The manta had lifted the anchor of a vessel in harbor by pushing against the chain, and had towed the vessel a considerable distance. When harpooned, he had dragged as many as fourteen catamarans or boats without apparent weariness. Well might the Paumotuan in his frail fishing-canoe dread the sea-devil! He had known him rise beneath his pirogue, and with a blow of his fearful fins shatter fisherman and craft. Not vicious in pursuit of man as the shark, or lithe and able to impale his victims as the swordfish, yet more terrible when aroused by the impotent Paumotuan, the “winged devil of the deep passes” stood for all that was perilous and awesome among the beasts of the ocean. When harpooned from a schooner large enough not to be in danger from the manta’s strength, the Paumotuan or Tahitian sailor loved to vent his hate upon the giant ray, and he had names for him then that he would not dare to call him from a smaller boat.
CHAPTER X
Traders and divers assembling for the diving—A story told by Llewellyn at night—The mystery of Easter Island—Strangest spot in the world—Curious statues and houses—Borrowed wives—Arrival of English girl—Tragedy of the Meke Meke festival.
THE scene at Takaroa was now remindful in a diminutive way of the bustle and turmoil before the opening of a camp-meeting in the United States. The traders and pearl-buyers of Tahiti began to assemble, and divers and their families of other islands to arrive. Soon the huddle had the mild disorder and excitement of an old-fashioned southern revival. Chinese, the cunning Cantonese, two generations in Tahiti, set up stands for selling sweetmeats and titbits, and the merchants spread out samples of their goods in competition with Mapuhi’s and Hiram Mervin’s stores. The whites developed artful schemes for circumventing one another in securing the best divers. These, until contracts were signed, were importuned and made much of as desirable members are solicited by college clubs. The narrow strand of the atoll crowded up with new-comers who every few days alighted from schooner, cutter, and canoe. All day the moat and sea were alive with boats unloading the belongings and merchandise of the visitors. The housing problem was settled by each family’s or group’s erecting for itself flimsy abodes of the scant building material growing on the isle, pieced out with boards or bits of flattened tin cans or canvas, while others contented themselves with lean-tos or leafy kennels. All was good nature, anticipation of profits, and hope of miraculous drafts from the lagoon.
In the evenings on the verandas or about the bivouacs, there was an incessant chatter. The bargaining, the reuniting of former friends or acquaintances, the efforts of deacons and missionaries, the sly actions of the traders, the commencements of courtships, and love-making of the free-and-easy foreigners filled the balmy night air with laughter, whisperings, and conversation. A hundred stories were told—jokes, adventures, slanders, and curious happenings. Religion, business, mirth, and obscenity vied for interest.
Llewellyn, the Welsh Tahitian vanilla-planter, with Lying Bill, McHenry, Kopcke, Aaron Mandel, and others, formed a nightly circle. Sitting on boxes or reclining on mats under the cocoanut-trees, with a lantern or two above them and pipes aglow, these pilgrims of the deep recited moving tales of phenomena and accident, of wanderings and hardships, and small villainies.
Photo from Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Spearing fish in the lagoon
“Sailors are damn fools,” said Captain Nimau, whom I had met in Lacour’s shed on Anaa. “There was a ship’s boat passed here some time ago. It was from the wrecked American schooner El Dorado, and the three men in it with eight others of the crew had spent months on a lonely island and were beating up for Tahiti. They did not reach Papeete for days after I sighted them from Lacour’s, yet they wouldn’t spare the time to touch at Anaa where they might have gotten plenty of food and water, and rested a day or two. I wondered who they were until O’Brien here told me. I saw them only through my glass.”