Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Against the rat, which was perhaps a worse enemy of the beneficent cocoanut than the crab, my friend Nohea had no safeguard. He could not afford to encircle his trees with bands of tin, as did corporate owners of plantations in Tahiti, but he told me, with great appreciation, the story of Willi, the clever American dentist, and his atoll of Tetiaroa, near Tahiti. Once it was the resort of the kings and aristocracy of Tahiti, the sanatorium to which they went when jaded, or wounded in war or sport, and to which the belles retired to whiten their complexion by wearing off the sunburn in the shade of the banyans and cocoanuts. It was famed in the annals of the Arioi, the ancient minstrels of Tahiti, as a scene of orgiastic dances.

“The atoll of Tetiaroa,” said Nohea, “had always many cocoanut-trees. The lagoon is as rich in fish as is Takaroa. Never had many people lived there, for it was tabu, and only for the Arii, the nobles, and the Arioi. But now it belongs to the man who takes away teeth from the head, and who hammers gold upon those that remain.”

The master diver spun his tale vividly but slowly. Often he repeated the same statement, for the Paumotuan speech, like that of all Polynesia, is a picture language, and iteration and harping is the soul of it, as of the ancient Hebrew chronicles.

Upon my mat and gazing into the expressive eyes of the diver, I recalled what I myself had been told by the owner of Tetiaroa, and, with Nohea’s story, pieced together the facts.

Dr. Walter Johnstone Williams, the dentist of Tahiti for twenty years, had, as related Nohea, taken away the teeth of the South Sea Islanders or gilded those which remained. They love those shiny, precious-metal teeth, these children of the tropics, and would give almost anything to gain the golden smile they admired. So when the royal family of Tahiti fell in debt to Dr. Williams, they bartered, in exchange for fillings and pullings, facings and bridges, and for other good and sufficient consideration, the wondrous atoll of Tetiaroa. Upon it the shrewd and skillful dentist found tens of thousands of cocoanut-palms which had grown as volunteers in the generous way of tropic verdure, and he himself planted tens of thousands more in order to increase the copra crop. He found a plague of rats, and, being unwilling to expend the large sum that would be needed for the metal bands which would frustrate the rats, he longed for a Pied Piper to lead the pests into the sea. But he bethought himself of the proverbial appetite of the domestic cat for the rat, and, lacking a magic whistler, he advertised for cats, offering to pay a franc for each one brought to his house by the Papeete quay. He had copies of his advertisement struck off on the press and posted upon the trees in and about Papeete, as was the custom.

The result was a flood, a deluge, a typhoon of cats. The Tahitian boy was as eager as his American brother to earn a few coins to spend on luxuries; and so the cats, much like our own in appearance except for their tails, which were curved like a question-mark, came in bags, in boxes, and in nets, while others were personally conducted, yowling, in the arms of the Tahitian youth.

Dentist Williams had not expected so many, and had much trouble in finding places for them to reside until he could remove them to Tetiaroa.

There were cats in his office, cats on the landings, cats in every room, and his garden was a boarding-place of felines. When more than a thousand had been collected, he posted a notice to ward off any further sellers, and, chartering a schooner, hastened with his live cargo to the atoll. There was no necessity of putting down a gangway from the vessel to the little wharf at Tetiaroa, for once she was made fast it needed but the loosening of their bonds to cause the thousand cats to reach the shore in one bound from the deck.

Of course, the cats set immediately about their pleasant business of catching and eating the rodents. There were tens of thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of thousands, because the island had been little inhabited for many years and the rats had been multiplying unmolested. But with a thousand South Sea Island cats to prey upon them, the easy supply of rats was soon exhausted. Then the cats chased them up and down the trees, in and out of caves and from every refuge, so that there came a day when the last rat was in the maw of a cat.

Meanwhile, with such rich meat diet the cats increased mightily. When the rats were all gone, they were confronted with the problem of existence for uncounted thousands of cats. They might have learned to eat cocoanuts, but they had become such confirmed meat-eaters that they would not abandon their carnal appetites. They did what greed does the world over—what the Russians did recently—they began to eat one another. And they followed the example of industrialism which takes the young in factories.