“Do you think there were any sharks about the day I bathed?” I inquired.
“Well, if the girls were blowing, I should say there must have been. They wouldn’t do it for fun altogether,” he replied.
“Surely they wouldn’t bathe, if they knew there were any about?”
“Oh, wouldn’t they, though! They don’t mind them. No native is afraid of anything in the sea.”
I believed this with reservations, until a day came in another island, when I nearly furnished a dinner for a shark myself, and thenceforth gave up bathing in unprotected tropical waters, for good. It was in Rakahanga, many hundreds of miles nearer the Line, and I had left the schooner to enjoy a walk and a bathe. A native Rakahangan girl, who had never seen a white woman before, and was wildly excited at the thought of going bathing with this unknown wonder, found a boat for me, and allowed me to pick my own place in the inner lagoon of the island. I chose a spot where the lagoon narrowed into a bottle-neck communicating with the sea, and we-started our swim. The girl, however, much to my surprise, would not go more than a few yards from the boat, and declined to follow me when I struck out for the open water. I had been assured by her, so far as my scanty knowledge of Maori allowed me to understand, that there were no sharks, so her conduct seemed incomprehensible until a stealthy black fin, shaped like the mainsail of a schooner, rose out of the water a few score yards away, and began making for me!
The native girl was first into the boat, but I was assuredly not long after her. The back fin did not follow, once I was out of the water. But the heat of that burning day far up towards the Line, was hardly enough to warm me, for half an hour afterwards.
I found, on asking the question that I should have asked first of all, that the bottle-neck entrance of the lagoon was a perfect death-trap of sharks, and that more than one native had been eaten there.
“Why on earth did the girl tell me there were none, and why did she venture into such a place herself?” I asked.
“Well,” said the only white man on the island, “I should think she knew that any shark will take a white person, and leave a native, if there’s a choice. And if you had that red bathing-dress on that you’re carrying, why, you were simply making bait of yourself!”
“But why should she want to see me killed?”