Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Nohea often picked up rori to make soup. They were to me the most repulsive offering of the South Seas, long, round, thin echinoderms, shaped like cucumbers or giant slugs, and appalling in their hideousness. The Malays called them trepang, the Portuguese bicho-do-mar, or sea-slug, and the scientists holothurian. Slimy, disgusting, crawling beings, they were like sausage-skins or starved snakes six inches or six feet long, and stretchable to double that length. One end had a set of waving tentacles by which they drew in the sand and coral animalculæ. They crept along the bottom or swam slowly.

There was a small trade in these dried trepang, or bêche de mer, which were shipped to Tahiti and thence to San Francisco, for transshipment to China, for purchase by Chinese gourmets. The Chinese usually put them in their gelatinous soups. I had eaten them at feasts in Canton and Chifu. They were considered a powerful aphrodisiac, as swallows’-nests and ginseng.

No race so eagerly sought such love philters as the Chinese. They had a belief that certain parts and organs of animals strengthened the similar parts or organs in humans. Our own medical men often verged on the same theory, making elixirs, as the Chinese had for countless centuries. At a Chinese feast where the heart of a tiger was the pièce de résistance, I had been assured that a slice of it would make me brave. There may have been something in it, for after eating I felt I was brave to have done so.

The fishing for rori was sometimes on a considerable scale. McHenry had often taken a score of Paumotuan men and women on his schooner to one of the unpopulated atolls. They built huts ashore for themselves, and others for curing the trepang. They searched for them with long grains or forks, going in calm weather to the outer edge of the reef where they found the red rori, which ranked second in the grading by the Chinese, but the black they had to dive for in the lagoon to great depths. Some trepang had spicules, or prickles, on their skin, and some were smooth, while others had teats or ambulacral feet, in rows; and these, known to the trade as teat-fish, and to the Chinese as Se-ok-sum, were bonnes bouches to a Pekinese gourmand. Next in order were the red, the black, and the lolly. These latter we found in great quantities on the reef at low tide in shallow places. They exuded, when stepped on, a horrid red liquid, like blood, from all the surface of their body.

Against mankind these rori had no defense when stabbed with the fork or grain, but to touch one of the elongated Blutwursts with any part of one’s body was to rue one’s temerity. They were like skins filled with a poisonous fluid, and this they ejected with force, so that if contacted with a scratch or sore, or one’s eye, it set up immediate inflammation, and caused hours of agony. Many Paumotuans had thus suffered serious injury to their eyes. The leopard trepang, olive-green with orange spots, disgorged sticky threads when molested, and these clung fast to the human skin and raised painful blisters. Nature had armed them for protection. The native never gathered the rori in baskets or sacks, but made a box to drag about on land or float on the water, into which he put them.

The pawky Paumotuan gave no thought to the aphrodisiacal qualities of the rori, as did the Chinese. The filling of his belly or his purse was his sole idea. The trepang must be cooked as quickly as possible after removal from the water because it quickly dissolved, like a salted slug, into a jellied mass. If the native had no caldron in which to boil the rori, he threw them on red-hot stones, covered them with leaves, and left them to steam. In an hour they were shriveled and rid of their poisonous power. They were slit with a sharp knife and boiled for several hours in salt water until the outer skin was removed. Taken from the pot, they were placed on screens made of the spinal columns of the cocoanut-palm leaves, and underneath the screens was built a fire of cocoanut-husks. When thoroughly dried and smoked, the trepang was put in sacks, with great precaution against dampness. If not shipped at once they were from time to time dried in the sun, because the presence of any moisture prejudiced them to the palates of the Chinese epicures. In China they sold for a high price, having the place in their cuisine that rare caviar might have in ours.

Nohea and I essayed every kind of fishing afforded by the atoll. We often went out at midnight, according to the moon, and speared swordfish by the light of torches, and I also caught these warriors of the sea on hook and line. We hooked sharks and many sorts of fish, and had many strange and stirring adventures.

For rousing hatred and fear, neither the devilfish, with his frightful tentacles and demoniacal body and eyes, nor the swordfish, which could hurl his hundred or thousand pounds against the body or craft of the fishermen, were peers of the manta birostris, the gigantic ray, called the “winged devil of the deep passes,” which was seen only in the depths between the atolls, and which was never fished for because worthless to commerce or as food.

Nohea, Kopcke, and I were out one day in a cutter. This was a sailing craft of about ten tons, which was used to pick up copra at points away from villages and to bring it to the village or to the waiting schooner. It was about noon. We had hooked a dozen bonito, and were having luncheon when a sailor shouted to us to look at a sight near-by. We saw a number of the largest mantas any of us had ever seen. A dozen of these mammoth rays were swimming round and round, in circles not more than a hundred feet in diameter. They were about twenty-five feet across, and twenty feet from head to tip of tail, and each one raised a tip of an outer fin two feet or so above the water. The fin toward the center of the circle was correspondingly depressed, and they appeared like a flock of incredible bats. Every few minutes one threw itself into the air and turned completely over, displaying a dazzlingly white belly. Their long, whip-like tails were armed with dagger spines, double-edged with saw-teeth. Their mouths were large enough to swallow a man, and their teeth, as they gleamed, flat as jagged stones.

Nohea said they used these fins to wave their prey, fish and crustaceans, into their maws. He expressed intense terror of them and urged Kopcke to steer away from them.