Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“Is the shark himself never frightened? A human being must seem a very queer fish to a shark. They do not always attack, do they?” I said. “I have swum where they were, and Jack of the Snark, Monsieur London, told that at Santa Ana in the Solomon Islands, when they were putting dynamite in the water to get a supply of fish, the natives leaped into the water and fought with the sharks for the fish. He said that the sharks had learned to rush to the spot whenever they heard dynamite exploded. The Solomon people had to grab the stunned fish away from the sharks, and one man who started for the surface with a fish came to the boat with only half of it, as a shark had taken away the head.”

“E!” answered Mapuhi, “Sharks are devils, but the devils are not without fear, and sometimes they become neneva, and do things perhaps they did not think about. At Marutea Atoll, Tau, a strong man, caught a shark about four feet long. They had a feast on the beach, and Tau, to show how strong he was, picked up the shark and played with it after it had been on the sand for some minutes. The mouth of the mao was near his arm, and it opened and closed, and took off the flesh of the upper arm. He got well, but he never could use that arm. Right here in Takaroa, in the rahui of seven years ago, a man, diving for shell, met a shark on the bottom. He was crawling along the bottom, looking for a good shell, when the shark turned a corner and struck him square in the mouth. The shark was a little one, not more than three feet long, but so frightened was he that he bit the man’s two cheeks right off, the cheeks and the lips, so that to-day you see all his teeth all the time. He has become a good Mormon.”

Mapuhi laughed. I looked at him, and his face was filled with mirth. He was not deceived as to the heart of man. Devout he was, but he had dealt too long with brown and white, and had been too many years a sinner—indeed, one of the vilest, if rumor ran true—not to have drunk from the well-springs of the passions. Mapuhi wore a blue loin-cloth and a white shirt. The tails of the latter floated in the soft breeze, and the bosom was open, displaying his Herculean chest. We could see his house in the distance across the lagoon, and now and then he kept it in his eyes for a minute. He had gone far for a man whose father had been a savage and an eater of his enemies. The Mormon tenets permit a proper pride of possession, like the Mohammedan philosophy. One can rejoice that God has signaled one out for holding in trust the material assets of life. The bankers of the world have long known this about their God. Mapuhi had become thoughtful, and, as I was sure he had other and more astonishing facts about the sharks not yet related, I suggested that other archipelagos were also cursed by the presence and rapacity of the mao.

“In Samoa,” said Mapuhi, “the shark is not called mao or mako as in Nuku-Hiva, but mălie. There are no lagoons in Samoa, for there are no atolls, but high mountains and beaches. Now the mălie is the shark that swims around the islands, but the deep-sea shark, the one that lives out of sight of land, is the mălietua. The Samoans are a wise people in a rich country. They are not like us poor Paumotuans with only cocoanuts and fish, but the Samoans have bananas, breadfruit, taro, oranges, and cocoanuts and fish, too. They are a happy people. Of course, I am a Paumotuan, and I would not live away from here. Once, a woman I had—when I was not a Mormon—wanted me to take my money and go and live in Tahiti, which is gay. I considered it, and even counted my money. But when I thought of my home and my people, I thrust her out as a bad woman. Now in Manua in Samoa was a half-caste, and his daughter was the queen of Manua. The half-caste’s name was Alatua Iunga, and he was one day fishing for bonito in the way we do, with a pearl-shell hook, when one of the four or five Samoans with him said, ‘There is a small shark. Put on a piece of bonito, and we will catch the mălie.’ They did so, and then they let their canoe float while they ate boiled taro and dried squid.

“Then one of the Samoans said, ‘I see a shark.’ Others looked, and they said, also, ‘A shark is rising from the deep.’ Now a deep-water shark, as I said, is a mălietua and is not to be smiled at. Iunga said, ‘Get the big hook and bait it!’ Then the shark rose, twenty feet of its body out of the water, and its jaws opened. They closed on the outrigger of the canoe, and bit one end clear off. Iunga said again, ‘Get the hook!’ He thought the shark would take the baited hook, and then they could throw the rope attached to the hook overboard, and the mălietua would be troubled with the rope at the end of his nose and would cease to attack them. They could see the shark all this time. He was a blue shark with a flat tail, and was forty feet long at least. Their canoe was just half as long, and they thought of Iona [Jonah]. The perofeta was swallowed by a shark, because a whale can swallow only little fish. The mălietua would not take the hook, and, leaving the outrigger, rammed the stern of the canoe. The shock almost threw them into the water. All were paddling hard to escape, for they knew that this shark was a real devil and sought to destroy them. Iunga, who was steering the va aalo, rose up and struck the shark many times on his nose. This angered him, but Iunga kept it up, as their one chance of safety. There is a saying in Samoa, ‘O le mălie ma le tu’tu’, which is, ‘Each shark has its pay.’ Iunga and all the Samoans were religious men, though not Mormons, and they sang a hymn as they paddled hard. They made their peace with the Creator, who heard them. For over two miles the race was run. The mălietua pursued the va aalo, and Iunga jabbed him with the big paddle. At last they were nearly all dead from weariness, and so Iunga sheered the canoe abruptly to the right, intending to smash on the reef as a chance for their lives. But just as the va aalo swerved, to strike upon the coral rocks, they rested on their paddles, and they saw that the shark had disappeared. If that shark had kept on for another minute it would have killed itself on the reef.”

“Mapuhi,” I verified, “I, too, have been to Manua, and heard the story from the kin of Alatua Iunga, whom I knew as Arthur Young, the trader. He became very pious after that, and was a great help to the mitinare.”

The republican king of the atolls may have thought he detected in my voice or manner a raillery I did not mean to imply, for he inspected my countenance seriously. He had long ago discovered that white men often speak with a forked tongue. But I was sincere, because I had never known a joyous, unfrightened person to become suddenly religious, while I had witnessed a hundred conversions from fear of the devil, hunger, or the future. However, Mapuhi, who was an admirable story-teller, with a dramatic manner and a voice of poesy, had reserved his chef d’œuvre for the last.

“American,” he said, “If I were a scoffer or unbeliever to-day and I met Huri-Huri and he informed me of what God had done for him, and his neighbors who had seen the thing itself brought their proof to his words, I would believe in God’s goodness. Have you seen Huri-Huri at Rangiora? He lives at the village of Avatoru. He has a long beard. Ah, you have not seen him. Yes, very few Paumotuans have beards, but no Paumotuan ever had the experience of Huri-Huri. He was living in his village of Avatoru, and was forty years old. He was a good diver but getting old for that work. It takes the young to go deep and stay down long. As we grow older that weight of water hurts us. Huri-Huri was lucky. He was getting many large shells, and he felt sure he would pick up one with a valuable pearl in it. He drank the rum the white trader poisons my people with, and he spent his money for tobacco, beef, and cloth. He had a watch but it did not go, and he had some foolish things the trader had sold him. But here he was forty years old, and so poor that he had to go from atoll to atoll wherever there was a rahui because he wanted all these foreign goods.

“This time he was diving in the lagoon of Rangiroa. He was all alone in his canoe, and was in deep water. He had gone down several times, and had in his canoe four or five pairs of shells. He looked again and saw another pair, and plunged to the bottom. He had the shells in his sack and was leaving the bank when he saw just above him a shark so big that, as he said, it could have bitten him in half as a man eats a banana. The shark thrust down its nose toward Huri-Huri, and he took out his shells and held them against the beast. He kept its nose down for half a minute but then was out of breath. He was about to die, he believed, unless he could reach the air without the shark following him. He threw himself on the shark’s back, and put his hands in the fish’s gills, and so stopped or partly stopped the shark’s breathing. The shark did not know what to make of that, and hurried upward, headed for the surface by the diver. Huri-Huri was afraid to let go even there, because he knew the mao would turn on him and tear him to pieces. But he took several long breaths in the way a diver understands, and still held on and tore the shark’s breathing-places.