As soon as our visitors had left I hurried to make a closer examination of our prizes before the cook took
possession of them. Of the eleven, only one was over a foot in length, the rest ranged from five to ten inches. The beautiful dark blue of the head and along the back, so noticeable when first caught, had now lost its brilliancy, and the four wide vertical black stripes on the sides had also become dulled, although the silvery belly was still as bright as a new dollar. The eyes were rather large for such a small fish, and all the fins were blue-black, with a narrow white line running along the edges. Their appearance even an hour after death was very handsome, and in shape they were much like a very plump trout. In the stomachs of some we found small flying squid, little shrimps, and other Crustacea.
Our Manila-man cook, although not a genius, certainly knew how to fry fish, and that morning we had for breakfast some of Jack Shark's pilots—the most delicately-flavoured deep-sea fish I have ever tasted—except, perhaps, that wonderful and beautiful creature, the flying-fish.
The "Palu" of the Equatorial Pacific
During a residence of half a lifetime among the various island-groups of the North-western and South Pacific, I devoted much of my spare time—and I had plenty of it occasionally—to deep-sea fishing, my tutors being the natives of the Caroline, Marshall, Gilbert, and Ellice Groups.
The inhabitants of the last-named cluster of islands are, as I have said, the most skilled fishermen of all the Malayo-Polynesian peoples with whom it has been my fortune to have come in contact. The very poverty of their island homes—mere sandbanks covered with coconut and pandanus palms only—drives them to the sea for their food; for the Ellice Islanders, unlike their more fortunate prototypes who dwell in the forest-clad, mountainous, and fertile islands of Samoa, Tahiti, Raratonga, &c., live almost exclusively upon coconuts, the drupes of the pandanus palm, and fish. From their very infancy they look to the sea as the main source of their food-supply, either in the clear waters of the lagoon, among the breaking surf on the
reef, or out in the blue depths of the ocean beyond. From morn till night the frail canoes of these semi-nude, brown-skinned, and fearless toilers of the sea may be seen by the voyager paddling swiftly over the rolling swell of the wide Pacific in chase of the bonito , or lying motionless upon the water, miles and miles away from the land, ground-fishing with lines a hundred fathoms long. Then, as the sun dips, the flare of torches will be seen along the sandy beaches as the night-seekers of flying-fish launch their canoes and urge them through the rolling surf beyond the reef, where, for perhaps three or four hours, they will paddle slowly to and fro, just outside the white line of roaring breakers, and return to the shore with their tiny craft half-filled with the most beautiful and wonderful fish in the world. The Ellice Island method of catching flying-fish would take too long to explain here, much as I should like to do so; my purpose is to describe a very remarkable fish called the palu , in the capture of which these people are the most skilful. The catching of flying-fish, however, bears somewhat on the subject of this article, as the palu will not take any other bait but a flying-fish, and therefore a supply of the former is a necessary preliminary to palu fishing.