their places at the oars, Fatu in the stern, and ten
or a dozen divers on the beach. Schmidt growled out an order to his
partner and I heard Rairi's voice raised to warn the boat away. But our
men paid no attention; the light showed them making for the Tara at top
speed.

"'Let them have it, then!' bawled Thursday Island. I heard two rifles
crack, the snap and click of the levers, and two more quick shots. Ivi
dropped his oar and sank down on the grating with a hand to his
shoulder. Fatu sprang to his feet, snatched up the oar, and took the
wounded man's place, to pull straight for the schooner. Rairi and the
bushman would have killed them like sheep, but they held their fire when
I shouted through the porthole, telling my men to go back; that a
strange schooner was in the lagoon, that her skipper had made me
prisoner, and that they had best leave the affair in my hands. There
isn't a gun of any sort ashore and I don't want to be rescued at the
cost of half a dozen lives! Well, they obeyed me and went ashore. The
sound of the shooting roused the whole camp--things have been humming
ever since. Perhaps Fatu has some scheme for setting me free; Schmidt
seems to think so at any rate, for he and his men went to work on the
windlass, got the anchor off the bottom, and allowed the Tara to drift
offshore with the current before they anchored her again. As for the fix
we're in, the worst that can happen is that we'll lose our pearls. I
doubt if even Schmidt has the audacity to load a hundred tons of shell
under the noses of the men ashore--I wonder if he would dare? What sort
of crew has he--many men he can trust for this sort of villainy?"

I said that I believed most of Schmidt's men were newly shipped, that
aside from Rairi and the black they seemed an average lot of natives,
not particularly bad. From Marama's words and what I had seen of the man
himself, I judged that Tua, the mate, was a first-class fellow,
beginning to feel qualms about the company in which he found himself.

"Tua," remarked Uncle Harry, musingly, "Tua--that's not a common name!
Did he ship in Papeete? He isn't by any chance a youngish chap, rather
light brown and more than six feet tall? That's the man? By Jove! I'd
like fifteen minutes alone with him--he's Maruia's foster son!"

A sound of voices put an end to our talk. Schmidt and the black man had
come across in the dinghey and were making her fast alongside. Raita was
with them, for I heard the captain order her roughly to climb aboard.
There was a step on the deck overhead; a sound made me look up and I saw
that a basket of food had been lowered to our porthole. Schmidt hailed
us.

"I am sorry, Mr. Selden," he said, "that your lunch comes late. For me,
these are busy days!" He spoke with a kind of cool politeness he had not
troubled to affect toward me. I never heard any man speak rudely to my
uncle; even now, while he lay helpless to resent an injury, Schmidt
chose to address him courteously. Water was to be had at the tap, and we
ate with good appetites while Schmidt conversed with my uncle through
the stateroom door. He had come below for a yarn, he said, and he seemed
in a communicative mood.

"My friend Rairi," he began abruptly, "does not love that old man of
yours. Last night, when he tied his hands, he hurt him more than I
thought necessary--I believed that he was taking him back to the
schooner that he might bind up his wounds. Today I found that old man
delirious in the sun, and I was forced to speak plainly. Ach! A
savage--I have had more than enough of the native--It would be good if
business did not deprive me of your company."

"See here, Schmidt," remarked my uncle good-naturedly, "do you realize
that this business of yours is apt to deprive you of all company except
your own, for a good many years to come? You have brains, man--use them!
So far, you've played your cards well: we'll grant that you are able to
get away from Iriatai with the pearls. You know pearls. I'll be frank:
they're worth forty or fifty thousand at least. But think of the
future--you can't do this sort of thing nowadays. Matters were different
twenty years ago. Sooner or later this affair will be the talk of the
Pacific. Think of the wireless, man--they'll be looking for you in every
port in the world! Don't mistake me--I'm not telling you this for your
own good--but the lawyers have a very unkind name for what you are
doing. Think it over, Schmidt. If you're wise, you'll return what you've
taken and clear out of Iriatai. As a matter of fact I rather admire your
nerve. If you'll turn over Rairi to me, I'll let the matter drop at
that."

The answer to my uncle's words was a rumbling chuckle; I could fancy
the ironical glint in the German's cold blue eyes. "A handsome offer,"
he said mockingly. "You are more than kind! Since you are good enough to
be frank, I will be frank as well. As for thinking, mine was done long
ago. I do not fear all the warships and all the wireless in the world!
There can be no harm in telling you, for that matter; in estimating my
chances of escape, you can amuse yourself for the next day or two.

"This morning I took my glasses and had a look ashore. A nice stack of
shell you have made ready for me, under the shed! That I must have. If
there is trouble in loading it and any of your men are hurt, they will
have themselves to blame. Bloodshed I do not like; it is always
foolishness! Without an axe you will not break out of your stateroom.
Matches I have left you and you could set fire to the schooner, but that
would be for you unpleasant and would only save me trouble in the end.
If you should succeed in breaking out, always there will be one of my
men to deal with. Kwala, the black, is a Malaita boy--not a man to
trifle with. And Rairi I do not trust overmuch myself; he is a
primitive, and he bears you an old grudge. I was nervous last night when
he brought me in through the pass; did you know that long ago he lived
on this island? Yes--his mother was one of the savage women deported by
the French. So you see, I put you out of my mind."

"Well," said my uncle in an amused voice, "suppose you do load the shell
and get away from Iriatai. Can't you see that your troubles would only
be beginning then?"

"Ach, Mr. Selden," said Schmidt with reproachful irony, "you do me
injustice! Remember, please, I am a man of resource. There can be no
harm in it: I shall open my heart to you and tell the truth--what my
vulgar Australian friends used to call, in their picturesque way, the
'straight griffin,' or the 'dinkum oil.' First of all, much though I
regret, I must scuttle your pretty Tara. When I am ready to leave and
the holes are bored, the key will be given you through the porthole in
time, that you may swim to land before the schooner goes down. Your
boats I shall tow to sea with me. I hope you are not foolhardy enough to
venture to sea in the native canoe. Many months will pass before
information can be laid against me. One chance I take--that a schooner
might put in here soon after I leave; but that chance is small. Like
your schooner, the Cholita is of French registry now; on paper, my mate,
Tua, is her captain; I am cleared for the Paumotus, to pick up copra and
shell. What shall I do? The simple thing, which all my life I have found
the wisest: go straight to Tahiti, sell my cargo to the highest bidder,
and clear once more for the Paumotus within a week. As for the
gold-lipped shell, there will be a hint of a discovery in a remote
lagoon; I can see now the wise ones among the traders hastening to a
place five hundred miles from Iriatai! My men may talk, but two things
will close their mouths, I think--love of money and fear of me. Clear of
Tahiti, my beard and my schooner's topmasts will come off; she will have
a new name and a new set of papers. At filling them out, I am
clever--you would be surprised! Then, one fine day, long before they
have come to look for you on Iriatai, a strange schooner will put into a
far-away port, South America, perhaps, or among the Dutch East
Indies--Ach--who knows? There is a Chinaman in Gillolo who would gladly
take the schooner off my hands. It is a sad thing to grow old, my
friend! I am tired of the Pacific and of this wandering life. Much is
forgotten in twenty years; it is my dream to settle quietly in the
German village where I was born--But you must excuse me--I hear my good
Rairi calling!"

I heard Rairi's voice and the sound of Schmidt's footsteps as he climbed
on deck. Then all was silent for an hour or more, while my uncle and I
spoke in low tones of our predicament. Suddenly there was a whispering
at our door--the voice of Raita, the half-caste girl.

"Eh, boy," she said rapidly, "you hear me? No talk loud--Kwala, that
black man, on deck! Schmidt, Rairi, they go aboard Cholita. You got
_kaikai_--got water? Good--me 'fraid you hungry. Listen: Raita tell you
what they do. Schmidt go Cholita tell that mate, Tua, go ashore. Tua
tell people on island stop in bush tomorrow; suppose they come on beach,
they get shot! When Tua come back, Schmidt, Rairi come aboard this
schooner sleep. Keep pearls here. When dark, maybe me swim ashore hide
in bush."

"Raita," I called softly, as a sudden idea came to me, "wait by the door
for a minute. I want to speak to you when I've talked with my uncle."

I climbed into the upper berth and squeezed my head and shoulders
through the porthole. It was as I thought; no man could have passed
through such a narrow aperture, but the feat was possible for a slender
boy. "Listen, Uncle Harry," I whispered as I climbed down to his side,
"you heard what that woman said; now see what you think of the plan I
have in mind. Schmidt has sent Tua ashore to warn the people to keep
away from the beach while he loads our shell. Tua, you say, is Maruia's
foster son, and I feel sure that he and most of the crew are uneasy in
their minds. This is my plan: we can see the shore from our porthole,
and if, by the time it is dark, Tua has not returned to the Cholita, I
will wriggle through the port and swim ashore. It will be easy, I think,
to explain the situation to Tua and to our divers. Tua can go off to the
Cholita and tell his crew what kind of venture they are engaged in. Once
they understand, I'm sure there won't be a hand raised to help Schmidt
tonight. Then, in the darkness after the moon has set, I'll swim off
quietly with Fatu, Ofai, and a few of the divers, climb aboard and take
the Tara by surprise. Once we have Schmidt and his two followers,
there'll be no trouble with the others, I think. We must decide
quickly--let me try!"

For a moment, while I waited in suspense, my uncle puffed meditatively
at his cigar. His eyes were half closed and he seemed scarcely to have
heard what I had said. Suddenly, with a shrug of his shoulders, he
spoke.

"Very well, Charlie--see what you can do. But take care of yourself.
Remember that I'd rather lose the Tara and all the shell than have
anything happen to you! It's the devil to have to sit here helpless
while those scoundrels sail away with our property. I was beginning to
believe they held the winning cards! You've a level head, old man; this
plan of yours has a chance of working out, I should say. Can you really
squeeze through that porthole? By Jove! I'd give something to have the
laugh on our friend Herr Schmidt!"

Before he had finished I was at the door. "Raita!" I whispered; and when
I heard her answering voice, I told her that I planned to escape through
the porthole and swim ashore. Knowing her hatred of Schmidt, I confided
the fact that we were going to attack the schooner that night, and
begged her to leave a rope's end hanging over the stern. The girl was
all eager excitement. The blood of a fierce and vengeful people ran in
her veins.

"Guk!" she exclaimed. "Maybe you kill Schmidt, eh? Me too much happy!
Stop aboard now. That other man--tell him when plenty dark me get axe
from galley. He watch porthole, eh? Suppose you come aboard--he break
door, go help kill Schmidt! Guk! Me like see that!"

"It's lucky you made friends with her," remarked my uncle quizzically,
when Raita was gone. "I should dislike to have that young lady for an
enemy! Well, if she doesn't forget that axe, I'll do my best to
entertain her!"




  12. "Boarders!"


The sun went down that night behind banks of crimson clouds, which grew
black as twilight gave place to darkness and blotted out the young moon
sinking in the west. The evening was calm, but the night promised to be
a stormy one. The Tara still lay broadside to the beach and a close
watch informed us that Tua had not left the islet. My time had come.

Our chief concern was to make no sound which might give the alarm to the
sharp ears of the savage on watch. Pulling together the curtains of the
lower berth and muffling the operation in blankets to avoid the
slightest noise, we tore a sheet into strips and braided a length of
clumsy cord. Then in the upper berth my uncle knotted our rope to one of
my ankles, and very gently and cautiously I began to squirm my way out
through the porthole. It was a tighter fit than I had supposed; after a
twist or two it seemed to me that I could neither move forward nor go
back. I was naked save for a pair of swimming trunks, and several square
inches of my skin remained on the porthole's sharp brass rim, but at
last I was through, hanging by one leg with my head and arms in the
water. Knowing that the least splash would bring Kwala instantly to the
side, my uncle lowered me little by little into the lagoon, until I lay
motionless in the black water and the end of the cord fell into my
outstretched hand. I undid the knot, heard Uncle Harry's faintly
breathed "Good luck!" and dove without a sound. It was not yet fully
dark and I feared that the black man's eyes might discern my head in the
reflections of the sunset. Thirty yards nearer the shore I rose to the
surface and expelled the breath gently from my lungs. All was quiet
aboard the Tara. I had neither been seen nor heard.

I landed under an overhanging thicket of hibiscus, in a little cove
where Marama and I kept our canoe hauled up. There were no lights in the
doorways that I passed, but when I came to Maruia's house I found the
population of the islet assembled there, women and children outside and
the divers in the house, surrounding Maruia and Schmidt's mate who sat
in earnest conversation on the floor. The light of a lamp shone on the
pair and I saw that Tua's face wore an expression of dejection and
perplexity. A murmur of astonishment went up as I arrived, and indeed I
must have presented a strange appearance--wet, nearly naked, bleeding in
a dozen places. Maruia rose and put an arm about me, patting my bare
shoulder softly.

"Ah, Tehare," she said, "you have escaped from that wicked man--that is
good. And Seroni, your uncle?" I told her how we had been imprisoned in
the stateroom, and how I had escaped through the porthole, too small for
the broader shoulders of a man. Then I asked for news of Marama.

"He is here," she answered, leading me to her bed, screened off with
mats in a corner of the spacious room. "See, he sleeps, and we must not
wake him. He followed the western shore on foot, hastening to warn
Seroni, but when he came here it was too late. His feet are cut to
ribbons by the coral and the sun has given him a fever; I have bandaged
his wounds and brewed a tea of herbs. But come--there are other things
of which we must speak." She led me back through the crowd and pointed
to Tua.

"This man is my foster son," she said, "a good man, but he serves an
evil master. He brings us a message from that German that we must go to
the far end of the islet while our shell and Seroni's is carried away.
Tua is greatly troubled in his mind. He has signed papers and the white
man's laws are strict. Furthermore those men are fierce and wary; they
are armed with rifles, while we have none. What are we to do?"

I turned to the mate. "Saving Schmidt and the black and Rairi," I asked
him, "are the others of the Cholita's crew good men?"

"I know them all," he replied, "and they are like others of their kind,
neither good nor bad. But like me, they are in fear of Schmidt and of
the white man's prison."

"Listen, then," I went on, "and I will show you how to act the part of
honest men. Schmidt is indeed an evil captain and to stand by him means
prison in the end. My own ears have heard him say that after he has
stolen our pearls and our shell he plans to sell the schooner and leave
you deserted and friendless in a foreign land. Take warning, therefore,
while there is time. You have heard of Seroni--Maruia will tell you
whether he or Schmidt is the more to be trusted. Give heed to my words,
then. Schmidt and that dog Rairi await your coming on the Cholita. Go to
them now and tell them that you have delivered their message; that the
people will obey, being unarmed and in fear of the rifles. In a little
while those two men will go to the Tara, where they will sleep this
night. Once they are gone, arouse the crew softly without showing
lights, and talk to them in the forecastle, telling them what I have
said. Remember that you on the Cholita need run no risks: only lie
quietly if there are noises from the other schooner. In the morning the
Tara will be ours and those three men our prisoners. Seroni will see to
it that no man of you is wrongly accused. The truth is that the
Government will praise you for having refused to aid a captain who is no
better than a robber. Think of old Pahuri, whose blood is on your
decks--is that the work of honest men?"

"Aye, and this!" A deep voice rang out as Fatu rose from the dark corner
where he had been lying, and pointed downward with a gigantic
outstretched arm. Then for the first time I saw Ivi, grinning at me over
a shoulder done up in blood-soaked rags. "It is well said that Rairi is
a dog," Fatu went on. "If I had my hands on his throat once more, I
would not let go so soon!" An angry murmur went up from the divers; I
perceived that the moment was ripe for my proposal.

"Who will come with me this night," I asked--"who will follow Fatu to
capture the Tara and to set Seroni free?" Ofai sprang from his seat at
Ivi's side. The divers crowded about me eagerly to hear my plan.

"We shall need only six or seven of the strongest," I told them. "Let us
give Tua time to return and deliver his message, and then, when Rairi
and the bearded captain have gone back to the Tara to sleep we will swim
out without noise, climb softly on deck, and take them by surprise. Only
one man will be on watch; Seroni waits our coming to break down the door
with an axe that will be given him."

While I lay on a mat, discussing our plan with Maruia and the others,
Tua took leave of us. I felt a reasonable confidence that he would play
his part and keep his men from interfering on behalf of Schmidt.
Maruia's blood was up; she was keen to go with us and it was not easy to
persuade her to stay behind. An hour dragged by--another--another--it
was nearly midnight when I gave the word to set out. Each man was naked
save for a breechclout; our bodies were well rubbed with coconut oil,
and we carried the long keen knives used for clearing bush.

The moon had set long since, and black clouds blotted out the stars. A
stir of air from the south caused the palms to rustle and sigh uneasily.
We were in for a squall. I saw that unless the wind grew strong enough
to rouse the sleepers on the Tara, the weather was in our favor: the
squall would put the watcher off his guard and drown any slight noises
of our approach. Presently the wind was sweeping in gusts across the
lagoon, driving a fine rain into our faces. The schooner must be facing
the south, with her stern toward shore.

"I think there will be a line astern," I told the men crouching beside
me under the dripping hibiscus trees, "and Fatu and I will go aboard
that way. You others must swim to the bow without a sound and climb up
by the chain or by the jibboom stay. We will allow you time to get
aboard. Wait by the forecastle till you hear the alarm given and then
come aft to take them by surprise. As I told you, there will be only one
man on watch, and Fatu alone can handle him. We must not use our knives
unless they drive us to it. Come--it is time we set out--this squall
will drown the noise of our approach."

"Yes," put in Fatu, whose closest friend was Pahuri, the old engineer,
"let us go quickly! My hands yearn for the feel of Rairi's throat!"

I led the way into the water, deeper and deeper, till we were swimming
in the black lagoon. We seemed an hour in reaching the Tara, anchored no
more than four hundred yards offshore. The little waves slapped against
my face and the rain stung my eyes. At last, when I was wondering if we
had taken the wrong direction, the clouds broke and the stars shone out,
disclosing the dim outlines of the Tara close ahead and Schmidt's
schooner, riding at anchor a hundred yards away. At that moment a man
appeared on deck--whether Schmidt or Rairi I could not make
out--carrying a lantern in his hand. He made the lantern fast to the
main boom and left it hanging there. Then he drew a deck-chair into the
circle of faint light, and sat down, facing the schooner's bow.

With Fatu close behind, I swam under the overhang of the stern, and next
moment my hand touched a heavy rope, trailing overboard from the rail.
The half-caste girl had kept her word. The others were clustering about
us, and as the wind was still strong I ventured to whisper fresh
instructions there in the schooner's lee. "The rope is here," I told
them softly. "Do not hurry about getting aboard. Give that man time to
settle down quietly in his chair. Be ready to come running aft in five
minutes."

I had not reckoned on Fatu's impatience, nor on the native vagueness
about time. My companion was aroused as I had never seen him before. For
a little while, with the greatest difficulty, I restrained his
eagerness, but finally he shook my hand off his shoulder and began to
pull his huge body up the rope, hand over hand. I followed: there was
nothing else to do. The wind was still blowing strongly from the south.

Fatu reached the rail in an instant, heaved himself aboard with uncanny
agility, and dropped to the deck without a sound. I was desperately slow
in following, for I was tired and chilled, and my arms were not trained
to sailors' work. When at last my head rose above the rail, I saw that
the giant was stealing toward the unconscious man in the deck-chair,
creeping forward with a stealthy swiftness in the shadow of the
binnacle. The lantern, flickering in gusts of wind, cast a dim yellow
light on the scene. Then my hand slipped on the wet rail, and I fell
thumping to the deck.

I was on my feet in an instant, but the man in the chair was quicker
still. It was Schmidt, and his senses must have been keen as those of a
savage, for his eye was on me before I had taken a step, and the rifle
came to his shoulder with a snap. In the same instant Fatu leaped at him
from behind the binnacle, springing like a monstrous cat--but the spring
was a breath too late. I saw a bright tongue of flame, heard a crashing
report, and felt a great blow on my leg--a shock that spun my body about
and sent me sprawling to the deck. I lay there sick and numb, yet keenly
alive to every detail of the scene that followed: a swift drama stamped
indelibly on my memory.

Fatu seized the rifle with a single mighty wrench, tore it from
Schmidt's hands and sent it flying overboard, then his arms closed about
the German's body. Schmidt was a very strong and active man. His foot
went out behind the leg of his antagonist; he twisted his body with the
movement of a skilled wrestler, and the pair came crashing to the deck.
But Fatu's grip never relaxed and I knew that in the hug of those mighty
arms Schmidt's moments of consciousness were numbered. He seemed to
realize it too, and his right hand, free from the elbow down, began to
move painfully toward the holster at his belt, where I saw the gleam of
an ivory pistol-butt. Then I heard my uncle's axe thundering at the
stateroom door, and the shouts of the divers, climbing over the bows.

I raised my eyes, hoping to see the natives running aft. I glanced back
at the wrestlers and saw Raita there beside them--a slender, crouching
figure in white, her face framed in waves of dusky hair. She had drawn
Schmidt's revolver in the nick of time, and held it cocked in her hand.

But Kwala, the black savage, who must have been sleeping on the forward
hatch, still had a part to play. In the second while Raita crouched
there, fiercely seeking her chance to kill, there was another streak of
flame, and the report of another rifle-shot. The girl sank down on the
deck. I saw the shock-headed savage blinking in the lamplight while a
wisp of smoke eddied from the muzzle of his Winchester. Then, with
fierce shouts and a rush of bare feet on deck, the divers were on him,
and he went down in a smother of brown arms and legs.

For an instant, Raita lay where she had fallen, but though she was
dying, hatred of the German gave strength for the last act of her life.
"Guk!" I heard her exclaim with a weak fierceness, as her hand went out
to take up the pistol a second time. By chance it had not gone off when
she had dropped it. With a wavering hand she aimed it at Schmidt's
temple and pulled the trigger. A third shot rang out above the
tumult--Schmidt's body quivered and relaxed--Fatu rose slowly to his
feet.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man standing at the companionway. It
was Rairi, an expression of angry astonishment on his handsome, sullen
face.

He glanced swiftly about him, seemed to arrive at a decision, and
bounded across the deck. Before I could cry out, he was over the rail
and into the lagoon.

The appearance of my uncle, dressed in a scarlet waistcloth and
brandishing an axe, smothered the shout on my lips.

"Eh, Fatu!" he cried, as his eye fell on the gigantic figure of the
mate. "Have you got them safe? Where's Charlie?"

"Here!" I said in a weak voice, and next moment he was bending over me.
"Schmidt shot me in the leg. He's dead, I think, and so is that poor
girl. Ofai and the divers have the blackman--look--they're tying him
now! And Rairi--he dove over the side a second before you came on deck!
Quick! Send someone after him!"

At my words Fatu sprang away to lower a boat. When my uncle had made
sure that Schmidt and the woman were dead and that the black was safely
bound, he took me in his arms and carried me below to dress my wound. He
laid me on the lounge in the saloon, turned up the lamp and bent over my
wounded leg, his face wearing an expression I had never seen. Then he
straightened his back with a great sigh of relief.

"Well, old fellow," he said, patting my bare shoulder, "you've given me
a scare! But you're not badly hurt: the bullet has passed through the
muscle of your thigh without touching the bone. Hurts like the deuce,
eh? That won't last long--well have you on foot within a month!"

He made me drink a glass of brandy, the first I had tasted: burning
stuff that made me cough and ran through my veins like fire. I was weak
from loss of blood, and when he had staunched the bleeding and bandaged
the wound with wet compresses, I fell into an uneasy sleep.

It was later that I was told of the happenings of that night: how one of
the divers swam ashore to tell the people that Seroni was free; how a
great fire was built on the beach and a fleet of canoes put off to swarm
about the Tara; and how her decks were crowded with brown men and their
women and children, all eager to shake my uncle's hand. It was a night
of rejoicing. A fire was built in the galley to brew huge pots of tea,
and cases of bully beef and ship biscuit were opened on deck.

The morning found me feverish and in pain with the stiffening of my
wound. Old Maruia had installed herself in my stateroom. The season was
over, she declared; she had earned enough for one year, and now she was
going to nurse me till I was well. I was eating the gruel she had
prepared, when I looked up and saw my uncle standing in the splintered
doorway, a long cigar in his mouth.

"It's tough luck to be laid up this way!" he remarked, "Hurts, eh? It
will for a few days. But you've a first-class nurse; I reckon she'll
have you in a steamer-chair inside of a fortnight! I didn't know how
many friends you had ashore--the whole lot of them were asking after you
last night--Eh, Maruia, don't let him move that leg!

"About Rairi," he went on--"he got clean away. A Paumotu boy in the
water on a dark night is a hard proposition to catch! We don't know
which way he swam, of course; we'll search the two islands on the east
side of the lagoon today. I'm leaving now; the boats will follow along
the beach to the pass and meet us there tonight. With fifteen men we'll
be able to comb the bush so that a dog couldn't pass us! If we don't get
him today, we'll try the west side tomorrow--You've guessed why I'm
going to so much trouble? Yes, he's gotten away with your pearls!

"This morning, when the excitement was over, I made an inventory of the
things in the safe. The door was open; Schmidt had left everything in
place, only taking the precaution to lock the inner door. I found the
key in his pocket. He never knew about the Twins--I told you how I saw
Rairi steal them under his eyes. I was losing hope of coming out of this
affair so well. I owe you a lot, old man; I'll try to repay part of it
by getting your pearls for you. We'll catch Rairi, never fear! Schmidt
and the girl were buried this morning. He was a man, that German, though
he had the morals of a wolf! It's odd--but there was something I almost
liked about him--It takes courage to play a game like his, and he might
have succeeded if he'd been a little less contemptuous of the natives
he's abused so long. I wonder who he really was! I'm sorry the girl was
killed--I would have sent her home. She couldn't have been more than
twenty, poor child--a forlorn way to die. The black is in irons aboard
the other schooner, where he's not popular with the crew!"

When my uncle had gone I sent a man ashore for Marama, and presently he
was installed in the upper berth, a mass of bandages about his swollen
feet. It was good to see my friend once more.

"I do not know where Rairi is now," he said, when Maruia had left us to
smoke her cigarette on deck, "but if he was barefoot when he went
overboard, he will be in no shape to run away! Au! That dry coral is
sharp underfoot! When I escaped from the Cholita, I had one thought in
mind; to get to Seroni quickly, to warn him and bring help to you. I
landed close to the village of the copra-makers and there was an old
canoe on the beach, but when I took thought, I saw that the day would
break before I reached the Tara, and that I would run a risk of being
picked up again by that bearded captain who is now dead, so I traveled
the length of the western island afoot. The sun was high when the time
came to swim, and I was faint with pain and loss of blood--the coral
cuts deep! If I had been stronger I would have gone directly to the
Tara, for I had no suspicion that Rairi's boat had come to her in the
night. Fatu was the first man I saw on shore; he told me of the
shooting, of Ivi's wound, and how Seroni was a prisoner on his own
schooner. All that day I lay in great pain, and my head was light with
the sun."

At midday Maruia dressed our wounds and brought us food, and we dozed
through the long warm afternoon. It was evening when my uncle returned
with his weary men. They had scoured the eastern islands from end to end
without finding so much as a footprint.

Next day, when they searched the long island on the western side of the
lagoon, the story was the same, though one of the divers claimed to have
found the half obliterated tracks of a man on a stretch of muddy beach.
That night my uncle went to bed with scarcely a word; I could see that
he was discouraged, mystified, and very tired. Marama and I were silent
for a long time after the others had gone to bed. Finally the native boy
spoke.

"Are you asleep?" he asked in his own tongue.

"No," I whispered back. "I lie here thinking."

"And I too. Listen, for there is something in my mind. First of all,
know that Rairi is not a stranger on this land of Iriatai. His mother
was a woman of the island--one of the wild people the French soldiers
came to take away. And when he was a boy he came here to labor at the
copra-making with the woman who lived here before Seroni's coming. There
are true words! Knowing all this, I have tried to put myself in his
place. He has our pearls--pearls of great value, for which a man would
endure hardships and long months of waiting. The question in his mind
must be: Where shall I hide myself till the schooners are gone and I can
steal a canoe to chance a passage to the nearest land?' Where, indeed?
The three islands about the lagoon are long, but they are flat and
narrow. The bush is thick in places, but not too thick to be searched as
one searches for a dropped fishhook in a canoe. Where, then? Listen,
and I will tell you--in the Cave of the Shark! Is it not possible that
in his boyhood Rairi found the cavern even as we found it, or that the
woman Turia showed it to him as an ancient sacred place? He would
believe that no other man on the island knew of it; that he might lie
hidden there for months, stealing out by night to catch fish and to
gather coconuts for food and drink. I tell you that the thought of
losing our pearls has weighed like a lump of lead on my stomach, but now
I feel hope!"

When my uncle had returned that evening, discouraged and empty-handed, I
had felt the full bitterness of disappointment--the hopeless collapse of
all my dreams. After all, our hopes had been absurd; a three or four
mile swim at night was a risky business, even for a native. Perhaps
Rairi had been seized with cramps; perhaps a roving shark had picked him
up. In reality, the chances were against his being alive. But now, as
the possibility of the cave grew large in my mind, I could scarcely wait
for the morning, to tell my uncle of Marama's idea. Eight bells struck.
It was midnight, and the soft breathing in the upper berth told me that
Marama was asleep. He had a wholesome lack of nerves, and to him the
loss of the pearls meant no more than a passing disappointment. In his
eyes, money was not a thing that mattered greatly--if one had none of
it, one did without; if one's pockets were full, it was pleasant to
spend. I envied him, for with me it was far different.

Hour after hour I lay there, wakeful with anxiety and the fever of my
wound, while the round ship's clock in the saloon struck off the bells.
The glimmer of dawn was in the stateroom when at last I fell asleep.

Maruia woke us with a tray of breakfast, steaming hot from the galley.
The sun was high, and glancing through the door, I could see my uncle,
bending over some papers at his table. My head was heavy with lack of
sleep, but the fever seemed gone and the pain in my leg diminished. I
called to Uncle Harry and he rose at the sound of my voice.

"Well, boys," he said, smiling in at us, with a hand on either side of
the doorway, "had a good night? I was for letting you sleep, but the old
lady thought it was time you were eating breakfast." I told him what
Marama had suggested the night before, and his eyes lit up with a
brilliant gleam of interest.

"I believe you've hit it!" he exclaimed. "That's the one place we
haven't searched. I remember now Schmidt's saying that, as a boy, Rairi
had lived on Iriatai. I lay awake half the night puzzling over this
business--I was beginning to believe that the man must have been taken
by a shark. But we must waste no time; I'm off now for a look at this
cave of yours. Wish me good luck!"

The hours of that day dragged past with interminable slowness. I grew
depressed as time went on: perhaps we had been unduly sanguine the night
before; the thread supporting our hopes was a slender one, after all.
Even if Rairi were found, he might have lost the pearls or hidden them.
Marama laughed at my fears, refusing to share in my renewed depression.
At noon the old woman brought us lunch and we ate with good appetites,
for by now we were on the way to recovery. Afterward, when she had
cleared the things away, I fell into a dreamless and refreshing sleep.

It was late afternoon when I awoke. There was a hail from the deck and
the sound of a boat, bumping against the schooner's side. Next moment my
uncle ran down the companionway and burst into our stateroom, a smile on
his lips and in the dark brilliance of his eyes. Without a word he
placed in my hands a small tin box--a box that I had seen before. I
opened it with a beating heart, and there, side by side in their nest of
damp cottonwood, were the Marama Twins! The native boy, gazing down over
the side of his berth, gave a shrill whoop of joy.

"It was a tame affair," remarked my uncle, when he had answered our
first rapid questions, "but your cave is certainly a curious place. We
had no difficulty in finding the entrance. I led the way in, with Fatu,
Ofai, and a couple of others close behind. Whew! That's a bit of a swim
before you can come up to blow! I had warned the men to make no noise;
it was possible that Rairi might have clung to the six-shooter I had
seen at his belt, and good ammunition is almost waterproof. Presently,
as my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I made out the idol and the
heathen altar, and then, on the ledge a little to one side, the huddled
figure of a man. It was Rairi--his eyes were open and he had been
watching us all the time. He's a plucky scoundrel; when I was standing
over him wondering why he had not moved, he shook his head and grinned
at me as he made an effort to hold up his right arm, blackened and
horribly swollen out of shape. 'I glad you come!' he said in a weak
voice. He was burning with fever.

"Then he told me what had happened. Swimming across the lagoon in the
dark, he had run squarely on a patch of the purple coral, the poisonous
kind that cuts like a razor-edge. He managed to get to the cave before
the wounds stiffened, but next morning, when daylight began to appear
through the cranny in the rock, he realized that it was all up with him
unless help came. Both legs and his right arm are frightfully
infected--I'm not sure that we can pull him through. Well, if he dies,
it will save the Government from supporting him in jail! The pearls
were in the pocket of his dungarees--he handed them to me of his own
accord. We had the deuce of a time getting him out to the boat; he'd
have been drowned if Fatu hadn't been along!"




  13. Tahiti


There is little more to tell of our days at Iriatai. For a fortnight,
while I lay bored and convalescent in a steamer-chair, the diving went
on. Then each man's share of the shell was laid out for my uncle's
inspection, sacked, weighed, and loaded in the Tara's hold. There were a
hundred and twenty tons of it, of a quality unknown in the lagoons of
the Eastern Pacific, and Uncle Harry was jubilant over our good luck.
His safe held a little fortune in pearls, and the divers had others they
were keeping to sell on their own account.

A day came at last when the village on the islet was dismantled; when
the people crowded our decks, noisy and gay with the joy of being
homeward-bound; when the Tara, deeply laden, turned her sharp bows
toward the pass, away from the anchorage which had been our home so
long.

Pahuri was at his accustomed place in the engine-room--the old man had
soon recovered from the rough handling he had endured. Ivi, with his
left arm in a sling, was the hero of the forecastle; the divers never
tired of discussing the memorable night when he had received his wound,
and I could see that in the future the story would be passed from
island to island, growing to epic proportions as the years went by.
Marama and I had thriven under Maruia's care; his feet were healed by
now, and I was able to get about the deck, though my leg still gave me
an occasional twinge.

The Cholita, with Tua in command and our two prisoners stowed away
below, followed us southward toward the pass. Rairi was out of danger at
last, after days of raging fever when there seemed small chance that he
would live. The copra-makers had been on Iriatai for more than a year,
and Schmidt's schooner halted off their village to take them aboard and
load the twenty tons of copra stacked under the shed on the beach.

Outside the pass, when the Tara dipped her nose into the long Pacific
swell, I lay alone on the after deck, gazing back at the line of
palm-tops that was Iriatai, fast disappearing beyond the slope of the
world. I thought of Schmidt, sleeping forever under a wooden cross on
the deserted islet; of the woman in the shallow coral grave beside him,
the half-savage girl he had stolen from her home in the far-off
Carolines--Raita, who had been my friend, and whose hand, at the last,
had ended his strange life. I felt a lump in my throat, as I realized
that in all probability my eyes would never again rest on Iriatai, this
dot of land, immeasurably lonely and remote.

A week later we dropped anchor in Faatemu Bay. The other schooner had
gone on to Tahiti and would await us there. The village hummed with the
excitement of our arrival; there were long stories to be told, friends
and relatives to be greeted, and good fortune to be shared. Forty pigs
were killed for the feast that Taura, the gray-haired chief, gave in our
honor. Fat old Hina welcomed me like a mother, with easy native tears. I
had not forgotten her kindness, and on the last day I tendered my
parting gift: two handsome pearls--one for her, and one for my former
playmate, Marama's little sister. When the Tara sailed out through the
Nao Nao Passage and I went below, I found my stateroom littered with
their presents--fans, hats, baskets, wreaths of bright-colored shell.

Marama and his father accompanied us to Tahiti. At dawn of the second
day I was awakened by my uncle's voice, calling me on deck to see the
land. The schooner was slipping through a calm gray sea, running before
a light breeze from the north, and a glimmer along the horizon told of
the approaching day. Close on our starboard beam, and so unreal that I
half-expected the vision to fade before my eyes, I saw the fantastic
pinnacles of Eimeo. Tahiti lay straight before the Tara's bows--faint,
lofty outlines rising from the sea to disappear in veils of cloud. We
were standing side by side at the rail, and at last my uncle spoke.

"This is my home-coming," he said quietly. "To me, that island is the
most beautiful thing in all the world."

At ten o'clock we were opposite the pass, and I saw for the first time
the little island port of Papeete: the masts of trading-schooners rising
along the docks; the warehouses and the line of sheds for freight; the
narrow, shaded streets running inland from the waterfront; the
background of green, jagged mountains, cleft by the Fautaua Gorge.

A crowd gathered while the Tara docked. There were shouted greetings in
native, in English, and in French. As the schooner was warped alongside
and the gangplank came out, the people began to stream aboard. The
Cholita had brought news of our coming, with the story of our
gold-lipped shell and Schmidt's attempted piracy. My uncle had given Tua
a letter to the authorities, turning over the schooner and the prisoners
to the Government, exonerating the crew, and giving a detailed account
of the affair. The news had caused a stir in this peaceful and remote
community; we refused a dozen invitations to lunch, and Uncle Harry was
forced to tell the story twenty times--to traders, to officials, to his
own agents in Papeete--before his friends would give him peace. And
through it all I heard a chorus of exclamations at the gold-lipped
shell.

I spent the afternoon wandering about the town. It was all new and
strange to me: the strolling bands of sailors, the Chinese shops, the
houses with their deep, cool verandas shaded by exotic trees. At four
o'clock I met my uncle by appointment at the bank. He took me to a
private room upstairs, and as he opened the door a man rose and came
toward us with outstretched hand. He was small and dapper--a shade too
well dressed. His black eyes were bright and beady as shoe-buttons; his
radiant smile, under a little waxed moustache, disclosed teeth like the
pearls in which he dealt.

"Monsieur Sikorsky," murmured my uncle, "my nephew, Charles."

"It is a pleasure," said the man, shaking my hand warmly, "to meet the
nephew of my old friend. I have been aboard the Tara this afternoon and
have heard much of you! They told me you had been diving with the
natives--a wonderful experience, young man, but dangerous, _hein_? Ah,
those sharks--those great man-eating fish--it is _epowvantable_!" He
shuddered delicately, offered my uncle a cigarette from a case of
tortoise-shell, and blew out a cloud of perfumed smoke.

"Yes," he went on, "Monsieur Selden has told me how old Maruia's kinsman
was taken by the tonu, and how you dove down to the cave for the old
oysters your native boy had seen. And he said that if I came here this
afternoon you might show me the matched pearls you found that day."

"I have them here," put in my uncle, drawing the familiar tobacco-tin
from his pocket. "We'll show them to Sikorsky, eh? Perhaps he'll want to
make you an offer." He drew up three chairs about a table close to the
window, and pulled back the blinds to admit the afternoon sunlight into
the room. Then he opened the little box and laid the pearls side by side
on the green tablecloth.

"Well, what do you think of them?" he asked. "You've never seen a finer
matched pair, eh?"

For a moment Sikorsky lost his urbane composure. His eyes glittered and
his hand trembled a little as he reached out to take up the pearl
nearest him. As he turned it over and over in his palm, admiring the
perfection of its form and the play of light on its flawless surfaces,
he muttered to himself in a language I had never heard. Presently he
laid down the first pearl and took up the other for examination; rose to
fetch a black leather case from a corner of the room; laid out his
jeweler's scales and measuring instruments. Without a word to us, he
weighed and measured to his satisfaction, took out writing-materials and
covered a sheet of paper with the figures of a complex calculation. Then
he took up the pearls for a last glance, and leaned back, lighting
another of his perfumed cigarettes.

"There is no need of beating about the bush," he said. "You know pearls,
Selden--such a pair does not turn up twice in a lifetime. They would
make a gift for an empress! It has been a privilege to see them, even
though nothing comes of it. If they were mine, I would go hungry before
I would part with them!"

"What are they worth?" asked my uncle.

"Ah, that is hard to say--they are for sale?"

"Yes, at a price; I would buy them myself if I could afford to own such
luxuries."

"I will make you an offer, then, though the responsibility is more than
I am authorized to take. They are matched almost to the weight of a
hair--Let me see--for one of them, alone, I could safely offer you
twelve thousand dollars. Double that for the matching--forty-eight
thousand for the pair--Yes--I will make my offer fifty thousand."

He raised his hand as my uncle was about to speak.

"That is a fair offer," went on Sikorsky, "I assure you, a long time
might elapse before my firm could find a purchaser. I would not make it
except that they love fine pearls as I do. But if you think that this is
not enough, name your own price and give me time to wire my people in
Paris. One thing I ask of you as an old friend: show them to no one else
till I have had my chance!"

"A fair enough offer, I should say," remarked my uncle, as he put the
pearls in their box and rose to leave. "I must go down to the schooner
now; my nephew and I will talk over your price tonight. Can you meet us
here after breakfast tomorrow? We'll let you know our decision in the
morning."

The pearl-buyer ushered us to the door and bowed us out with another
radiant smile.

That evening, when we were sitting alone on the balcony of our hotel,
Uncle Harry told me something of the dealer. "If you met Sikorsky at
home," he said, "you wouldn't think much of him, but as a matter of fact
there's no squarer or more decent fellow in this part of the world. I've
known him for years. He speaks half a dozen languages and has been in
most of the odd corners of the earth. What do you think of his offer? In
your place I'd be inclined to accept. I doubt, in fact, if the Twins
would fetch much more. One might take them abroad, of course, and find
some rich fancier who would pay twice as much, but peddling jewels is
not in our line. What do you say?"

"Oh, let's accept his offer!" I exclaimed. I had been thinking of
nothing else since our visit to the bank. Half of fifty thousand dollars
seemed a tremendous sum to me.

"Very well," said Uncle Harry with a smile. "Tomorrow will be a great
day for Marama and the old man!"

He drew from his pocket the familiar case of worn brown leather and
selected a cigar. When it was drawing to his satisfaction he tossed the
match into the street and cocked his feet against the railing of the
balcony.

"I've good news," he remarked. "We have a week before your steamer
sails. I want you to see my place in the country. When does your school
begin? The first of October? That's good--you'll be home in plenty of
time. Now about the money; it's yours to do with as you like, of course,
but let me give you a bit of advice. If I were you, I'd turn the bulk of
it over to your father--he's in need of cash, and a few thousand would
put the Santa Brigida on its feet. It will be yours eventually; stick by
the land, old fellow--it doesn't pay to knock about the world as I have
done. By the way, there'll be something coming to you from your lay in
the season's work, though it will look small beside Sikorsky's check.
Well, it's getting late--time we were turning in."

In the morning, when we had finished breakfast, we met the pearl-buyer
at the bank. Half an hour later, as we shook hands and strolled out the
door, I carried in the inner fold of my pocketbook a draft for
twenty-five thousand dollars, on a San Francisco banking house. We found
Marama and his father aboard the schooner. Their eyes were bright with
wonder when my uncle told them of the bargain he had made, and they were
glad to accept his offer to look after the money for them, letting them
draw on him whenever they were in need of funds.

"I'm having some friends to dinner tomorrow," he told me as we walked
down the gangplank. "We must be getting out to Fanatea now. My boat got
in early this morning--come along and have a look at her."

She was lying a quarter of a mile down the beach, moored to the sea-wall
under the old trees bordering the avenue. On her narrow stern I saw the
word "Marara" lettered in gold, and her lean lines and the six great
exhaust-pipes standing in a row left no doubt that she could show the
speed of her namesake, the flying fish. A native in a suit of oily
overalls sprang ashore to greet us and smiled when I spoke to him in his
own tongue.

"What do you think of her?" asked my uncle. "Isn't she a beauty? I built
her myself--every plank. That's a French engine--ninety horsepower--and
it drives her at better than twenty knots!"

The mechanic fetched our bags from the hotel. We took our places in the
cockpit, the spray-hood was raised, the anchor came up, and the stern
line was cast off. The deep-throated roar of the exhaust brought a
little crowd to the quay while the man turned up grease cups and oiled a
bearing here and there. He raised his head and glanced at my uncle with
the odd native lift of the eyebrows which means "All ready!" The motor
burst into a deeper and a fiercer roar; my uncle took the wheel and
pulled back the lever of the clutch. The boat quivered and sprang
forward swiftly, heading for the docks where the stevedores were
dropping their wheelbarrows to watch. She swept around the harbor in a
great curve, turned seaward, and headed out through the pass, her bows
parting the waves in sheets of spray. Outside the reef we swung
southward toward Fanatea, twenty miles off.

An hour later I saw a break in the white line of the reef. As we sped
in through the gap, the huge blue combers, with spray whipping back from
their crests, raced in on either side of us to topple and crash in
thundering foam.

"There's Fanatea!" shouted my uncle, pointing to a long white house at
the end of an avenue of palms.

A path, bordered by ornamental palms, led from the pier to my uncle's
house, set on a rise of land a quarter of a mile beyond. The plantation
had a long frontage on the beach and extended inland, across the rich
alluvial flat, up into the hills. More than two hundred acres were
planted with coconuts--stately young palms in rows ten yards apart--and
lines of fencing divided the land into paddocks, where I saw fat cattle
grazing belly-deep in grass.

The house was long and low, plastered with burned coral from the lagoon.
The veranda overlooked a matchless view of dark-green foreshore, placid
lagoon, white reef, and sparkling sea. Far off across the channel the
horizon was broken by Eimeo's jagged peaks. Deep, cool, and airy, the
veranda was my uncle's living-room, and at the windward end, in a great
glassed-in bay, I found his collection of idols, weapons, and native
implements. That night, when the Chinese houseboy rang the gong, I
scarcely knew Uncle Harry in pumps, flannel trousers, and a smart white
dinner-coat. It was his custom to potter about all day on the
plantation, bush-knife in hand and clad only in a cotton pareu; but when
evening came and he had had his bath, he never failed to appear
immaculate at the dinner hour.

"This is the only home I have," he remarked as we sat down, "and when
I'm here I make a little effort to keep up appearances. It saves me from
becoming a savage. I have a good many friends scattered about the
island--I visit them sometimes and they often come here. As I told you,
a few of them will be out tomorrow: Sikorsky is coming and a couple of
Government men. Old Jackson said he would come, too--he's my agent here;
by the way, he's reserved a deck cabin for you on the steamer. Maruia is
the most famous cook on the island--she's promised to come out to
superintend the kitchen."

Maruia arrived early the next afternoon, and when she had shaken hands
with us she went straight to the back of the house, where the Fanatea
people, who stood in awe of such a rich and celebrated character, sprang
this way and that to do her bidding.

The motorboat had gone to town, and just before sunset I heard the
hoarse bellow of her exhaust and saw her moving swiftly across the
lagoon toward the pier. When he had presented me to his guests, my uncle
took the Frenchmen in charge and left me with old Mr. Jackson and
Sikorsky. The gold-lipped shell and his adventure with Schmidt had made
Uncle Harry the hero of the hour, and since Sikorsky had showed the
Marama Twins to several of his friends, I found myself an object of
interest to these older men. But Mr. Jackson, a gaunt old Englishman
with friendly eyes and an enormous white moustache, knew how to put me
at my ease.

"A beautiful pair of pearls," he remarked when we were walking into the
dining-room. "They'll make a sensation in Paris! Sikorsky showed them to
me last night; he's planning to take the next boat north, on his way to
France. Told me how you found them, too--the tonu and all the rest of
it. Bad brutes, those tonus--one nearly had me when I was a lad. Forty
years ago, that was--I'm getting old, eh? In those days I was
super-cargo aboard a schooner of the Maison Brander. We were lying
becalmed inside the pass at Mangareva, and in spite of what the natives
said, I thought I'd have a bit of a swim. In the nick of time I saw the
brute coming up at me--a great spiny, mottled beast, with a mouth like
an open door. We were towing a boat, by good luck--I went over her stern
so fast I scraped half the skin off my chest!"

"He's off!" said my uncle, at the other end of the table. "Mr. Jackson's
our champion spinner of yarns, Charlie; he's a true artist, and you
mustn't believe everything he says!"

The old man chuckled--they were friends of many years standing. "I'll
promise not to do any more talking," he said. "I'm hungry, and I can
tell by that salad of shrimps that old Maruia is somewhere about. Lucky
man! How did you persuade her to officiate?"

An hour later, when the Chinese boy had brought coffee, one of the
Frenchmen pushed back his chair and rose. He was the treasurer of the
colony, a stout, middle-aged man, with keen dark eyes and a
close-cropped beard.

"First of all," he said, with a friendly smile at my uncle, "permit me
to thank you for an excellent dinner, such as I know how to appreciate.
Nor must we forget Maruia, whose skill in her art I have known for so
many years. And now let me propose the health of our host, whose
discovery of gold-lipped shell in the Paumotus marks an addition to the
resources of the colony. To Monsieur Selden, then, whose enterprise has
earned the Government's warm thanks!"

My uncle rose as the Treasurer sat down.

"Monsieur Durand has been more than kind," he said. "And speaking of
Maruia, she has been good enough to offer to entertain us this evening.
You all know the old-time native songs, and how rarely one hears them
nowadays. She has composed an _ute_ on our diving-season at Iriatai. I
think she is waiting for us on the veranda--bring your coffee along."

We found her in the bay-window, examining a piece of tapa cloth. She
seemed known to all the company and perfectly at ease, addressing Mr.
Jackson in native and the others in fluent French. Her hair, which was
brushed back loosely, was fastened with a pearl-studded clasp at the
nape of her neck; golden earrings were in her ears, and she wore a
flowing gown of thin black silk. I could scarcely believe that this was
the old savage beside whom I had dived day after day, the fierce
creature who had leaped overboard, spear in hand and muttering a heathen
prayer, to avenge her nephew's death.

I sat down between Mr. Jackson and Sikorsky, on a long lounge covered
with a scarlet-bordered mat. Beyond the railing of the veranda a score
of natives squatted on the grass.

Maruia took her place cross-legged on the floor, and a boy placed in her
hands a great piano-accordion, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In the
silence which proved the interest of her audience, she drew out the
bellows and let her fingers play over the stops. Then I heard for the
first time the music of the ute--a wild minor melody, stirring,
exultant, heathen, and profoundly sad. Suddenly she began to sing, in a
high-pitched wail, a song such as our ancestors must have sung in the
firelight, centuries before history dawned. Here and there I could catch
a word--enough to piece together the story the verses told--but the
language was full of imagery and many of the words were of the ancient
tongue which only a few of the older people understood. She sang of how
the Tara came to Faatemu and sailed away to Iriatai; of how Seroni
killed the old god in the form of a shark; and of the temple in the
cave; of the strange shell with lips like gold, such as no man in the
Paumotus had seen; of her nephew's death, and how Teura had been
avenged; of Schmidt and the fight aboard the schooner, when the woman
from a far land was killed.

All this sounds commonplace enough, as I read over the words I have set
down, but there was something far from commonplace in the quality of the
woman's voice, in the wild imagery of her words, in the primitive and
stirring cadences of her song. At last the music died away, and Maruia
leaned back with a sigh as she snapped the hooks of her accordion.

We were silent for a time, and then my uncle spoke. He turned to Mr.
Jackson.

"It's curious," he observed--"the spell of those old songs!" The trader
looked up at him, raising his snowy eyebrows in the native gesture of
assent.

"Either there's real art in a thing of that kind," he answered, "or I've
become a savage after forty years!"

Sikorsky had not moved once while Maruia sang. The perfumed cigarette,
forgotten between his fingers, had burned out. The old man's words
seemed to rouse him from a reverie.

"Ah, gentlemen," he said, more seriously than I had heard him speak
before, "make no mistake--the essence of all art is in such a song! So
our old Hebrew minstrels sang, long before my people's captivity in
Egypt! So, perhaps, the Greek bards sang of the fall of Troy!"

As the next day was Sunday, we persuaded our guests to stop over, and it
was late afternoon when we took our places in the motorboat, slipped out
through the pass, and headed north along the reef. The breeze had died
away and the Marara drove through a long, gentle swell, running in from
the west. I was beginning to understand my uncle's love of the island:
on such an evening, it was impossible to believe that any part of the
world could be more beautiful. Beyond the line of breakers the lagoon
lay like a mirror in the sunset calm, and I saw the smiling coastal
land, with its coconut and breadfruit groves, sheltered at the mouths of
valleys which pierced the lofty wooded hills. Out to the west, half
hidden in clouds all rosy and edged with gold, Eimeo rose from unruffled
waters. A long spit of land ran out to sea ahead of us.

"Point Venus," remarked my uncle, leaning over to speak in my ear. "The
speck of white at the end is the lighthouse, the only one in this part
of the world. It is built on the site of Captain Cook's observatory; he
came here, you know, to observe the transit of Venus in 1769. He was a
wonderful man--have you read the account of his voyages? Ah, you've a
treat ahead! His ship anchored in Matavai Bay, this side of the point,
and he named the group the Society Islands, in honor of the Royal
Society, which sent him out. Sometimes I wish I could have lived in
those days, when there were still islands to discover--"

We were turning into the pass. Half an hour later we had bidden our
guests good-night, and the Marara was speeding homeward in the dusk.

My week at Fanatea passed with the swiftness of a dream, and the day
came all too soon when I said good-bye to the people of the plantation
and stepped aboard the boat for the last time. As we entered the pass at
Papeete, I saw the mail steamer from New Zealand lying alongside the
dock, hideous and huge beside the trim sailing vessels of the port. She
was to carry me to San Francisco.

We went aboard at once to look up my stateroom and inquire at what hour
the steamer would sail. The captain, a gray-haired Englishman, with a
red face and a great jutting stomach, tightly buttoned in a
double-breasted coat of drill, was an old friend of my uncle's. He
called us to his quarters by the bridge.

"Hello, Selden," he said, "they tell me you've had a row with old
Thursday Island. He was done in, eh? Good job, to my way of thinking! An
odd bloke; gentleman born, I should say, but a hard case, and crook as
they make 'em! I knew him out in the Solomons, in ninety-eight." He
turned to me, holding out an enormous hairy hand.

"I've heard about you, young man," he rumbled. "You're the lad who found
Sikorsky's pearls, eh? He's going north with us. They're aboard now,
safe in the purser's strongbox. I'll tell the chief steward to put you
at my table. We'll be sailing by three o'clock."

We lunched aboard the Tara that day, and when the meal was finished my
uncle and I sat talking in steamer-chairs on deck. "It's hard to see you
go, old fellow," he said. "I'll be lonely without you; but don't forget
that you're coming down again. I wish I could go north with you now--I'd
give something to be there when your father hears of our good luck, and
sees how tall and strong you've grown! But I'll be up next year without
fail; perhaps I'll bring the Tara, and you'll see Marama and the rest of
them again. I've always wanted a cruise down the Lower Californian
coast, to have a look at those Mexican islands and bays. Give my love to
your father and mother, and to Marion--tell them how glad I am that they
let you come with me. This is for your sister, by the way; take good
care of it--perhaps you'd better put it in the purser's safe." He handed
me a little plush-lined jewel-case, opening it to display a string of
beautifully graduated pearls.

"I've been collecting them for years," he went on with a smile. "Marion
is the only niece I have, and I hope this will give her pleasure for a
long time to come. But it's time you were getting aboard--the men are
up forward, waiting for you to say good-bye."

I felt a lump in my throat as I shook hands with them, one after the
other: Ofai, Ivi with his bandaged arm, Pahuri, Fatu, and the cook.
Marama and the chief of Faatemu were standing with Maruia on the dock.

"My heart is heavy today," said Marama, as I took his hand, "but Seroni
has promised that I shall go with him when next he sails away to your
land. Perhaps it will not be long before we meet."

"Come back to us one day," said the old woman. "Your welcome will be
warm, for your friends are many in these islands!"

"_E, parau mau_," put in Taura, in his deep voice. "Those are true
words!"

The ship was whistling for the last time. Half laughing and half vexed
at the delay, my uncle seized my arm to drag me away from the group of
kind native friends. As we pushed our way through the crowd about the
gangplank, the sailors were casting off the lashings. Uncle Harry
grasped my hand.

"Time you were aboard," he said. "Good-bye, old man."

The gangplank came up, lines were cast off, and the propeller began to
churn. I stood by the rail, gazing down at the faces of friends among
the crowd ashore, while the steamer backed, turned, and headed for the
open sea. A handkerchief fluttered on the Tara's deck; her ensign dipped
gracefully in a farewell salute. All at once a feeling of sadness came
over me--I turned my eyes away from the land, walked blindly to my
stateroom, and closed the door.

That evening, when the bugle announced the dinner hour, I went on deck
and gazed back across the calm sea astern. The far-away peaks of Tahiti
and Eimeo stood like faint blue clouds on the line where sea met
sky--lands of enchanted memory, fast disappearing in the fading light.


  =Transcriber's Notes:=
  original hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in
    the original
  Page 39, "was near, Then, suddenly" changed to "was near. Then, suddenly"
  Page 53, "once more, It was" changed to "once more. It was"
  Page 60/61, "Raira" changed to "Rairi"
  Page 68, "that is produces" changed to "that it produces"
  Page 76, "he is! he exclaimed" changed to "he is!" he exclaimed"
  Page 76, "gathering way Then" changed to "gathering way. Then"
  Page 77, "turned at right anles" changed to "turned at right angles"
  Page 126, "fish-blub" changed to "fish-bulb"
  Page 143, "beard. "There will" changed to "beard. 'There will"
  Page 150, "sit here helples" changed to "sit here helpless"




[End of The Pearl Lagoon, by Charles Nordhoff]
