Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

I wonder if you know this fish; it is new to me, though I have been told that it exists in the northern Pacific. It is of the true game type—swift and rapacious—with the conformation of a mackerel, and related, I should say, to the pompano of American waters. The young ones, eight to ten inches long, and appearing at certain times of year, in great schools, are called aturi. When medium-sized—running from two pounds up to twelve—it is known as titiara in the Cook Islands; paihere in Tahiti and to the east. The fully grown fish, which attains a weight of a hundred pounds or more, is called urua. These different names for stages in the life of the same fish are interesting to me, for they illustrate the richness, in certain directions, of a language so poor in others. We have such terms in English, but they are rapidly becoming obsolete; I doubt, for example, if the average man at home knows that a young salmon is called a grilse, and a still younger one, a parr.

One's outfit for this kind of fishing consists of a pail of hermit crabs, a couple of stones for crushing them, a hundred feet of stout cotton line, a single hook on a length of piano wire, and several dozen pebbles, to be used as sinkers. First of all you smash the shells of a few crabs, tear off the soft bodies for bait, and crush the claws and legs to a paste. This chum is thrown overboard little by little to attrach the fish and keep them about the canoe. When a glance through the water-glass shows that the fish you want are gathered beneath you, a pebble is attached to the line by means of a special hitch, which can be undone by a jerk. Now you lower the line over the side until the bait is in the required position; a sharp pull frees the sinker, and you are ready for the first client. The theory of the detachable sinker is that it enables one to fish at a distance from the boat without having the hook rest on the bottom, where it is apt to foul in the coral.

On this occasion my sport was ruined by one of those tantalizing incidents which lend charm to every variety of angling. I had caught two fish and was lowering my line to try for a third, when the small fry gobbling my chum suddenly scattered and disappeared. Next moment a monstrous titiara—almost in the urua class—loomed up from the depths, seized my bait, and made off so fast that the line fairly scorched my fingers. My tackle was not designed for such game as this—there was nothing to do but try to play him; but when only a yard of line remained in my hands I was forced to check the rush. A powerful wrench, the line slackened dead, he was off, the light hook had snapped at the bend—and I had no other! The old, old story—it is never the fingerlings that get away.

Cut into filets and soaked for six hours in lime juice, my two fish made a raw hors d'oeuvre of the most delicate kind. I took a plate of it to the house of a neighbor who had asked me to dinner, and this old-timer in the South Seas pronounced it of the very first order. You would enjoy knowing him: he has been in this part of the world since the 'seventies—supercargo, skipper, trader on islands seldom visited even to-day. Now he is retired and lives on a small plantation which represents the savings of a lifetime. After dinner, as we sat on his wide veranda with pipes going and glasses on the table between us, he told me a tale so curious that I cannot resist repeating it to you—the story of an island far away to the north and west—an island I shall call Ariri.

Atolls are by nature lonely places, but of all atolls in the Pacific, Ariri is perhaps the loneliest—never visited, far off from any group, out of the paths of navigation. Not very many years ago Ariri was a bit of no man's land; though marked on the chart, its existence was ignored by the Powers—it had never been inhabited, no flag had ever been raised above its benches of dazzling coral sand. At that time, as for centuries before, the sea birds nested undisturbed on the islets within the reef, where all day long the water flashed blue in the sunlight and the trade wind hummed a song of loneliness among the palm tops.

Then a day came when two Frenchmen—shrewd traders and planters of coconuts in the Tuamotu—spoke of Ariri. Here was an island capable of an annual hundred tons of copra, and claimed by no man; they would plant it and reap the rewards of enterprise. The chief difficulty was to find a superintendent to take charge of the project; it needed a white man, but white men willing to undertake a task of such poignant loneliness were not to be found every day in Papeete. As it chanced, their man was at hand.

The natives called him Tino—perhaps his name had once been King. Years among the islands had obliterated whatever stamp of nationality he might have possessed; it was rumored that he was English by birth, and also that he had held a commission in the Confederate navy. Tall, strong, and of fine presence, with a full blond beard and eyes of reckless blue, a great singer and dancer—always the merriest at a feast and the idol of the women, a remarkable linguist and story-teller, drunken, brave, witty, and unprincipled—Tino was of a type which thrives in Polynesia.

When they offered him the position of superintendent at Ariri the two Frenchmen were not without misgivings. He was on the beach at the time, though the only sign of that condition was an unusual laxity in returning the favor when a friend invited him to drink. Tino had no money, but that was his sole limitation; each of a dozen native families vied for the honor of transferring his mat and camphorwood box to their house; when evening came he had his choice of a dozen invitations to dine, and a dozen girls competed for the joy of doing his laundry and making hats for him. But this easy-going philosophy and lack of worry over a situation scarcely respectable in the eyes of Papeete's business men were calculated to sow distrust. In the case of Ariri, however, it was difficult to see how he could go astray; there would be no liquor—they would see to that—and with no visitors and no means of leaving the island there seemed little chance of trouble. Tino was a famous handler of native labor.

The agreement was made and in due time a schooner sailed into the Ariri lagoon to land Tino and a score of Raiatea boys with their wives. The Frenchmen took care to leave no boat capable of putting out to sea, but as there were houses and sheds to build they left a considerable variety of tools and gear, in addition to a year's supply of medicine, food, and clothing. A day or two later the schooner sailed away.

The superintendent called his men together and appointed a foreman. The main island was to be cleared, rows staked out, and the nuts brought for seed to be planted in such a manner. Before this work began, a house was to be built for each family. That was all, except that Tino needed five men at once for special work of his own—let them be those most skilled in woodworking. With that he seems to have dismissed the business of planting coconuts from his mind.