Madame Gilbert's Cannibal

by Bennet Copplestone

The water had fallen below its full height when Madame caught her first glimpse of the famous Barrier, and the Pacific swell, urged against the outer face by the south-east trade wind, was meeting the tidal flow and tossing great spumes of spray high into the air. Over the whole width of the reef the water boiled and roared, and masses of coral limestone, tons in weight, were flung about like small stones. Although the madrepores cannot live above the level of low water, the Barrier was several feet higher, and here comes in the mechanical theory of Chamisso and his followers to modify the beautiful simplicity of Darwin's hypothesis of subsidence. By force of the swell which beats perpetually on the outer wall, where the polyps flourish in surf, and where their millions of tiny skeletons are perpetually adding to the structure, lumps are being torn off and piled upon the coping of the wall. These lumps under the solvent action of sun and water become cemented into masses, so that the purity of the original madrepore design is partially lost. The Barrier has risen higher than the polyps unaided could have built it. The sea is no respecter of coral graveyards. In this way the interior of purely coral islands may have become heaped up by masses torn by the sea from the fringing reefs and flung high up the shore.

Though the Barrier broke the full force of the Pacific rollers, enough of water swirled over it to set the string of boats tossing and bucking in the tide rips of the sheltered western face. Willatopy ordered the whaleboats to be cast off, and the motor launch to be anchored some half a mile short of the reefs. The second engineer remained on board of her, but the Topy family and Madame Gilbert transferred their wet persons to one of the whaleboats. The long net was dragged out and stretched between the boats, which drifted slowly on parallel courses towards the Barrier. Between them ran the line of floats which marked the upper edge of the net. As the boats moved rather faster than the heavily weighted net, it sagged between them, pulling out into a long wide-mouthed bag from the jaws of which the fish feeding in the shallows could not readily escape. The net was carried forward in this fashion until the boats which were controlling it had reached the inner shelving edge of the reef, and the depth of water had come down to about ten feet, which, it may be recalled, was the depth to which the weighted edge of the net descended. Then the fun began, for the drag-rope on the lower edge became entangled in the rough coral lumps on the sea floor, and the fish which had been herded between the net's capacious jaws began to skurry forth through the opening avenues of escape. To Madame this overflow, as it were, seemed to matter little, for, between the boats, the fish were leaping in hundreds, even thousands, and even if half of them won a way to freedom, there would be far more left than the Humming Top or Tops Island could possibly consume. But the family of Topy had other views. The moment had arrived for which these amphibians had waited and hoped; anyone, white or brown, could trap sea fish in a net; it was vouchsafed to them alone, hereditary fishers of Hula, to pursue escaping fish into their own depths, and to catch them directly by hand and teeth.

When the lower drag-rope caught and strained, Willatopy directed both boats to anchor, and cried out to his sisters in native dialect. What he said in words Madame did not know, but what he meant was instantly made plain. Up leapt the three Topys, away went trousers and banana-skin petticoats, and the three of them, bare as when they were born, and revelling in their supreme sea skill, streaked overboard. The one dark body and the two light ones flashed over the gunwale, and took the water like seals. Down they went to where gaps opened between the net and the sea floor, and the fish were struggling to escape. The human fish swooped upon the sea natives, and grappled them with claws and teeth. These were no small feeble, defenceless fish; the least of them weighed a pound and a half, and the erectile spines near the tail fins made them in their own element opponents worthy even of the Hula Topys. Avoiding the spines, the Topys, boy and girls of equal skill and quickness, grabbed the elusive fish by the gills, and when both hands were full, buried their sharp white fangs in the backs of them.

"I shall never forget that sight," said Madame to me. "Down they would all flash for a few seconds, and then the three black heads shot up and fish in torrents poured into the boat. Blood ran from their mouths, and from the bitten backs of the captured fish. Often and often they shot up, all three of them, with a two-pounder in each hand, and another gripped in their jaws. We poor white folk are proud if we can by artifice tickle a trout in its lair and ravish it from a hole with our hands. These Hula Topys caught those fish in the free open sea. They never seemed to miss their swoop, for they stayed down a few seconds only at each dive, and never came up with empty hands. Their diving was a revelation. There was no effort in it, no clumsy heaving up of the loins and extravagant splashing. Their brown bodies rolled over and vanished with as little fuss as the diving of a seal. Perhaps that is the nearest word to describe what I saw. The Topys were just seals. Their frizzy hair plastered down by the water gave them, too, something of the look of seals. All the while they never paused for breath. It was up and down, up and down, without ceasing, for fully a quarter of an hour, and the fish came aboard in a torrent. Our bottom boards were covered before the Topys ceased. And then it was the girls who stopped to rest, not that indefatigable Willatopy. Joy and Cry swung in over the high sharp bows and sat down panting on the forward thwart." Madame laughed a little to herself before she resumed the description. "I was interested to observe," she went on, "that the girls were tattooed in deep blue patterns down the centre line of the body and on the upper part of their thighs. And this interested me, for Willatopy had no tattoo marks at all. The pattern was identical on both girls, a series of light brown saltires on a blue ground resembling Alexander's Scottish St. Andrew's Cross. It was curious that the Hon. William Toppys should have permitted his daughters to submit to the Hula tribal markings while his son was excluded. But perhaps men are not tattooed in the tribe though most of the brown Melanesian boys on Tops Island had some face markings. What struck me most vividly was the effect of the tattooing in removing the appearance of bareness. If the Topy girls had been tattooed from breast to knee they would have appeared to the casual eye to have been wearing tight bathing dresses, woven in blue and brown checks. There is a lot to be said for tattooing. Though my dear men turned their bashful backs there was no suggestion at all of immodesty about Joy and Cry. I loved their admirable, unconscious simplicity."

When the whaleboats had been loaded with fish to their utmost capacity, the unwanted remainder were allowed to go free, and the net was hauled in and coiled down. It was the hand and mouth fishing which the Toppys really loved, the savage sport, not the larder which absorbed their interests. The net was the means to an end—the penning up of fish so that Willie and his sisters might attack them in their native element. The party lunched by the Barrier while waiting for the tide to turn, and at slack water Willatopy suggested that Madame, already clad in her silk bathing gear, should go over the side with him. Madame was willing, but dreaded sharks. She was quite fearless when confronted by risks which she understood, but the thought of swimming with sharks smelling at her toes made the brave lady's blood run cold. For her daily swims off the Island she always kept to a small narrow creek warranted by Willatopy to be shark-proof.

"Sharks are nothing," remonstrated Willie. "They will not come where there are so many boats, and if they do I will drive them away."

"But you have no daggers here, Willie," objected Madame. "Even you cannot shoo away sharks with bare hands."

One of the sailors offered his sheath knife, but Willatopy put it aside. "If a silly shark comes by I will borrow it," said he. "There will be time enough."

Spurred by all this easy indifference—though she saw herself being gobbled up by a huge shark while Willatopy was strolling off to borrow the sailor's knife—Madame flung aside the trench coat and her sun helmet and stood forth as a reluctant sacrifice for the honour of the white race. Though it may have really been a case of heroism without risk, in her terrified imagination the seas swarmed with black shark fins. Over she went, and following her went Willatopy and the girls.

"I can swim a bit," said Madame, "and rather fancied myself at home. But those brown seals made rings around me. While I lumbered noisily along they would frisk to and fro, now behind, now in front, now on either side. Whenever they pleased, they would join me in half a dozen swift vivid strokes. My progress was exactly like that of an elderly fat woman down a field with three terriers sporting about her. It was a humiliating spectacle. I did my best; I swam as fast as I could, and when I got back to the boat I was puffing like an asthmatic grampus. Willatopy was good enough to say that I had quite a useful leg drive and might learn to swim some day if I stuck at it. He regarded me much as a plus golfer does his thirty-six handicap grandmother. I knew better than to show those Topys that ungainly agitated sprawl which in Europe we call diving from the surface. But though the swimming was a humiliation I enjoyed sitting in the sun to dry."