Early in the “seventies” I was shipwrecked with the once notorious Captain “Bully” Hayes, on Kusaie (Strong's Island), the eastern outlier of the Caroline Islands on the North Pacific, and lived there for twelve happy months, and here I saw for the first time the method of fish stupefaction employed by the interesting and kindly-natured people of this beautiful spot.

I had previously seen, in Eastern Polynesia, the natives drugging fish by using the pounded nuts of the futu tree ( Barringtonia speciosa ), and one day as I was walking with a native friend along the beach near the village in which I lived, I picked up a futu nut lying on the sand, and remarked that in the islands to the far south the people used it to drug fish.

Kusis laughed. “ Futu is good, but we of Kusaie do not use it—we have oap which is stronger and better. Come, I will show you some oap growing, and to-morrow you shall see how good it is.”

Turning off to our right, we passed through a grove of screw-pines, and then came to the foot ot the high mountain range traversing the island, where vine and creeper and dense jungle undergrowth struggled for light and sunshine under the dark shade of giant trees, whose thick leafy branches, a hundred feet above, were rustling to the wind. Here, growing in the rich, red soil, was a cluster of oap —a thin-stemmed, dark-green-leaved plant about three feet in height. Kusis pulled one by the roots, and twisted it round and round his left hand; a thick, white and sticky juice exuded from the bark.

“It 'sickens' the fish very quickly,” he said, “quicker than the futu nut. If much of it be bruised and thrown into the water, it kills the largest fish very soon, and even turtles will 'sicken.' It is very strong.”

I asked him how the people of Kusaie first became acquainted with the properties of the plant. He shook his head.

“I do not know. God made it to grow here in Kusaie in the days that were dark” (heathenism) “and when we were a young people. A wise man from Germany was here ten years ago, and he told us that the people of Ponapé, far to the west, use the oap even as we use it, but that in Ponapé the plant grows larger and is more juicy than it is here.” *

* The “wise man from Germany,” I ascertained a year or twoafterwards, was the well-known J. S. Kubary, a gentlemanwho, although engaged in trading pursuits, yet enrichedscience by his writings on his discoveries in Micronesia.

Early on the following morning, when the tide was falling, and the jagged pinnacles of coral rock began to show on the barrier reef opposite the village, the entire population—about sixty all told—were awaiting Kusis and myself outside his house. The men carried small, unbarbed fish-spears, the women and children baskets and bundles of oap.

From the village to the reef was a distance of two miles, which we soon covered by smart paddling in a dozen or more canoes; for had we delayed we should, through the falling tide, have been obliged to leave our stranded crafts on the sand, half-way, and walk the remainder.