I wish that I had space to tell more of the month I spent at Faatemu—the story of all that happened in those days would fill a thicker volume than this one. I was young, keenly alive, and set down among strange and kindly people in a brand-new world. When the Tara set sail at nightfall I felt a little lonely and forlorn, but before another day had passed I was beginning to enjoy one of the happiest periods of my life. No matter how far I wander, or how remote those dreamy island days, I shall never forget the kindness of my friends, the brown Faatemu villagers.
We had been sighted offshore and canoes were thick about the Tara when her anchor dropped. Taura was the first man aboard—a stately, gray-haired native, of a type not common nowadays. He was barefoot, but his suit of drill was spotless and he wore a beautifully plaited hat. His fat old wife Hina came behind him, her kindly face working and her eyes full of tears; and Tetua, Marama's little sister, stood shyly at her mother's side. Hina made straight for her son and clung to him for a time, sobbing gently; Tetua kissed her brother bashfully; and finally the chief, after he had shaken hands with the rest of us, sat down beside Marama for the silent greeting of their race.
"Come ashore with me," called my uncle, as the ship's boat went over the side; "there's some copra here and I still have room for a bit of deck cargo. We must hurry if I'm going to get away to-night!"
The boat plied back and forth all morning, laden with bags of copra, while Uncle Harry unlocked his store, showed me how to keep account of the goods, and explained to Taura that I was to stop over and that the canoe-building must be hurried as much as possible. The chief promised to have the canoes ready in a month's time. As for divers, he believed we could pick up all we needed on Raiatea—Paumotu men who had settled in the Leeward group. My bag and light blanket were brought ashore and installed in Taura's house, and toward evening my uncle bade us good-bye and was pulled out to the schooner. It was dusk when she stole out through the pass, before the gentle night-breeze which comes down from the hills.
I lay awake long that night, in my bed in a corner of Taura's great single room. The others had spread a mat on the floor and set a turned-down lamp near by. Father, mother, and sister lay in a circle about Marama while he recounted, in a low voice and with many gestures, the story of his adventures in the north. I lay staring up at the rafters under the lofty thatch, thinking of all that had happened since Uncle Harry had steered his boat in through the California surf; of the von Tesmars, father and son; of Iriatai, and what the future held in store. The lamp flickered when the land breeze found its way through the thin bamboo walls, causing the shadows above me to deepen and retreat; Marama's rapid flow of words droned on monotonously; and at last sleep closed my eyes.
Early next day, when Taura came to demand half a dozen axes for his men, I did my first bit of trading. Then I closed the store, and Marama and I went with the canoe-builders to select their trees in the valley far up among the mountains. We followed the river up from the bay toward Faaroa, the great central valley of the island. A dim path, along which we walked in single file, led through the jungle, winding about the trunks of fallen trees, across the rushing, waist-deep stream, high along the mountain-side, at a place where the valley became a gorge. I saw thickets of fei, the wild plantain, bearing great bunches of its reddish fruit; jungle cock crowed shrilly among the hills; and once a troop of wild pig, led by a gray old boar, crashed off, grunting, through the undergrowth. It was strange to think that only three generations had passed since Marama's ancestors, fierce brown warriors armed with rude ironwood clubs and spears, had stolen along this same path on forays against neighboring clans.
The wild hibiscus seldom grows large enough to furnish a log for a twenty-foot canoe, and it took us the best part of the day to choose our trees. All were close enough to be dragged to the river and floated down to Faatemu, and while the work was going on Marama and I went out every day with the men. First of all, the tree was felled and the branches chopped off smoothly, flush with the trunk. Then a twenty-foot length was measured along the straightest part of the tree and the ends cut off, before the log was rolled and dragged to the riverside. Finally, when our fifteen logs were ready, it took a strenuous day's work, pushing over shallow reaches and swimming through deep pools, to float them to the beach.
Once our logs were at Faatemu, Taura was for giving a feast and resting for a day or two. But I urged haste, recalling my uncle's words to the chief. Then the logs were laid out in the shade, close to the village, and one man set to work on each, fashioning a canoe with axe and adze. Day after day the builder chopped, while the chips flew and the form of the canoe emerged—the curve of sheer, the rounded bilge, the sharp lines of bow and stern. Sometimes a man stood off, squinting at his handiwork with one eye closed—judging the symmetry of the slender hull. When the outside was roughly chopped to shape, the log was turned over and the builder began to hollow out the inside with his adze. At last, when the walls of wood were of the required thickness, the process of finishing began: a slow and laborious rubbing with hard bits of coral, and a final smoothing with the rough skin of a stingray's tail, tacked to a wooden block. Then a pair of narrow planks of hibiscus were sawn out to make the raised gunwales, six inches high and of the same thickness as the sides of the canoe. After long scraping and repeated trials, these gunwales were made to fit so perfectly that no crack of light appeared when they were set in place. At intervals of about a foot, holes were drilled in the gunwales and corresponding holes in the dugout-sides beneath. The planks were joined at stem and stern and lashed to the canoe with cinnet—strong cording made of the braided fibre of the coconut. Now, save for its outrigger, the canoe was finished.
Round-bottomed and very narrow for their length, the native canoes would capsize at once were it not for their outriggers—light slender logs which float in the water alongside at a distance of four or five feet, attached to the hull by a pair of transverse poles. When Captain Cook first sailed among the islands, the natives marveled at the great canoe which remained upright without an outrigger—more wonderful by far, in their eyes, than the white man's cannon, or muskets, or axes of steel. "Aué!" they exclaimed, in astonishment. "E vaa ama oré!"—a canoe without an outrigger!
We made our outriggers of light purau wood, twenty feet long, five or six inches thick, and pointed at the forward end. The attaching poles were of iron wood—casuarina is the name of the beautiful, pale-foliaged tree—lashed across the gunwales fore and aft, the bow pole rigid, the rear one curved and flexible. At Taura's suggestion, I gave orders that all the outriggers and their fittings be assembled, and the canoes tested in the water before they were taken apart to be loaded aboard the Tara. Thanks to the chief, they were ready some days before the schooner came in sight, and our diving-goggles, made in the evenings by the old men of the village, were finished and waiting at the store.
To the native fisherman, these goggles are nearly as important as his spear. They are not unlike the goggles used by motorists at home: a pair of glasses, set in wooden rims which fit tightly about one's eyes, and held in place by an elastic around the head. With such glasses, well fitted and water-tight, one can see nearly as well in the clear sea-water as in the air above.
I kept two pairs for Marama and myself, and we went out often, on afternoons of leisure, to spear fish inside the reef. Paddling to a place where the water was from five to ten feet deep, we moored our canoe to a coral mushroom and set out, swimming for long distances or wading as the water shoaled. Little by little I learned one of the most difficult of native arts: to swim gently with my face under water, holding the spear between my toes. I learned to distinguish the good fish from the bad, the wholesome from the poisonous; to recognize the holes where the fat black maito hide; to see the octopus dart into his cranny; to transfix my quarry with a well-aimed thrust. Sometimes we were in the water for three hours at a stretch, but I never wearied of admiring the strange beauty of this underwater world. The sunlight, filtering through the clear lagoon and reflected from the bottom in delicate tints of blue and green, revealed shoals of fish, colored like jewels and of fantastic shapes, gliding among the branches of the coral forest. In deeper water a gleam of vivid blue showed where the tridacna—the giant clam—lay in his hole with jaws agape, and I learned to swim down with a bar of steel and pry him from the rock.
Sometimes, on moonless nights, we took torches and went out spearing on the reef. The Raiatea barrier-reef, about a mile offshore, is no more than a low dyke of coral, half awash and breaking the landward run of the swell. By night, when the torches flicker and flare, and mighty combers, bursting on the outer edge, come foaming waist-deep across the jagged rock, the reef is an eerie place, not without dangers of its own. Under cover of darkness, strange monsters have been known to crawl up from the depths on the seaward side—the huge decapods on which the sperm whale feeds, and nameless creatures of which the natives speak with whispered dread. There were tales of fishermen who had paddled out at nightfall, never to return.... Nothing would have tempted me to fish on the reef alone at night, though when several of us went out together, armed with machetes and heavy spears, there was a wild charm about the sport.
We walked abreast in a line that reached from lagoon to sea, each man bearing in his left hand a torch of dry bamboo. At times, a cry from the seaward man caused us to brace ourselves for the big sea he had seen rearing in the torchlight. Then with a roar and a crash the wave would break, sending a wall of white water across the barrier. Sometimes a shark came thrashing across with the wave, to be speared before he could reach the deep water of the lagoon. Sometimes a series of shouts went up as a great silver cavally swept by us so fast that man after man missed his thrust. When the wave receded there were spiny crayfish to be caught in the pools, and enormous pink-spotted crabs to be held down with a spear-shaft till one could take a safe grip, out of reach of the menacing claws.
One day, when the sun was bright and the current in the pass was slack, Marama showed me a pleasanter and lazier kind of fishing. He had caught a great quantity of hermit crabs the night before, and at daybreak I found him on the beach, picking up the pebbles used for sinkers and tossing them into the bottom of the canoe. He had brought a line fitted with strong hooks on wire leaders, and his water glass—a small wooden box, open at the top and with a bottom made of a pane of clear glass. We paddled to the passage and anchored the canoe on one side, where she could swing out over the wall of coral, shelving almost vertically into deep blue water. Then Marama began to crack the shells of his crabs, smash the claws and bodies between two stones, and toss this ground bait over the side of the canoe. I took the glass and watched the fragments of crab-meat eddying down beside the seamed and crannied wall. The water was so clear that every detail of the scene was visible: the strange fish drifting along the face of the cliff; the mouths of the caverns from which larger fish looked out; the sandy bottom beneath us, scoured clean by the current of the pass. At first, only a shoal of small fry gathered to gobble up the bait, but suddenly they scattered in terror as a pair of parrot fish, bright blue and a yard long, with horny beaks instead of mouths, moved leisurely from their hiding-place. There was so little wind that my companion had seen them without his glass. He baited his hook with the soft body of a hermit crab, tied a pebble to his line with the curious hitch that allows the sinker to be released by a jerk, and dropped hook and stone over the side. I watched the pebble rush down toward the bottom; saw it halt below the drifting bait; saw the line jerk and the sinker drop off and disappear; watched the baited hook rise slowly to the level of the parrot fish, that were beginning to feed in their deliberate way.
Now Marama's bait was eddying among the other morsels of crab, and I almost shouted as I saw it disappear in the beak of the larger of the big blue fish. The native boy struck sharply and began to haul in his line, cutting the water in crisp zigzags this way and that. A final heave brought the twenty-pound fish tumbling into the canoe, a blow of a short club ended its struggles, and I examined it at leisure while Marama baited his hook once more. It was the first that I had seen—a strange and beautiful creature, covered with scales larger than a fifty-cent piece, scales of a vivid iridescent blue with a green spot at the base of each. A nip of its horny beak would have severed a man's finger clean. Later that day when I ate my share of it, steaming-hot from the oven, I understood why the parrot fish was prized so highly.
When Taura's family assembled for a meal, all of their cooked food came from the native oven, under the shed behind the house. Their method of cooking seemed to me—and still seems, when I think of those dinners at Faatemu—the finest in the world, preserving as it does all the juices and flavor of fish or fowl or meat. The native cook's equipment consists of a heap of waterworn pebbles, picked up along the beach, a pile of large green leaves, and a supply of firewood. Fish and chicken and pork are cut into pieces of convenient size and made into little leaf-wrapped packages. Yams, sweet potatoes, plantains, and bananas are selected for cooking and laid out beside the packages of meat. Then a shallow hole is scraped out in the earth—perhaps a foot deep, and two feet across—and a hot fire is built inside. When the fire is blazing well, the pebbles are heaped on the wood and left till they are heated almost to a glow. At this stage the hole is raked out clean, the food put in and covered with hot pebbles, and the whole overlaid with a thick layer of leaves and earth. An hour later the oven may be opened, the baked vegetables peeled, and the packages of fish and meat removed from their clean leafy wrappings.
As time went on, it seemed to me that my friend Marama possessed more useful accomplishments than any lad of his age at home. The fishing excursions in which I was always eager to join were in reality his work, for we supplied more than half of the household's food. My friend could read and write, but otherwise he had no education in our sense of the word. He knew nothing of history, algebra, or geometry, but his mind was a storehouse of complex fishing-lore, picked up unconsciously since babyhood and enabling him to provide himself and his family with food. And when you come to think of it, that is one of the purposes of all education.
The habits of the fish in the South Pacific are regulated by the moon, and Marama knew what kinds were to be found on any night of the native lunar month. On nights of bright moonlight we cast a white fly for the small rockfish which frequent patches of live coral; on dark nights we gathered the mollusks abounding in the lagoon. During the week of the new moon's first appearance, we went out at dawn to fish for tunny in the pass. Sometimes Tetua, the twelve-year-old sister of Marama, took me with her to spear prawns in the Faatemu River. Carrying torches and armed with small barbless spears, we slipped and clambered over the wet rocks, scanning the pools for the little fresh-water lobsters which soon filled our pail. Sometimes I took a paddle in one of the long narrow bonito-canoes and went with the men on trips that took us far offshore, following the birds above the leaping schools. I grew hard and browned by the sun, and the native language came to me surprisingly.
Once on a Saturday, when my uncle's work was done, Taura took us to the mountains to hunt for pig. The chief's two lean dogs ranged ahead, and far up in the Faaroa Valley they started a bristling gray boar, fierce, old, and fleet of foot. He led us a long chase over the rough stream-bed and through dense thickets of tree-fern and hibiscus. In the end we heard a fierce uproar of snarls and yelps and grunting, and knew that he had turned at bay. Taura was too old to run as we did, and by this time the chief was a good half-mile behind. We had no weapons, and when I saw the angry brute, foam dripping from his jaws as he faced the dogs with his back to a great tree-trunk, I wondered what we were to do, now that we had come up with him. But Marama did not share my hesitation.
"Take care!" he warned me—unnecessarily, I thought. "He is a bad pig! If he runs at you, jump into a tree!"
He took a clasp knife from the tuck of his pareu, cut a limb of hibiscus, and peeled off a length of the tough bark—the strongest of natural cord. Then he shouted encouragingly to the dogs, and while their attack diverted the boar's attention, he stole quickly around the sheltering tree-trunk. I saw his brown hands shoot out to seize the boar's hind legs, and the next moment—grunting and struggling ferociously—the old brute was thrown heavily upon his back. I rushed to lend a hand and our combined strength was enough to hold him while we tied his legs with strips of bark. Taura found us lying exhausted beside our captive, while the dogs lay in the cool stream, with heaving flanks and tongues lolling in the water.
That evening, when Marama had recounted the details of our hunt, his mother told us one of her tales of heathen days—the story of how the first pigs were given by the ancient gods to mankind. Many of her words I understood; at times her son whispered a translation in rapid broken English. We were lying on a wide mat, spread under the palms close to the beach. A new moon was setting behind the point and the evening was so calm that only the faintest of murmurs came from the reef.
There was a time—so the story ran—many years ago, when there were no pigs on any of these islands. In those days men ate only fish, and sometimes, in seasons of famine, the flesh of rats. The clans of the different valleys were constantly at war, for there was no one government over the island—no family of Raiatean chiefs. Men lost heart for the planting when villages were destroyed and crops burned on every hand, and many of the people left their lands to live in hidden caves among the hills.
In this bay of Faatemu lived a feeble old man, blind with age and weeping, for his wife and all but one of his children had been slaughtered in the wars. He was called Vatea, and the name of his young son, who cared for him, was Tamatoa. They lived in a rude thatch-shelter the boy had built. It was a time of famine; a war-party from Tahaa had burned the village, and there were no plantations of yams or sweet potatoes. The men of Tahaa, as was their custom, had chopped down all the coconut palms, and Tamatoa feared to go after plantains. By day the father and son kept to their hidden shelter, and each night the boy came cautiously to the seaside, to catch what fish he could. Since he dared not use a torch, that was not much; on many occasions his patience was rewarded by no more than one small fish. Then he would make for himself a poor dish of scraped banana-stalks, not fit to keep the life in a man, and after preparing his single fish, he would carry the food to where blind old Vatea awaited him. "I have caught only two small fish," he told the old man at these times; "one for you, and one for me. Now let us eat!" And while the hungry father devoured his fish, the son would make a great noise of smacking his own lips over the wretched scrapings of banana stalk.
Each day the fish were smaller and more difficult to catch, and finally the old man was starving, though Tamatoa gave him all the real food that he could find. As happens at such times, Vatea grew suspicious of his son, thinking that the boy was taking advantage of his blindness to save the best morsels for himself. One day, when the son brought a small raw fish and his own dish of grated banana-stalk, the old man spoke. 'Fetch me a calabash of cool water from the stream,' he said; and when the boy was gone, he felt his way across to where his son's food lay in a wooden bowl. Then his tears fell, and his heart was heavy with remorse.
That night, as they lay side by side on their mats, old Vatea spoke to his son. "Listen carefully to my words," he said, "and forget nothing that I say. To-morrow I shall die; when I am dead, bury me by the great rosewood tree yonder in the valley. Then, every morning, you shall go to my grave at the hour when the sun first strikes the ground. Watch closely; take what you find and use it wisely—it will make you a powerful man."
Next morning old Vatea died, and his son, who was a dutiful lad, did as the father had instructed. For two days, when the first rays of sunlight touched his father's grave he was watching by the rosewood tree, and on the third morning his eyes saw a strange thing. The earth cracked and heaved, and he heard a new sound, the sound of grunting, as a pair of pigs came up out of the dust—the first pigs that any man had seen. Marveling greatly, Tamatoa took them home and cared for them, and only a day or two later, peace was made among the clans, and a bountiful run of fish entered the lagoon.
Litters of young pigs were born as time went on, and the fame of Tamatoa went abroad among the islands—to Huahine, to Bora Bora, and even to distant Maupiti. Then the high priest of Oro, at the Opoa temple, was seized with a frenzy, and through his lips the chiefs learned that Tamatoa, the favored of the gods, was to be made ruler of the island. Thus Tamatoa became king, and the race of swine was given to furnish food for men.
As she finished the story, Marama's mother heaved herself to her feet and led the way to Taura's steep-roofed house. The moon had set, and as I followed through the warm darkness, I thought drowsily of my uncle and wondered when the Tara would return. I might have slept less soundly if I had known that she was then within twenty miles, and that in the morning she would anchor in Faatemu Bay.