Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

The floor of the lagoon was the superbest garden ever seen by the eye of man. A thousand forms of life, fixed and moving, firm and waving, coral and shells, fish of all the colors of the rainbow, of beauteous, of weird, and of majestic shape and size, decorated and animated this strange reserve man had invaded for food and profit. The giant furbelowed clams, largest of all mollusks, white, or tinged with red and saffron or brown-yellow, a corruscating glare of blue, violet, and yellow from above, reposed like a bed of dream tulips upon the shining parterre.

The coral was of an infinitude of shape: emerald one moment and sapphire the next, shot with colors from the sun and the living and growing things beneath. Springing from the sea-floor were cabbages and roses, cauliflower and lilies, ivory fans and scarlet vases, delicate fluted columns, bushes of pale yellow coral, bouquets of red and green coral, shells of pink and purple, masses of weeds, brown and black sponges. It was a magic maze of submarine sculpture, fretwork, and flowers, and through all the interstices of the coral weaved in and out the brilliant-colored and often miraculously-molded fish and crustaceans. There were great masses of dark or sulphur-hued coral into which at any alarm these creatures darted and from which they peeped when danger seemed past. Snakes, blue, gold, or green bars on a velvet black-brown, glided in and out of the recesses, or coiled themselves about branches.

Big and small were these denizens of the lagoon. The tiny hermit-crab in a stolen mollusk-shell had on his movable house his much smaller paramour, who, also in her appropriated former tenement of a dead enemy, would spend the entire mating season thus waiting for his embrace. And now and again as I looked through the crystal water I saw the giant bulks of sharks, conger-eels, and other huge fish. These I pointed out to Mapuhi.

He peered through the titea mata.

“E!” he exclaimed. “For fifty years I have fought those demons. They will take one of us this rahui as before. It may be God’s will, but I think the devil fights on the side of the beasts below. I myself have never been touched by them though I have killed many. When I think of the many years I entered the water all over these seas, and in blackest sin, I understand more and more what the elders say, that God is ever watching over those He intends to use for His work. I have seen or known men to lose parts of themselves to the sharks, but to escape death. They prayed when in the very jaws of the mao, and were heard.”

Mapuhi blew out his breath loudly, as if expelling an evil odor.

“Tavana, tell me about some of the bad deeds of sharks,” I said.

“Aue! There are no good ones,” he replied. “In Raiatea, near Tahiti, they were fishing at night for the ava, the fish something like the salmon. They had a net five meters high, and, after the people of the village had drawn the net round so that no fish could escape, a number of men dived from their canoes. You know they try to catch the ava by the tail and make it swim for the air, pulling the fisherman with it. That is an arearea [game]. The torches held by the women and children and the old people were lighting the water brightly when Tamaehu came up with his fish. He was baptized Tamaehu, but his common name was Marae. Just as he brought the ava, or the ava brought Tamaehu, to his canoe, and the occupants were about to lift the ava into the canoe, a shark caught Tamaehu by the right foot. He caught hold of the outrigger and tried to shake it off. It was not a big shark, but it was hungry. He shouted, and his companions leaned over and drove a harpoon into the shark, which let go his foot, tore out the harpoon, and swam away. Poor Tamaehu was hauled in, with his foot hanging loose, but in Raiatea the French doctor sewed it on again. You can see him now limping about, but he praises God for being alive.”

“He well may; and there are many others to join with him?” I ventured, inquisitively.

“Do you know Piti, the woman of Raroia, in these Paumotu islands?” he asked. “No? If you go there, look for her. You will know her, for she has but one arm. Raroia has a large door to its lagoon. The bigger the door the bigger the sharks inside. The lagoons to which only small boats can enter have small sharks only. Piti was diving in the lagoon of Raroia during the season. She was bringing up shell from fifty feet below, and had several already in her canoe. She dived again, and, after seizing one shell, started to come up. Suddenly she saw a shark dart out of a coral bank. She became afraid. She did not pray. She forgot even to swim up. A man like me would not have been afraid. It is the shark that takes you when you do not see him that is to fear. Piti did nothing, and the mao took her left arm into his mouth. He closed his teeth and dragged off the flesh down to the elbow where he bit her arm in two. You know how when a shark bites, after he sinks his teeth into the meat, he twists his mouth, so as to make his teeth cut. That is the way God made him. This shark twisted and stripped off Piti’s flesh as he drew down his teeth. When he bit off her lower arm he swam off to eat it, and she rose to the top. She put her good arm over the outrigger, and those other women paddled to her and pulled her into the canoe. The bone stuck out six inches below the flesh the shark had left. There were no doctors, but they put a healing plant over the arm. The wound would not heal, and ate and ate inside for several years until the upper arm fell off at the shoulder-joint. Then she got well.”