Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

A quarter of a mile above the house of Airima we stopped to watch a large canoe, loaded with a mound of seine, gliding up the river, followed by a fleet of smaller craft. An old woman stood in the bow, directing the proceedings with shrill volubility; she was the proprietor of the net, a village character at once kindly and tyrannical—widow of one chief and mother of another. As her canoe drew abreast of us she gave the command to halt and spread the net. The river at this point is almost without current, very still and clear; Maruae and I sat on the high bank, too tired to do more than play the part of spectators.

They grounded the big canoe just below where we sat, putting one end of the seine ashore and paddling slowly across the river while the net was laid out in a deep, sagging curve downstream. One after another the smaller canoes were beached, and the people, half naked and carrying spears, ran along the bank to take to the water a few hundred yards above. The river was alive with them, splashing and shouting as they drove the fish toward the trap. Next moment the bright shoals began to appear beneath us, the sunlight glinting on burnished sides as they darted this way and that by hundreds, seeking a way of escape. A run of mullet flashed downstream, saw the net, turned, and were headed back toward the sea. A series of cries went up—"Aué! Aué!"—as fifty or sixty of the beautiful silvery fish leaped the line of floats and dashed away to safety. The old headwoman, dressed in a Mother Hubbard of respectable black and a rather handsome hat, was swimming easily in three fathoms of water; nothing escaped her watchful eye.

"E ara!" she shouted, angrily; "the best fish are getting away! Hurry, you lazy ones—splash the water below the net, or we shall not have a mullet left! Remember that when the haul is over he who has not worked shall have no fish."

As the line of beaters drew near, the men in the big canoe paddled upstream and across behind them, throwing out net as they went, until the frightened fish and a score of swimmers were encircled. The two ends of the seine were now close together on the bank, and half a dozen men began to haul in with a will, their efforts causing the circle to narrow slowly and steadily. Looking down from the high bank, one could see children of ten or twelve, stark naked, and carrying tiny spears in their hands, swimming like frogs a fathom deep in the clear water, pursuing the darting fish. Now and then a youngster came to the surface with a shrill cry of triumph, holding aloft the toy spear on which was transfixed a six-inch fish. The people of the islands, as a rule, are neither fast nor showy swimmers; one can see prettier swimming any summer afternoon on the Long Island shore, but the Polynesian is at home in the water in a way the white man can never match. I watched an old woman, all of seventy and wearing a black blouse girded tightly to her waist with a pareu, treading water at the lower end of the net, where the fish were beginning to concentrate. She was as much at her ease as though she had been lying on her veranda exchanging gossip with a neighbor. Each time she thought the headwoman's eyes were turned away she reached over the net, seized a fish, and stuffed it into her blouse, until a flapping bulge hung down over her pareu. But old Tinomana's eyes were sharp. "Enough," she cried, half laughing and half in anger, "aué, tera vahine e! Perhaps she thought to get a string of fish, too, for that worthless son-in-law of hers!"

At length the seine lay in two great piles on the beach, and only a bulging pocket, filled with a pulsating mass of silver, remained in the river. Under the direction of Tinomana the fish were divided into little piles, strung on bits of hibiscus bark, and apportioned among the people, according to the size of their families and the amount of help they had given in the haul. For herself she reserved a considerable share, for her household was large, and as the owner of the net she was entitled to a full half—more than she loaded into the big canoe.

It was early afternoon when we laid down our burdens in the cook house and stripped for a swim. The others were awakening from their siesta; a flock of brown children, all vaguely related to the family of Airima, followed us to the river, carrying miniature surf boards. Next moment they were in the water, splashing and shouting as they paddled downstream toward where the surf broke on the bar. Tehinatu, the pretty sister of Maruae, passed us with a rush and leaped feet first from the high bank. She rose to the surface thirty yards away, shouting a challenge to catch her before she could reach the opposite shore. Her brother and I dove together, raced across the river, and had nearly overtaken the girl when she went under like a grebe. I was no match for her at this game; under water she could swim as fast as I, and was a hundred times more at home. I gave up the pursuit and landed for a sunning among the warm rocks of the point.

Out where the seas reared for the landward rush the black heads of children appeared and disappeared; I could hear the joyous screams of others, flattened on their boards and racing toward me, buried in flying spray. The old woman I had seen helping herself to fish was coming down the river, paddling an incredibly small canoe, laden with an enormous bunch of bananas and four kerosene tins of water. She lived a mile down the coast and, like many of her neighbors, braved the surf daily to supply her house with fresh water from the river. The gunwale of her canoe seemed to clear the water by no more than a couple of inches; I watched with some anxiety, thinking of the feelings of an American grandmother in the same situation.

She ceased to paddle at the river mouth and watched her chance, while the frail dugout rose and fell in the wash of half a dozen big seas. Then in a momentary lull she dug her paddle into the water. I sat up to watch; a boy standing in the shallows near by shouted encouragement. At first I thought that she had chosen her moment well. The canoe passed the white water, topped a little wave without swamping, and was seemingly out of danger; but suddenly a treacherous sea sprang up from nowhere, rearing a tossing crest. It was too late to retreat—certain disaster lay ahead. Stoically, without a sign of dismay, the paddler held her craft bow on; the canoe rose wildly against the foaming wall, seemed to hang for an instant almost vertically, and then canoe, cargo, and old woman disappeared in the froth. The boy screamed in ecstasy as he galloped through the shallows to lend a hand. The other children ceased their play and soon the canoe and its recovered cargo were brought ashore. They emptied the dugout and filled the tins with fresh water; I heard the old woman laugh shrilly as she wrung her clothes on the beach. Presently, coached by a dozen amused spectators, she made a second attempt, and passed the surf without a wetting; when I saw her last she was paddling off steadily to the west.

I was dozing among the rocks when a ringing whistle startled me and I looked up to see a bird like a large sandpiper alight on the beach and begin to feed, running briskly after the receding waves or springing into the air for a short flight when threatened by a rush of water. It was a wandering tattler, and no bird was ever better named. Solitary in its habits, except in the breeding season, when it resorts to northern lands so remote that its nest and eggs are still (I believe) unknown, it travels south at the approach of winter, making lonely passages across some of the widest stretches of ocean in the world ... to Hawaii, to the Galapagos, to the Marquesas, and probably to the remote southern islands of Polynesia. What obscure sense enables the migrating bird to follow its course far out of sight of land? In France, I have flown side by side with wild geese, heading steadily southward above a sea of clouds. It seemed to me that—like the pilot of an airplane—they might guide themselves, in a general way, by the sun, the stars, or the look of the land below—an idea borne out by the fact that geese become lost and confused in a fog. But in considering a bird like the carrier pigeon or the tattler, all such theorizing comes to an end. No general sense of north and south could guide the tattler to the lonely landfalls of the South Pacific; his wanderings—like the migration of the golden plover, or the instinct of the shearwater, which sends him unerringly, on the darkest night of storm, to his individual burrow in the cliff's—must be classed among the inexplicable mysteries of nature.

On the road which passes close to the house of Airima I found Tehinatu in conversation with the driver of a Chinese cart. She was bargaining for a watermelon; the Chinaman stood out for three francs—she offered two. "Enough of talking," she said, firmly; "the melon is the best you have, but it is green. I will give two francs."