In the Strange South Seas

by Beatrice Grimshaw

Takutea we did not call at, since it was uninhabited, but the Duchess, under her daring little pirate of a captain, made no bones about running as close to anything, anywhere, as her passengers might desire, so we saw the fascinating place at fairly close quarters. In 1904, when I saw it, it was a real “desolate island,” being twelve miles out in the open sea from the nearest land (Atiu), and totally uninhabited. Its extent is four or five hundred acres; it is thickly wooded with cocoanuts-, and has a good spring of water. The beautiful “bo’sun bird,” whose long red and white tail feathers have a considerable commercial value, is common on the island. No one had visited it for a long time when we sailed by; the wide white beach was empty, the cocoanut palms dropped their nuts unheeded into earth that received them gladly, and set them forth again in fountain-like sprays of green. The surf crumbled softly on the irregular fringing reef; the ripples of the lagoon laid their ridgy footsteps along the empty strand, and no Man Friday came to trample them out-with a step of awful significance. I wanted Takutea very badly indeed, all for myself; but I shall not have it now, neither will the reader, for some one else has bought it, and it is to be turned into a cocoanut plantation.

Manuwai, better known as Hervey Island, is not many miles away, but we took a day or more to reach it, partly because the winds were contrary, partly because (with apologies to the Admiralty Surveys) it was wrongly charted, and could not be found, at first, in a slight sea-fog. Manuwai has changed its ownership and its use, of late, but in 1904 it was a penal settlement and a copra plantation combined, being used as a place of punishment for sinful Cook Islanders, who were compulsorily let out as labourers to the Company renting the two islets of which this so-called group is composed.

The islands between them cover about fifteen hundred acres, according to the estimate given me. They have no permanent inhabitants, and when first taken up for planting, were quite desolate of life. A far-away, melancholy little place looked Manuwai, under the rays of the declining sun, as we came up to the reef. The two low islands, with their thick pluming of palms, are enclosed in the same lagoon, sheltered by a reef of oval form. There were a couple of drying-huts on the beach, and some heaps of oily smelling copra, when our boat pulled in. About twenty men, some convicts, some hired labourers, were gathered on the shore, fairly dancing with excitement, and the rest of the population—one white overseer, and one half-caste—were waiting on the very edge of the water, hardly less agitated. No ships ever called except the Duchess, and she was long overdue.

I stepped on shore, and was immediately shaken hands with, and congratulated on being the first white woman to set foot on the island. Then we all went for a walk, while the native crew fell into the arms of the labourers, and with cries of joy began exchanging gossip, tobacco, hats, and shirts, bartering oranges from the ship for cocoanut crabs from the island, and eagerly discussing the question of who was going home in the Duchess, and who would have to stop over till her next call, perhaps six months hence.

Manuwai is not one of the most beautiful of the islands, but anything in the way of solid ground was welcome after the gymnastics of the too-lively Duchess. The cocoa-nut plantations, and the new clearings, where the bush was being burned away, interested the officials from Raratonga, and the “boulevard” planted by the overseer—a handsome double row of palms, composing an avenue that facetiously began in nothing, and led to nowhere, received due admiration. We heard a good deal about the depredations of the cocoanut crabs, and as these creatures are among the strangest things that ever furnished food for travellers’ tales, I shall give their history as I gathered it, both in Manuwai and other places.

One must not, by the way, believe all that one hears, or even half, among the “sunny isles of Eden.” Flowers of the imagination flourish quite as freely as flowers and fruits of the earth, and are much less satisfactory in kind. Also, it is a recognised sport to “spin yarns” to a newcomer, with the pious object of seeing how much he—or she—will swallow; and where so much is strange, bizarre, and almost incredible, among undoubted facts, it is hard to sift out the fictions of the playful resident.

However, the cocoanut crab is an undeniable fact, with which many a planter has had to wrestle, much to his loss. It must be confessed that I had expected something very exciting indeed, when I heard in Tahiti that cocoanut or robber crabs were still to be found in some parts of the Cook Group. One of the most grisly bugbears of my youth had been the descriptions of the terrible cocoanut crab that attacked the “Swiss Family Robinson” on their wonderful island. It was described, if my memory serves me, as “about the size of a turtle.” and was dark blue in colour; it descended rapidly backwards down a tree, and immediately went to the attack of a Robinson youth, who repulsed it at the peril of his life.... On the whole, I thought it would make things interesting, if it really was in the Cook Group.

I never was more disappointed in my life than when I really saw one. It was dead, and cured in formalin, and only brought down from an island house as a show, but that was not the trouble. It was not more than two and a half feet long, lobster tail and all; it was not in the least like a turtle, and any small boy armed with a good stick could have faced it without fear, at its worst. No, decidedly the terrible crab was not up to the travellers’ tales that had been told about it.

Still, it was worth seeing, for it was like nothing on the earth or in the sea that I had ever encountered. It had been excellently preserved, and looked wonderfully alive, when laid on the sand at the foot of a cocoanut palm. Its colour, as in life, was a gay mixture of red and blue. It had a long body like a colossal lobster, and two claws, one slight and thin, the other big enough to crack the ankle-bone of a man. It was an ugly and a wicked-looking thing, and I was not surprised to hear that it fights fiercely, if caught away from its hole, sitting up and threatening man or beast with its formidable claw, and showing no fear whatever.

In the daylight, however, it is very seldom seen abroad. We walked through groves that were riddled with its holes that afternoon, but never even heard the scuffle of a claw. The creature lives in rabbit-like burrows at the foot of palm-trees, and the natives can always tell the size of the inmate by a glance at the diameter of the hole by which it enters its burrow. At night it comes out, climbs the nearest palm, and gets in among the raffle of young and old leaves, fibre, stalks, and nuts, in the crown, there it selects a good nut, nips the stalk in two with its claw, and lets the booty drop with a thump to the earth, seventy or eighty feel below. Then the marauder backs cautiously down the tree, finds the nut, and proceeds to rip and rend the tough husk until the nut as we know it at home is laid bare. A cocoanut shell is no easy thing to crack, as most people know, but the robber crab with its huge claws makes nothing more of it than we should make of an egg, and in a minute the rich oily meat is at the mercy of the thief, and another fraction of a ton of copra is lost to the planter. It goes without saying that any stray nuts lying on the ground have been opened and destroyed, before the crab will trouble itself to climb.