The pearl lagoon

by Charles Nordhoff

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 iron wood—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 water-tight, 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.