A Writer's Notebook (45 page)

The nets. The whole village turns out when the great net is cast; the owners of the net go out in a canoe and one or two of them plunge into the water; long strings of women, boys and men, seize each end of the rope and pull. Others sit on the beach to watch the fun. Gradually the net is drawn in and a boy leaps on to a silvery fish, putting it into his pareo, and the catch is landed. A hole is made in the sand and the fish are poured in. Then they are divided up among the assistants.

Christianity. A French admiral came to one of the islands in his flag-ship, and the native queen gave a formal luncheon in his honour. She proposed to put him on her right, but the missionary's wife insisted that he should sit on
her
right. As the wife of Christ's representative she ranked higher than the
queen. The missionary agreed with her. When the natives protested they both flew into a rage; they threatened to get even with them if such a slight were put upon them, and the natives, frightened, at length yielded. The missionaries had their way.

Tetiaroa. We went over in a small cutter with a gasolene engine. We started at one in the morning so as to arrive at daybreak when the sea is supposed to be at its calmest and the passage over the reef less difficult. It was very lovely in the silence of the night. The air was balmy. The stars were reflected in the waters within the reef. There was not a breath of wind. We put a rug down on the deck and made ourselves comfortable. Outside the reef there was the inevitable swell of the Pacific. When dawn came we were still in the open sea, but presently we saw the island, a low line of coconut trees, some miles off. Then we came to the reef and got into a boat. The owner of the cutter was a man named Levy. He said he came from Paris, but he spoke French with a strong accent which suggested to me the Algerian Jew. He cast his anchor on the reef, we got into the dinghy and rowed to the opening. This is not an opening at all, but merely a slight dip in the reef and when something of a wave beats in there is just enough water for a boat to scrape over. Once over it is impossible to row, for the coral is thick, and the natives get out, up to their waists in water, and pull the boat through a narrow, tortuous passage to the shore. The beach is white sand, fragments of coral and the shells of innumerable crustacea; then there are the coconuts and you come upon the half-dozen huts which make up the tiny settlement. One is the hut of the headman; there are two huts for copra, and another for the workmen; then two pleasant grass huts, one serving as a parlour, the other as a bedroom, used by the owner of the island. There is a grove of old, enormous trees and it is among these the huts are built; they give coolness and shade. We unloaded our
stores and bedding and proceeded to make ourselves at home. There were swarms of mosquitoes, more than I have ever seen anywhere, and it was impossible to sit down without being surrounded by them. We rigged up a mosquito-curtain on the veranda of the living hut and set a table and a couple of chairs beneath it. But the mosquitoes were ingenious to enter and before it was possible to settle down in anything like peace twenty at least had to be killed under the curtain. There was a little shed at the side which served as a kitchen, and here the Chinaman I had brought with me with a few sticks made a fire on which he did the cooking.

The island has evidently been raised from the sea at a comparatively recent date and much of the interior is barren, caked, almost swampy, so that you sink several inches as you walk, and it may be supposed that it was a brackish lake, now dried up; and in one part there is still a small lake which not so very long ago must have been much larger. Besides the coconuts nothing much seems to grow except rank grass and a shrub something like broom. In all these islands the mynah bird is seen everywhere; but here there are no more than two or three that have recently been brought. Bird life consists only in great sea-birds, black in colour, with long sharp bills, which make a piercing sort of whistle.

The sand on the beach has really the silver whiteness that you read of in descriptions of South Sea islands, and when you walk along in the sunshine it is so dazzling that you can hardly bear to look at it. Here and there you see the white shells of dead crabs or the skeleton of a sea-bird. At night the beach seems to be all moving; it is at first quite strange, this perpetual, slight movement, weird and uncanny; but when you light your torch you see that it comes from the incessant activity of innumerable shelled things; they move hither and thither on the beach slowly, stealthily, but there are such vast numbers of them that the whole beach seems alive.

The Reef. It is a broad causeway along which you can walk all round the island, but it is so rough and uneven that it tears your feet to pieces. In the pools fish dart about and now and then an eel raises a vicious head. Lobster-catching: you go along the reef at night with hurricane lamps and walk, peering right and left, into every nook and cranny; fish slither away frightened by the light; and you have to walk carefully, since everywhere are great sea-hedgehogs capable of causing nasty wounds on the feet. There are great numbers of lobsters and you do not walk far before you see one. You put your foot on it and then a native comes, takes it up quickly and throws it in the old kerosene can which he has strapped on his shoulder. Walking thus in the night one loses all sense of direction, and on the way back it was not easy to find the boat. For a few minutes it looked as though we should have to stay on the reef till dawn. There was no moon, but the sky was unclouded and the stars were bright.

Fishing on the Reef. At one point, near the passage, the reef is abrupt, like a precipice, and you look down directly into I know not how many fathoms of water. The natives had spread a net among the coral rocks of the lagoon and we had a number of fish to use as bait. It was rather horrid to see the natives killing them. They hit them with their fists on the belly or banged them with a piece of coral. When we reached the fishing-place, the canoe was attached to a coral rock, and the headman proceeded to pound up a couple of fish and threw the fragments in the water. This soon attracted a lot of small fry, thin, worm-like, active little things, and then a number of large black fish. In a few minutes a couple of sharks' fins showed themselves on the surface and we saw the brown sharks circling round with a kind of horrible stealth. The rod was merely a bamboo, and to this a line was attached. The big black fish circled round the bait and took it voraciously, so that one pulled them out of the water one after the other. The
sharks were greedy too and we had to snatch the bait away from them since the line was too thin to hold them. Once I got a shark on my hook and he snapped the line in a twinkling. We put down a couple of lines with the innards of fish on them and caught a tunny that must have weighed the best part of forty pounds.

Catching sharks. Toward evening you attach the lights of a large fish to a hook and then tie the line to a tree. Not long elapses before you hear a great splashing, and going down to the beach you find that a shark is caught. You drag him in and when you get him on the beach he struggles and beats about. The native takes his large knife, a descendant of the cutlass brought by the first discoverers of the islands, and strikes at the head to get to the brain. It is an ugly, malicious-looking beast with hideous jaws. When it is dead the hook is cut out. Then the Chinaman cuts off the fins to dry them in the sun and a kanaka hacks out the jaw with its terrible teeth. The dead fish is cast back into the sea.

The natives often tie the line to one of their legs before they go to sleep and are awakened by the tugging.

Fish. Their variety is indescribable. Bright yellow fish, fish black and yellow, fish black and white, fish striped, fish curiously patterned. One day the natives went fishing and when they raised their net I saw their catch in all its brilliance. I had a sudden thrill, for it reminded me of the casting of a net in one of the stories in the Arabian Nights and among that astonishing confusion of colour and strange shapes I half expected to find a bottle sealed with the seal of Suleyman, the prison of a powerful djin.