Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

WORD we got at Anaa of a few tons of copra at Kaukura sent us hurrying there. The wind was against us, and we drew long sides of a triangle before we reached that atoll, which was, as our starting-point, at the base of the isosceles. Kaukura was a divergence from our intended course, but these schooners were like birds of the air, which must take their sustenance as fortune wills. Copra was scarce, and competition in buying, fierce. The natives received about four cents a pound, but as payment was usually in goods, the Tahiti traders, who shipped copra to America and Europe, profited heavily. There were grades in copra, owing to the carelessness of the natives in drying it. Green or poorly-dried nuts shrank, and the nuts parched in kilns developed more undesirable creosote than sun-dried. All copra was sold by weight and quality, and it continually lessened in weight by evaporation of oil. Time was the essence of a good bargain. The sooner to the presses of the mainland, the greater the return. Crude mills in the Paumotus or Tahiti crushed out the oil formerly, and it was sealed in bamboo lengths, and these exported. These tubes, air-tight, were common mediums of exchange, as wampum among Indians, or gold-dust in Alaska. Modern processes extracted double the oil of the old presses, and the eight-foot sections of the long grass were almost obsolete for cocoanut-oil, and used mostly for sauces sold in the Papeete market-place.

“Trade ain’t what it was,” said McHenry. “There’s more traders than natives, almost. I remember when they were so crazy to exchange our stuff for their produce, we’d have the trade-room crowded all day, an’ had to keep guns handy to chase the mob away, to add up the bloody figures. Now every atoll has its store, and the trader has to pat his copra-makers an’ divers on the back, instead o’ kickin’ them the way we used to. The damn Frogs treat these Kanakas like they were white people, an’ have spoiled our game. We can’t trade in the Paumotus unless the schooner has a French registry and a French captain,—Lyin’ Bill is a Frog citizen for not stealin’ a vessel he had a chance to,—an’ when you leave the Papeete you’ve got to register every last drop o’ booze you’ve got aboard. It’s supposed to be only for us on the schooner, and for the whites in the Paumotus, or a few chieves who have permits, for bein’ Froggy. But it’s the rotten missionaries who hurt us, really. We could smuggle it in, but they tell on us.”

We had not caught a fish from the schooner, despite having a tackle rigged most of the days. I had fixed a bamboo rod, about eighteen feet long and very strong, on the rail of the waist of the vessel, and from it let trail a hundred feet or so of tough line. The hook was the most perfect for the purpose ever made by man. It was cut out of the mother-of-pearl lining of the Paumotuan pearl-oyster shell. It was about six inches long, and three quarters wide, shaped rudely like a flying-fish, and attached to it on the concave side was a barb of bone about an inch and a half in length, fastened with purau fiber, and a few hog’s bristles inserted. The line was roved through the hole where the barb was fastened, and, being braided along the inner side of the pearl shank, was tied again at the top, forming a chord to the arch. Unbaited, the hook, by the pull of the schooner, skipped along the surface of the sea like a flying-fish. I had made a telltale of a piece of stick, and while McHenry and I talked and Jean Moet slept it snapped before my eyes. To seize the rod and hold on was the act of a second. I let out the entire five hundred feet of line, before the fish tired, and then it took four of us to drag him to the deck. He was a roroa, a kind of barracuda, about ten feet long, and weighing a couple of hundred pounds.

The fish made a welcome change in our diet and was enough for all, including a number of Paumotuans who were returning to Takaroa for the opening of the diving season. Chocolat nibbled a head, but preferred the remnants of a can of beef. He improved daily in his tricks and in his agility in avoiding being hurtled into the water by the roll or pitch of the schooner. He had an almost incredible instinct or acquired knowledge of the motion of the Marara, and when I felt sure we had lost him—that he would fall overboard in another instant—he would leap to the deck and frolic about the wheel. The spokes of it were another constant threat to his health, for one blow when they spun fast might kill him; but he was reserved for a more horrid fate.

Kaukura rose from the sea at dawn, after a night of wearing and tacking. It was an atoll, irregularly annular in shape, twenty-six miles long and ten wide, wooded in patches, and with vast stretches where only the dazzling coral shone. It, too, had been spoiled in prosperity by an inimical wind and tide, and the cocoa-palms had been annihilated that had once grown upon all its many component islets. The cocoanut-tree lives more than eighty years, and does not fruit until seven years old, so that the loss of thousands of these life-giving palms was a fearful blow. Each tree bore a hundred nuts annually, and that crop was worth to the owner for copra nearly a dollar, besides being much of his food.

Landmarks we gradually discerned; a village, two churches, and a row of houses, and then the French tricolor on a pole. The surf broke with a fierce roaring on the reef, and when McHenry and I left the schooner, Moet stayed aboard, as the wind was ominous. There was no pass into the lagoon at this village, and even the pit in the barrier-reef had been made by French engineers. They had blown up the madrepore rock, and made a gateway for small boats.

The schooner did not take our painter, for the breeze was too stiff for the venture, and so we had a half-mile to row. When we neared the reef and entered the pit, I felt that it was touch-and-go, for we rose and tottered on the huge swells, and dived into their hollows, with a prophetic certainty of capsizing. I could hardly keep on the box under me, and swayed forebodingly. Then suddenly the steering oar caught under a bank of coral. I barely heard the cry of Piri a Tuahine, “E era! There she goes!” when the boat rose on its stern with a twisting motion, as if a whale had struck it with its fluke, and turned turtle. I was slighted into the water at its topmost teeter, falling yards away from it, and in the air I seemed to see the Tahitians leaping for safety from its crushing thwarts and the cargo.

McHenry’s “What the bloody——!” as we both somersaulted, was in my ears as I was plunged beneath the surface.

With the fear of encountering the boat, the dark bulk of which I saw dimly above me, I swam hard under the water a dozen strokes, and rose to find myself beneath the reef, which grew in broken ledges. When my head in stunning contact with the rock knelled a warning to my brain, I opened my eyes. There was only blackness. I dived again, a strange terror chilling me, but when I came up, I was still penned from air in abysmal darkness.

Now fear struck me weak. I realized my extraordinary peril, a peril glimpsed in nightmares. I had penetrated fifteen or twenty feet under the ledge, and I had no sense of direction of the edge of the coral. My distance from it was considerable; I knew by the invisible gloom. With a fleeting recollection of camera films in my shirt pocket, came the choking dread of suffocation, and death in this labyrinth.