Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

The sponges were oddities hard to recognize as the tender toilet article. Some were soft and some were full of grit. The grit was their skeletons, for every sponge has a skeleton except three or four very low specimens, and some without personal skeletons import them by attraction and make up a frame from foreign bodies. I examined and admired them, reasoning that I myself, in the debut of living creatures, was close in appearance to one; but my basic interest in them was to sit on them.

Many times I went only to where the coral began, half-way to the reef. This was away from the path of the Vairahaha River, and where the coral souls had manifestly indulged a thousand fancies in contour and color. After the million years of their labor in throwing up the bastion of the reef, with all its architectural niceties, they had found in the repose behind it opportunities for the indulgence of their artistry. They were the sculptors, painters, and gardeners of the lagoon.

I brought with me a lunette, the diver’s aid, a four-sided wooden frame fifteen inches each way, with a bottom of glass and no top. I stuck my head in the box and looked through the glass, which I thrust below the surface, thus evading the opaqueness or distortion caused by the ripples. One did not need this invention ordinarily, for the water was as clear as air when undisturbed, and the garden of the sea gods was a brilliant and moving spectacle below my drifting canoe. One must be a child again to see all of it; the magic shapes, the haunting tints, the fairy forms. The gardener who had directed the growth of the aquarium believed in kelpies, undines, and mermaids, and had made for them the superbest playground conceivable even by sprites.

There were trees, bushes, and plants of yellow and white coral, of scarlet corallins, dahlias and roses, cabbages and cauliflowers simulated perfectly, lilies and heaps of precious stones. On flat tables were starfish lazying at full width, strewn shells, and hermit-crabs entering and leaving their captured homes. Mauve and primrose, pink and blue, green and brown, the coral plants nodded in the glittering light that filtered through the translucent brine. They were alive, all these things, as were the sponges, with stomachs and reactions, and impulses to perpetuate their species and to be beautiful. They had no relation to me except as I had to nature, but they were my beginnings, my simple ancestors who had stayed simple and unminded, and I was to count those hours happy when I communed with them.

Taken from their element they died, but left their mold, to harden in the air they could not breathe, and to amaze the less fortunate people who could not see them in their own estate. The seaweeds grew among them, green or brown, more primordial than the corals, with less of organic life, vegetables and not animals, but eager, too, for expression in their motions, their increase in size, and their continuance through posterity. All these were the display of the kindness of the same spirit who rode the thunder, who permitted a million babes to starve, who stirred in men the madness to slay a myriad of their brothers, and who fixed the countless stars in the firmament to guide them in the darkness.

The hermit-crabs drew my minute attention, and I anchored my canoe and with the lunette watched them by the hour. They were as provident and as handy—with claws—as the bee that stores honey. The hermit inhabits the vacant shells of other mollusks, entering one soon after birth, sometimes finding them untenanted, and sometimes killing the rightful occupant, and changing his house as he grows. I had been surprised to see small and large shells moving fast over the reef, and on the beach at the water’s-edge; shells as big as my thumbnail and nearly as big as my head. I seized one, and behold! the inmate was walking on ten legs with the shell on his back, like a man carrying a dog-house. I attempted to pull him out of his lodging, and he was so firmly fastened to the interior by hooks on his belly that he held on until he was torn asunder. His abdomen is soft and pulpy and without protecting plates, as have other crabs, and he survived only by his childhood custom of stealing a univalve abode, though he murdered the honest tenant. In one I saw the large pincher of the crab so drawn back as to form a door to the shell as perfect as the original. When he felt growing pains the hermit-crab unhooked himself from his ceiling and migrated in search of a more commodious dwelling.

Interesting as were these habits of the cenobite crustacean, his keeping a policeman or two on guard on his roof, and moving them to his successive domiciles, was more so. These policemen are anemones, and I saw hermit crab-shells with three or four on them, and one even in the mouth of the shell. When the anchorite was ready for a new shell, he left his old one and examined the new ones acutely. Finding one to suit his expected growth, he entered it belly first, and transferred the anemone, by clawing and pulling loose its hold, to the outside of his chosen shell. How skilfully this was done may be judged by the fact that I could not get one free without tearing the cup-like base which fastened it. The anemone assisted in the operation by keeping its tentacles expanded, whereas it withdrew them if any foreign object came near. The stinging cells of the anemone prevent fishes from attacking the hermit, and that is the reason of his care for the parasite. It is the commensalism of the struggle for existence, learned not by the individual crab, but by his race. Some crabs wield an anemone firmly grasped in each claw, the stinging nematocysts of the parasite warding off the devilish octopus, and the anemone having a share of the crab’s meals and the pleasure of vicarious transportation. The anemone at the mouth of the shell keeps guard at the weakest spot of the hermit’s armor.

These sea-anemones themselves are mysterious evidences of the gradual advance of organisms from the slime to the poem. They are animals, and attach themselves by a muscular base to the rocks or shells, or are as free-swimming as perch. I saw them two feet in diameter, seeming all vegetable, some like chrysanthemums and some resembling embroidered pin-cushions. They were of many colors, and are of the coral family.

In this wonderful sea garden, where lobsters, crabs, sea-urchins, turbos, starfish, and hundreds of other sentient beings lived, I saw a thousand true scaled fish, most of them highly colored, and many so curiously marked, fashioned, and equipped with eccentric members that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, but in the lagoon they were a kaleidoscope of complexions and shapes. They were the lovely elves to complement the fantastic shellfish, yellow, striped with violet; bright turquoise, with a gold collar; gold, with broad bands of black terminating in winglike fins; scarlet, with cobalt polka-dots; silver, with a rosy flush; glossy green, dazzling crimson, black velvet, solid red.

They darted and flashed in and out of the caves in the coral, caressed the sea-anemones, idled about the shells, avoided by dexterous twistings and turnings a thousand collisions, and continued ever the primary endeavor, the search for those particular bits of food their appetites craved.