Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“In Japan,” I told Nohea, “I have seen the men at night sink in the sea earthenware jars, very tall and stout, and in the morning find them occupied each by a devilfish, who must have thought them suitable to its condition in life.”

We had other methods of catching the fe’e. One was to tie many pieces of shell on a large stick with the pointed ends up, and from our canoe to strike the water with this. The resulting noise or vibration attracted the octopi, who thought the bait alive, and, eager to examine, threw themselves upon it and were killed and hoisted aboard. Nohea would strike the canoe sometimes with his paddle in a rhythmical manner, and draw them to hear the concert, when he would spear them.

At the rookeries of the hair seals on Puget Sound, bounty hunters lure these destroyers of salmon nets and traps, by the wailing of a fiddle string, the wheeze of an accordian, a hymn upon a mouth organ, or almost any musical note. The hair seal rises to the surface to listen to the entrancing notes, and is shot by the hunter from his boat.

The smaller devilfish Nohea eviscerated and ate, or gave to his friends. I could not look at them as food. The sepia still contained in their sacs he dried for bait for small-mouthed fish, and we used also the bellies of hermit-crabs, the tentacles of squid, and the tails of various kinds of fish. For the larger, scaled fish, Nohea preferred hooks of mikimiki, which he carved from the bushes, or of turtle-shell or whalebone, though the stores had the modern ones of steel. For bonito we used only the pearl-hook without barb, and, of course, unbaited. The advantage of the barbless hook—that is, lacking the backward-projecting point which makes extraction difficult—could, perhaps, be appreciated only by seeing our way of fishing.

When we came into a school of bonito pursuing flying-fish, I took the paddle, and Nohea, with a fifteen-foot purau rod, and a line as long, trailed the pa, the pearly hook, on the surface, so that it skipped and leaped as does the marara. When a bonito took the lure, Nohea with a dexterous jerk raised the fish out of the water, and brought it full against his chest. He hugged it to him a second and, without touching the hook, threw it hard into the bottom of the canoe where I could strike it sharply over the head with the edge of my paddle. The whole manœuver was a continuous motion on Nohea’s part. The fish seized the hook, the rod shot up straight, the bonito came quickly to his bosom, he embraced it, and, with no barb to release, it slipped off the bone into his powerful grip, and was hurled upon the hard wood. Thus no time was lost, and the hook was in the water in another instant. Once or twice when I failed in my part the bonito raised itself on the end of its tail, and shot through the air to its element. That Nohea was not hurt by the fish when they were brought bang against his chest, can be explained only by his dexterity, which doubtless avoided the full impact of the heavy blow. The bonito weighed from thirty to a hundred pounds.

The turtle-shell for the hooks Nohea got from the turtles which he caught. They were a prime dish in the Paumotus, especially the great green turtle. The very word for turtle, honu, meant also to be gorged, associating the reptile itself with feasting. The thought of turtle caused Nohea, a fairly abstemious man, to water at the mouth and to rub his stomach in concentric circles, as if aiding in its digestion. The honu was in the days of heathenry sacred to high livers, the priests and chiefs, and was eaten with pomp and circumstance; to make sure of their husbanding, they were, in the careful way of the old Maoris, taboo to women and children under pain of death. An old cannibal chief was called the Turtle Pond because he had a record of more than a hundred humans eaten by him. Turtles were of two hundred species, and were found six feet long and weighing eight hundred pounds, but more ordinarily in the Paumotus from a hundred to four hundred. After a feast the pieces of turtle meat were put into cocoanut-shells, with the liquid fat poured over them, and sealed with a heated leaf, for a reserve, as we put up mince-meat.

The best season for turtles was when the Matariki, the Pleiades, rose in the east, and the time of egg-laying arrived. Then the turtles came from long journeys by sea, and looked for a place to deposit their eggs far from the haunts of humans. They came two by two, like proper married folk, and, leaving the husband on the barrier-reef, the wife, alone, dug a hole from one to two feet in depth in the coral sand, above the high-water mark, and in it scooped a deeper and smaller pipe, to lay five or six score eggs, white and rough, like enlarged golf-balls. The moon was usually full when this most important deed of the turtle’s career was done with intense secrecy. The sand was painstakingly replaced and smoothed, and the wife swam back to the reef and at high tide touched flippers again with her patient spouse. The operation occupied less than an hour.

McHenry, whom I met every day when I walked to the village, said that it was the Southern Cross and not the Pleiades that governed the dropping of the eggs, and that the honu did not approach the beach until the four stars forming the cross had reached a position exactly perpendicular to the horizon.

“Those turtles are better astronomers than Lyin’ Bill,” said McHenry. “They savvy the Southern Cross like Bill does a Doc Funk.”

The turtle returned to her eggs on the ninth night, but if she saw evidences of enemies about, she left immediately, and waited another novendial period and, if again scared, came back on the twenty-seventh evening. But when that fatal night had passed she surrendered to the inevitable. Nohea knew the habits of the honu as well as she did herself. He knew the broad tracks she made, which she tried in vain to obliterate, and he often removed the eggs to eat raw, or freshly cooked. Nohea could swim to the beach where the mother turtle was, and land so quietly that she would not have notice of his coming, and so could not escape to the lagoon or the moat; or he could swim noiselessly to the reef, and forelay the uxorious male napping until the arrival of his consort from her oviposition. To rush upon either male or female and turn it over on its back was the act of a moment, if strength permitted, but Paumotuans seldom hunted alone for turtles, the fencing them from the water being better achieved by two or more. Even when we saw one at sea, Nohea would spring from the canoe and fasten a hook about the neck and front flipper which rendered the honu as helpless as if a human were bound neck and leg. Once fast, the turtle was turned, and then pulled to the beach. Nohea could attach such a device to a turtle, and without a canoe swim with him to the beach or to a schooner. The turtle was put under a roof of cocoanut-leaves, until desire for his meat brought death to him.