VI
THE END OF THE SHARK AND
THE BEGINNING OF THE DIVING
That Sunday night, while the crew of the Tara told to their friends the story of Ofai's rescue, my uncle and I labored with forge and anvil and grindstone under the shed of corrugated iron. From the schooner's trade-room we took a couple of the whale-spades used throughout the islands as agricultural tools, and removed the wooden hafts from their sockets. While I pumped the bellows, Uncle Harry heated one of these in the forge and hammered it into the shape of a harpoon, welding on a piece of steel to make the socket into which the hinged barb would fit. Then, gripping a morsel of steel in the tongs, he forged out the barb, punched a hole through it, and riveted it in place, so that it folded into its socket when the harpoon was thrown and opened to prevent the iron's withdrawal from the wound. When the harpoon was finished to his satisfaction, I turned the grindstone while he ground it to a razor-edge. After that he heated the other spade and forged out a lance for killing: a slender, double-edged blade, two inches wide and eighteen long—a murderous weapon in skilled hands. We fixed the lance on a twelve-foot pole of hibiscus, and whittled out a short stout shaft for the harpoon, tapered to fit loosely in the socket. Then my uncle fetched from the storeroom a coil of heavy cotton line. Passing one end of it through a screw eye halfway up the shaft of the harpoon he lashed it firmly to the small of the iron. It was long past midnight.
"We won't get much sleep," he remarked, as we paddled out to the schooner in a canoe. "We must kill that shark to-morrow—to-day, rather—without fail! The natives are superstitious as children; they used to worship sharks, you know, before the missionaries came, and if any ghost-talk starts, we may have to go back for another lot of men. I'll wake you at five o'clock."
I dreamed strange dreams that night, for my mind was feverish with the excitement of the day. I was diving, and like Ofai, I had taken refuge in the coral while a great shark nosed at me from above. But the crevice was too narrow for his head, and I crouched there with bursting lungs, praying that the monster would leave me to reach the air before I drowned. At last I could stand it no longer; I sprang out from my retreat—past the shark gazing at me with fierce green eyes, upward toward the surface, so far off that I gave myself up for lost. The water weighed on me like lead; I seemed to sink instead of rising; I saw the monster approaching, grimly and deliberately. Then he seized my shoulder in his jaws. I felt the sharp teeth tear the flesh and crunch the bone—and I awoke with a strangled shout.
The stateroom was lit by the first gray light of dawn, and my uncle's hand was on my shoulder as he shook me awake.
"Time for coffee," he said, smiling at my bewildered face. "The men have killed a pig for bait, and they're getting the surfboat ready. We'll be off in half an hour."
We left before sunrise, in the broad heavy boat used for landing cargo from the schooner. I sat aft with Fatu, who held the steering-sweep; Ivi and Ofai pulled, and my uncle stood forward in the bows. The morning was calm, and as we reached the line of buoys we kept a close lookout for the shark, but no fin cut the water and no long shadow passed beneath the boat. Finally, at the place where we had sighted our enemy the day before, we cut open the carcass of the pig, tied it to a buoy, and pulled off a little way to watch.
An hour passed; the sun rose, and the lagoon began to shimmer in the heat. I heard the booming of the breakers where the ring of land was broken north of us and saw the smoke rising vertically from the ovens at our island camp. The natives were half dozing, but my uncle had not relaxed his watch.
"There he is!" he exclaimed suddenly. "Quick—pull over there—don't make a noise with your oars!"
I glanced up as he spoke and saw the dead pig rise and disappear in a circle of ripples. Then the head and forelegs came to the surface again—the carcass of our pig had been bitten in two.
"Row faster," my uncle whispered in the native tongue. "Make haste, or he will eat the pig and go."
Our boat glided toward the feeding monster. Without turning his head, Uncle Harry motioned to the men to cease their rowing, and it was then I caught sight of the huge brownish body of the shark, rising to finish what was left. My uncle brandished the harpoon above his head—hurled it with all the strength of his arm. The water swirled and coil after coil of line flew out through the chock. We were fast.
As he felt the iron, the shark turned with a mighty sweep of his tail and rushed off swiftly to the south. Fatu swung the boat around to follow, and before half the line had streaked overboard we were gathering way. Then my uncle got his hands on the line, paying it out more gradually until our full weight was on the fish; the oars came in and we foamed along at a faster gait, perhaps, than the clumsy surfboat had ever known. The shark seemed tireless—we passed the islet, where the people stood on the beach, waving in answer to our shouts, and sped on toward the southern end of the lagoon. We were following a deep channel in the coral, which turned westward halfway to the pass and approached the long island that formed the atoll's western side. At the end of an hour I could see the village of the copra-makers and the distant pass, a gap in the low ring of wooded land. The channel had brought us close to the inner beach and our pace was slowing appreciably. My uncle was beginning to haul up, when all at once the fish turned at right angles toward the submarine cliff of coral, close at hand. The line went slack; the boat drifted quietly for a few yards, and came to a halt. My uncle turned his head.
"Look," he said, "he's gone into that hole yonder! See the mouth of it a couple of fathoms down? This must be his den."
Holding the line with one hand, he took up the lance and ordered the rowers to back water—to keep a steady galling strain on the fish. "The iron is tickling him," he remarked when five minutes had passed. "I can feel him twitch. Look lively now! He'll be out in a moment—Ah! Here he comes!"
Far in beneath the coral the cave must have broadened, for the shark had turned to face the entrance of his lair. He came out with a rush, maddened by the pain of his wound, open-mouthed and at bay. Before Ofai could pull in his oar the monster had wrenched it from his hands and turned to sink his teeth in the cutwater of the boat. But my uncle was ready with the lance. Again and again his arm rose and thrust downward, and at each stroke the keen blade bit deep. The water reddened; the jaws relaxed their hold; the tail ceased its lashing and lay quiet. The huge carcass turned belly-upward and sank in the clear blue channel beneath us.
Uncle Harry laid down the lance and came aft to light a cigar. "That's a good day's work," he said. "No diving with that fellow about! He's sinking now; we'll have the boys cut the line and make the end fast to the coral. To-morrow he'll float high—I'll send a couple of men to cut out the jaws. They'll make you a fine souvenir of Iriatai."
There was rejoicing when we arrived at camp, for the native regards a large shark with a peculiar, superstitious dread. There had been much talk among the divers since the night before, but now their fears were at an end and they busied themselves with preparations for the ensuing day.
That night, when dinner was over and we sat talking on the Tara's deck, my uncle explained to me the terms of the agreement under which his divers worked. "Ordinarily," he said, "when the Government opens the lagoons the men are free to keep everything they bring up: the shell and the pearls are theirs to do with as they please. The traders keep track of all the better men and do their best to get them as deeply as possible in debt before the season begins. You can imagine what happens when credit is offered to simple fellows like these Paumotans: they run up bills for all sorts of useless trash—guitars; silk dresses and high-heeled shoes for their women; cheap perfume at five or six dollars a bottle; every kind of fancy white-man's food in tins. They load up with this sort of stuff till they are over their heads in debt. By the time he begins to dive, each native is safe in the clutches of some trading-house—Chinese, more often than not—and every pearl and every pound of shell must be sold to the creditor at the creditor's price.
"It is different here on Iriatai, for the men know that I have a year's monopoly of the lagoon. But there is more shell, and it lies in shallower water than in the lagoons which have been worked for a generation, so the divers are glad to accept my terms. Ever since I came to the islands I have tried to deal honestly with the people, for I have a theory that the savage appreciates a square deal as well as a civilized man. It has paid me, too. As you know, I am furnishing the canoes and advancing a reasonable amount of food and goods. The men have agreed, on their side, to work every day the weather permits and to let me make the first offer on their catch. Half of the shell goes to me; all of the pearls and the other half of the shell will be theirs. At the end of the season I'll make each man an offer on his shell—cleaned, sacked, and loaded aboard the Tara. As for the pearls, they will be brought out every night and offered for sale to me. Those I do not care to buy, or for which the owners think they can get a higher price in Tahiti, will be sold in the open market when we go North. But I'll get all the really fine ones—I can pay good prices and still double my money in every case!"
In the morning I had my first sight of pearl-diving as it is practised among the atolls of the Paumotus.
The men we had brought with us from Raiatea, reënforced by a few volunteers from the copra-makers of Iriatai, made up fifteen crews of two men each. I say men, but one of the best of the lot was an elderly brown woman, and there was not a man who could dive deeper than old Maruia, or bring up more shell in a day.
Each canoe was equipped with its paddles, an anchor at the end of thirty fathoms of line, a five-gallon kerosene-tin, a stout knife, and two coils of light rope—one attached to the diving-weight, the other to a large openwork basket of bamboo. The two members of the crew shared equally in the catch, though almost without exception one man did all the diving while his partner remained at the surface, raising and lowering the basket, cleaning the shell roughly, opening the oysters and inspecting them for pearls.
As they worked no more than five hours a day, we did not leave camp till the sun was well up, illuminating the bottom of the lagoon. I went out with a pair of middle-aged Paumotans whose acquaintance I had made during the passage from Raiatea. It was about half a mile from the islet to the patch of shell on which work was to begin. Uncle Harry had gone out ahead of us in the whaleboat and as the little fleet of canoes drew near, he pointed out to the paddlers the two acres of lagoon in which they were to work. The bow-man in our canoe dropped anchor in about seventy feet of water, and began to prepare himself to dive.
First of all, he stripped off the cotton shirt he had been wearing and hitched the pareu tight about his waist. Then he polished his water goggles, adjusted them carefully over his eyes, and thrust his right hand into a heavy working-glove. A pile of coral lumps, picked up on the beach the night before, lay in the bottom of the canoe; the stern-man placed a couple of these in the basket and lowered it into the lagoon till it came to rest on the bottom. Then the diver went over the side and lay in the water with a hand on the gunwale of the canoe, while his partner coiled the diving-line and lowered the leaden weight till it hung a few feet beneath the surface. The man in the water gripped the line with his left hand and the toes of his left foot; he took two or three long breaths before he jerked his head upward in a sudden gesture that meant: "Let go!" Coil after coil of line went leaping overboard, as the diver sank like a stone, leaving a trail of bubbles in his wake. When the lead touched bottom the stern-man hauled it up at once, coiling the line in readiness for the next dive.
A minute passed—a minute and a quarter—a minute and a half. The canoe lurched to a sudden strain on the taut basket-line. I looked over the side. Far down in the green water I could see the shadowy figure of the diver, mounting the rope with leisurely movements of his arms. He came to the surface, exhaling the breath from his lungs with the strange shrill whistle I had heard before. Then, raising the goggles from his eyes, he gave the exultant whoop of the diver who has brought up a rich haul—a cry that was beginning to ring out on all sides, where the canoes lay at anchor. He lay resting alongside while his companion pulled up the basket, loaded with six or seven great gold-lipped oysters; and craned his neck to watch as the other opened the shells with a twist of his knife at the hinge, felt for pearls under the soft mantle, and tossed the body of each mollusk into the open kerosene-tin. My companions seemed excited.
"Aué!" exclaimed the diver. "There is no other island like this! It is as Seroni told us—the bottom is covered with shell, and the water is not overdeep: twelve fathoms, by the knots on my line. Last year, at Hikueru, I worked at twenty till my head ached all through the night. And this shell—the size, the weight, the color of the lip—think of what it must be worth a ton! No man in all these islands has ever seen its like! I would still dive if there were fifty sharks instead of the one Seroni killed yesterday. But watch carefully, and if a shark comes, move the basket up and down a little so that I may be warned. Now pass me the weight, for I am ready to go down again."
At the end of three hours the diver clambered stiffly into the canoe; even in this water, only a few degrees below the temperature of one's blood, a man grows chilled and must come out to rest and warm himself in the sun. He had averaged a minute and a half to two minutes under water, and five minutes' rest at the surface between dives, and I noticed that he sent up five or six oysters each time he went down. We had brought along a bottle of water and a package of cold food done up in leaves. When lunch was over and the diver lay basking in the sun, I asked him how he could stay under water so long, and how a man could stand the pressure of the depths. At home in California I had excelled my friends by bringing up sand from the bottom at thirty feet, and my ears had ached for an hour afterward. These natives thought nothing of working at seventy feet, and from what they said, I knew that one hundred and twenty feet was not considered an extraordinary depth.
"It is not difficult," the diver remarked, smiling at my efforts to question him in his own tongue. "If he would take the trouble, the white man could learn as well as we. But one must know how. You say that at six fathoms your head ached and your lungs were bursting. That was because you tired yourself by swimming down instead of letting a weight pull you to the bottom. And perhaps you held all of your breath until you rose—that is wrong. First of all, you must learn never to tire yourself beneath the water, and not to fill your lungs too full before you start. When your time is half up, you must begin to let the air out of your lungs, little by little,—a few bubbles now and then,—so that, as you reach the top, there will be scarcely any air left in you. If your ears ache, swallow; or hold your nose and blow—this will clear the little passages between your nose and ears, and stop the pain. That is all, except that in deep water you must never look up, nor bend your body backward. As for the sharks, there is little danger—not one in a hundred will do you harm. When that one comes, you will know him by the way he swims, and if there is sand or mud on the bottom, you can escape by throwing it up to cloud the water while you pull yourself quickly up the basket-rope. Otherwise you can only take refuge in a crevice of the coral, hoping that the shark will leave you before your lungs go flat. Conger eels are more to be feared; you must watch sharply as you pass the holes where they lie hidden. The big eel's jaws are like the jaws of a dog! If a conger seizes wrist or ankle, it is useless to struggle—ten strong men could not drag one from his hole. Three times, when I was young and careless, I have felt the teeth of the eel; see—my ankles bear the scars to this day. But I remembered what the old men had told me and lay quietly without struggling, till the conger relaxed his jaws to dart forward for a better hold. Each time I tore my ankle free and reached the surface with only the loss of a little blood. But we must get to work—the others are beginning to dive.”
The canoes returned to camp in mid-afternoon. The women were waiting to begin their task of cleaning shell, and there were exclamations of wonder as the day's catch was brought ashore. While the men went off to rest, their wives and daughters sat gossiping in little groups, hammering, chipping, and washing the mother-of-pearl. Half of the catch of each canoe had been set aside as my uncle's share, and some of his own people—Ivi, Ofai, and a few men and women from the settlement on Iriatai—set to work to clean it in a space reserved for them. I saw a number of women along the beach, filling the tins from the canoes with sea water, mashing the soft meat between their fingers, and pouring off the mess little by little, as they searched for any pearls that might have been overlooked. My uncle was delighted with the first day's work.
"It is going better than I had hoped," he said, as we sat in his stateroom that evening. "They brought in about two tons of shell to-day, and the quality is superb—nothing like it has ever been seen in this part of the Pacific. Your canoe had no luck, but the others netted four handsome pearls and a number of small ones for the day. That alone proves that there must be something in von Tesmar's theory. I've seen thousands of black-lipped oysters opened without a pearl. Old Maruia found a beauty to-day, with her usual luck. I gave her a thousand dollars for it, and any jeweler in Paris would jump at a chance to offer twice as much. You are smiling, eh, to think of that funny old woman having a thousand dollars, all at once? Why, in the eyes of her people Maruia is a millionaire! Twenty years of diving have made her the owner of a fine plantation, and one of the prettiest villas on Tahiti. Ah—I almost forgot to show you our first pearls."
He leaned over to twirl the knob of the safe, swung open the door, and took from the shelf a small tobacco-tin, which he opened and handed to me. It was lined with cotton and there, lying side by side like tiny eggs in a nest, were four pearls, pale, lustrous, and without a flaw. Three of them were like peas in size and the other was larger than the three together,—I had never seen a pearl of such size and beauty,—shimmering with a soft opalescence in its bed. My uncle took it in his hand, turning it to admire the perfection of its shape.
"You won't see a pearl like this five times in a season," he remarked. "There are many larger ones of greater value, but there is nearly always something wrong with them—a flattened spot, a flaw on the surface, a dullness in orient. Though not of great size, this is a really perfect pearl. If I had a mate for it I could ask my own price for the pair!
"I wish now that I had brought a few more men," he went on, "but I think we can make out by shutting down the copra-making and putting everyone at work. I am going to put Fatu and Ofai to diving, with a couple of stern-men from the village; they say we can find trees to build two or three more canoes. The others will have to work at cleaning shell, and from now on I'm counting on you and Marama to feed us. Tins are all right in an emergency, but it would be absurd to make ourselves ill on canned stuff in a place swarming with excellent fish. There are eight of us on board, counting the new cook, and I want you to supply us with fish. You can begin to-morrow—I'll give you the small canoe and whatever gear you need.”