“Another time when I was in the suit, a puhi, a very big eel, wrapped itself about me. I had a narrow escape but I killed it with my knife. In the olden days in Hikueru I would have perished, for that puhi eel, the conger-eel, was taboo, sacred as a god, here and in many islands. To eat that eel or harm him was to break the taboo. More than eighty people of Fakaofa were driven from that island for eating the puhi, and they drifted for weeks before they reached Samoa. The vaaroa, the long-mouthed eel, is dangerous to the diver. It is eight feet long, and Amaru, of Fakarava had the calf of his leg bitten off by one.”
A week I could have listened to Mapuhi. I was back in my childhood with Jules Verne, Ballantyne, and Oliver Optic. Actual and terrifying as were the harrowing incidents of the diving related by the giant, they found constant comparison in my mind with the deeds of my boyish heroes. After all, these Paumotuans were children—simple, honest, happy children. The fate that had denied them the necessaries of our environment, or even the delicious foods and natural pleasures of the high islands, Tahiti and the Marquesas, had endowed them with health, satisfaction with a rigid fare, and an incomparable ability to meet the hardships of their life and the blows of extraordinary circumstance with fortitude and persistent optimism. They had no education and were happier for the lack of it. The white man had impressed their instincts and habits but shallowly. Even their very austerity of surroundings had kept them freer than the Tahitians from the poisonous gifts and suicidal customs of the foreigner. Their God was near and dear to them, and a mighty fortress in time of trouble.
While Mapuhi talked the canoe had returned with the currents nearer to his house, from which we had embarked. It was conspicuous over all the other homes on the motu, though it was a very ordinary wooden structure of five or six rooms. It was not a fit frame for Mapuhi, I thought. This son of the sea and lagoon was suited better to a canoe, a cutter, or the deck of a schooner. He had a companionship with this warm salt water, with the fish in it, and the winds that blew over it, exceeding that of any other man. He drove the canoe on the sand, and we stepped ashore. I lingered by the water as he walked on to his store. In his white, fluttering shirt, and his blue pareu, bare legged and bareheaded, there was a natural distinction and atmosphere of dignity about him that was grandeur. Kingship must have originated in the force and bearing of such men, shepherds or sea-rovers.
CHAPTER XII
History of the pearl hunger—Noted jewels of past—I go with Nohea to the diving—Beautiful floor of the lagoon—Nohea dives many times—Escapes shark narrowly—Descends 148 feet—No pearls reward us—Mandel tells of culture pearls.
MUCH of the mystery and myth of these burning atolls was concerned with the quest of pearls. In all the world those gems had been a subject of romance, and legend had draped their search with a myriad marvels. Poets and fictionists in many tongues had embroidered their gossamer fabric with these exquisite lures, the ornament of beauty, the treasures of queen and odalisque, mondaine and dancer, image and shrine, since humans began to adorn themselves with more delicate things than the skins and teeth of animals. A thousand crimes had their seed in greed for the possession of these sensuous sarcophagi of dead worms. A million men had labored, fought, and died to hang them about the velvet throats of the mistresses of the powerful. Hundreds of thousands had perished to fetch them from the depths of the sea. History and novel were filled with the struggle of princes and Cyprians, merchants, adventurers, and thieves for ropes of pearls or single specimens of rarity. Krishna discovered pearls in the ocean and presented them to his goddess daughter. The Ethiopians all but worshiped them, and the Persians believed them rain-drops that had entered the shells while the oysters sunned themselves on the beach. Two thousand years before our era, a millennium before Rome was even mud, the records of the Middle Kingdom enumerated pearls as proper payments for taxes. When Alexander the Great was conquering, the Chinese inventoried them as products of their country. The “Url-Ja,” a Chinese dictionary of that date, says “they are very precious.”
Solomon’s pearls came from the Persian Gulf, India, and Ceylon, and the queen of Sheba’s too. Rivers of Britain gave the author of the “Commentaries” pearls to dedicate to Venus Genetrix, and to present to that lovely assassin who melted two, costing ten million sesterces, for a love philter, and seduced two Cæsars. Who can forget the salad Philip II of Spain, the uxorious inquisitor, set upon the royal table for his wife, Elizabeth of Valois, the leaves of which were of emeralds, the vinegar of rubies, the oil of topazes, and the salt of pearls? What more appetizing dish for a royal bride? The Orientals make medicine of them to-day, and I myself have seen a sultan burn pearls to make lime for chewing with the betel-nut.
The New World offered fresh preserves to pearl-hunters; primeval grounds drew a horde of lusty blades to harry the red men’s treasure-house. South and Central America fed the pearl hunger that grew with the more even distribution of wealth through commerce, and the rise of stout merchants on the Continent and the British Islands. The Spanish king who gave his name to the Philippines got from Venezuela a pearl that balanced an eighth of a pound. I saw it in Madrid. These Paumotus and Australasia were the last to answer yes to man’s ceaseless demand that the earth and the waters thereof yield him more than bread for the sweat of his brow. On many maps these atolls are yet inscribed as the Pearl Islands. About their glorious lagoons was a mist of obscurity and of wonder for centuries. Besides dangers to vessels, the cannibalism of savages, the lack of any food except cocoanuts and fish, and stories of strange happenings, there were accounts of divers who sank deeper in the sea than science said was possible, and of priceless pearls plundered or bought for a drinking-song.
Custom-houses and organized commerce had rung down the curtain on the extravaganza of the past, but the romance of man wrestling with the forces of nature in the element from which he originally came, now so deadly to him, was yet a supreme attraction. The day of the opening of the rahui came none too soon for me. Nohea, my host, was to dive, and we had arranged that I was to be in his canoe. I was assured by Mapuhi, and by Captain Nimau and Kopcke, that despite the fact that his youth was gone, Nohea was the best diver in Takaroa, and especially the shrewdest judge of the worth of a piece of diving ground.