As soon as Tom Arbor saw them, he clapped his hands and said that here was a chance of laying in a good stock of provisions, and that it would be better to secure them before they went bad, and even before we thought of our catamaran.
We were puzzled as to how he meant us to proceed; but he said he had been shipmates with a Yarmouth lad on a previous voyage, and he had told him how herrings were prepared by salt and smoking, and that, even if we had no salt, we could smoke a good many, and so provide ourselves with a stock which would last us some time, and which would be a pleasant variety to the cocoanuts, which, so far as he saw, were the only vegetable products fit for food to be found.
We at once set to work at one pool and picked out a lot of fish, which we strung on our ramrods and carried back to camp with us. And after Tom had shown me and Bill how to clean and split them open, he set to work to prepare a number of thin, light rods out of the midribs of the leaves of the palms which had been blown down. On these he slipped the fish as soon as we had completed cleaning them, putting his rods in at one of the gills and out at the mouth of each of the fish; and when a rod was strung with fish about four inches apart, he put it on a couple of uprights planted in the ground, under which he lighted a fire, which he banked down with green leaves and damped cocoanut husks, so as to cause a dense smoke.
“There,” he said—“that will do after a fashion; but at Yarmouth, I’m told, they have houses to keep the smoke in. And now you, Bill, had better make a basket out of some of these leaves, and go and get some more fish, while Sam and I set to work to rig up some sort of a hut for us.”
I said, “Why should we have our hut here? Isn’t the other side of the reef bigger? It looks so.”
“Yes,” he said; “but don’t you see the palms over there waving in the breeze? It’ll soon be down on us. And that must be the trades setting in again; and they’ll blow for months and months without taking off. It’s only when there are storms for a time that they cease.”
“Why’s that, Tom?” I asked.
“I can’t rightly tell the reason, but so it is; and while they’re a-blowing there’ll always be a big surf tumbling on that side. And if ever it happen that we see a ship, and have to get off to her, it’ll be from this side that we shall have to make a start.”
Tom now chose four palm trees which had not been blown down, and telling me to get a couple of axes from among our stores, he and I set to work to cut them off as high up as we could manage by standing on the top of our beakers and the trade-chest.
The four trees stood at the corners of a space about twelve feet long by eight wide, and would, he said, make the main posts of the hut we were to build; and before Bill came back with his load of fish two of them had been cut at a height of six feet from the ground.