By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories Part 7

Another furious outburst of yelping and barking--through which ran the quavering of voices of the affrighted natives--smote the stillness of the night. Then the bright light of torches of coconut leaves flashed below, nude figures ran swiftly to and fro among the houses, and then came a deep-voiced answering hail in English--

"_Hallo there! Who hails_?"

"Two white men," was the officer's quick reply. "We cannot get down.

Bear a hand with a torch; we have lost the track." Then as something flashed across his mind, he added, "Who are you? Are you a white man?"

"Yes. I am Tom Ledyard."

"Thank G.o.d for that! Send a light quickly. You and your people are in deadly danger."

In a few minutes the waiting men saw the gleam of torches amid the trees to their right, and presently a tall, bearded, white man appeared, followed by half a dozen natives. All were armed with muskets, whose barrels glinted and shone in the firelight.

Springing forward to meet him, North told his story in as few words as possible.

Ledyard's dark face paled with pa.s.sion. "By heaven, they shall get a b.l.o.o.d.y welcome! Now, come, sir; follow me. You must need rest badly."

As they pa.s.sed through the village square, now lit up by many fires and filled with alarmed natives, Ledyard called out in his deep tones--

"Gather ye together, my friends. The son of the Slaughterer is near.

Send a man fleet of foot to Mout and bid him tell Nena, the chief, and his head men to come to my house quickly, else in a little while our bones will be gnawed by Charlik's dogs."

Then with North and Macy besides him, he entered his house, the largest in the village. A woman, young, slender, and fair-skinned, met them at the door. Behind her were some terrified native women, one of whom carried Ledyard's youngest child in her arms.

"'Rita, my girl," said Ledyard, placing his hand on his wife's shoulder and speaking in English, "these are friends. They have come to warn us.

That young h.e.l.l-pup, Charlik, is attacking us tomorrow. But quick, girl, get something for these gentlemen to eat and drink."

But North and the harpooner were too excited to eat, and, seated opposite their host, they listened eagerly to him as he told them of his plans to repel the attack; of the bitter hatred that for ten years had existed between the people of Lea.s.se and the old king; and then--he set his teeth--how that Se, the friendly sister of the young king, had once sent a secret messenger to him telling him to guard his wife well, for her brother had made a boast that when Lea.s.se and Mout were given to the flames only Cerita should be spared.

"Then, ten days ago, Mr. North, thinking that this young tiger-cub Charlik knew that these people here were well prepared to resist an attack, I left in my cutter on a trading voyage to Ponape. Three days out the vessel began to make water so badly that I had to beat back. I only came ash.o.r.e yesterday."

He rose and walked to and fro, muttering to himself. Then he spoke again.

"Mr. North, and you, my friend"--turning to Macy--"have saved me and those I love from a sudden and cruel death. What can I do to show my grat.i.tude? You cannot now return to your s.h.i.+p; will you join your fortunes with mine? I have long thought of leaving this island and settling in Ponape. There is money to be made there. Join me and be my partners. My cutter is now hauled up on the beach--if she were fit to go to sea we could leave the island to-night. But that cannot be done. It will take me a week to put her in proper repair--and to-morrow we must fight for our lives."

North stretched out his hand. "Macy and I will stand by you, Ledyard. We do not want to ever put foot again on the deck of the _Iroquois_."

CHAPTER III

The story of that day of bloodshed and horror, when Charlik and his white allies sought to exterminate the whole community, cannot here be told in _all_ its dreadful details. Seventy years have come and gone since then, and there are but two or three men now living on the island who can speak of it with knowledge as a tale of "the olden days when we were heathens." Let the rest of the tale be told in the words of one of those natives of Lea.s.se, who, then a boy, fought side by side with Ledyard, North, and Macy.

"The sun was going westward in the sky when the two s.h.i.+ps rounded the point and anch.o.r.ed in what you white men now call Coquille Harbour. We of Lea.s.se, who watched from the sh.o.r.e, saw six boats put off, filled with men. There pulled inside the reef, and went to the right towards Mout; three went to the left. Letya (Ledyard), with the two white strangers who had come to him in the night, and two hundred of our men, had long before gone into the mountains to await Charlik and his fighting men, and their white friends. They--Letya and the Lea.s.se people--made a trap for Charlik's men in the forest. Charlik himself was in the boats with the other white men. He wanted to see the people of Lea.s.se and Mout driven into the water, so that he might shoot at them with a new rifle which Kesa or the other s.h.i.+p captain--I forget which--had given to him. But he wanted most of all to get Cerita, the wife of Letya, the white man. Only Cerita was to live. These were Charlik's words. He did not know that her husband had returned from the sea. Had he known that, he would not have given all his money and all his oil to the two white captains to help him to make Lea.s.se and Mout desolate and give our bones to his dogs to eat.

"It was a great trap--the trap prepared by Letya; and Charlik's men and the white men with them fell in it. They fell as a stone falls in a deep well, and sinks and is no more seen of men.

"This was the manner of the trap: The path down the cliff was between two high walls of rock; at the foot of the cliff was a thick clump of high panda.n.u.s trees growing closely together. In between these trees Letya built a high barrier of logs, encompa.s.sing the outlet of the path to Lea.s.se. This barrier was a half circle; the two ends touched the edge of the cliff, and the centre was hidden among the panda.n.u.s trees. On the top of this barrier the men of Lea.s.se waited with loaded muskets; lower down on the ground were others, they too had loaded muskets. On the top of the cliff where the path led down, fifty men were hidden. They were hidden in the thick scrub which we call _oap. Oap_ is a good thing in which to hide from an enemy, and then spring from and slay him suddenly.

"I, who was then a boy, saw all this. I heard Letya, our white man, tell the head of our village that Charlik's men would enter into the trap and perish. Then kava was made, and Letya and the head men drank. Kava is good, but rum is better to make men fight. We had no rum, but we had great love for Letya and his wife, and his two children, and great hate for Charlik. So we said, 'If this is death, it is death,' and every man went to his post--some to the barrier at the foot of the cliff, and some to the thicket of _oap_ on the summit. Cerita, the wife of Letya the Englishman, was weeping. She was weeping because Nena, the chief of Mout, was waiting in the house to kill her if her husband should be slain. But she did not weep because of the fear of death; it was for her children she wept. That is the way of women. What is the life of a child to the life of a man?

"Nena was my father's brother. He was a brave man, but was too old to fight, for his eyes were dimmed by many years. So he sat beside Cerita and her two children, with a long knife in his hand and waited. He covered his face with a mat and waited. It was right for him to do this, for Letya was a great man; and his wife, although she was a foreigner, was an honoured woman. Therefore though Nena might not look upon her face at other times, he could kill her if Letya said she must die. This was quite right and correct. A wife must be guided by her husband and do what is right and correct, and avoid scandal.

"For many hours the women in the houses waited in silence. Then suddenly they heard the thunder of two hundred guns, and the roaring of voices, then more muskets. They ran out of the houses and looked up to the cliff, and lo! the sky was bright as day, for when Charlik's people and the white men walked into the trap in the darkness, Letya and our people set alight great heaps of dry leaves and scrub, which were placed all along the barrier of logs. This was done so that they could see better to shoot. There were thirty or forty of Charlik's men killed by that volley. The white man who was leading them was very brave; he tried to climb over the barrier, but fell back dead, for a man named Sru thrust a whale-lance into his heart. All this time the other white men and the rest of Charlik's people were firing their muskets, but their bullets only hit the heavy logs of the barrier, and Letya and our people killed them very easily by putting their muskets through the s.p.a.ces. When the sailors saw their captain fall, they tried to run away, and the Lele warriors ran with them. But when they reached the path which led up between the cliff, it too was blocked, and many of them became jammed together between the walls, and these were all killed very easily--some with bullets, and some with big stones. Then those that were left ran round and found inside the trap, trying to get out. They were like rats in a cask, and our people kept killing them as they ran. Some of them--about thirty--did climb over, but all were killed, for when they jumped down on the other side our people were there waiting. At last four of the sailors made a big hole by tearing out two posts, and rushed out, followed by the Lele men. Letya was the first man to meet the sailors, and he told them to surrender. Two of them threw down their arms, but the other two ran at Letya, and one of them ran his cutla.s.s into him. It went in at the stomach, and Letya fell. We killed all these white sailors, but some of the Lele men escaped. That was a great pity, but then how can these things be helped?" The two strange white men who were fighting beside Le|tya, picked him up, and they carried him into his house. He was not dead, but he said, 'I shall soon die, take me to my wife.' I did not go with them to the house. I went into the barrier with the other youths to kill the wounded. It is a foolish thing not to kill wounded men; they may get better and kill you. So we killed them.

There were fourteen white men slain in that fight beside their captain.

"Before it was daylight some of our men set out along the beach to look for the boats. They did not want to kill any more white men, but they did want to kill Charlik. They were very fortunate, for before they had gone far on their way they saw three of the boats coming along close in to the beach. So they hid behind some rocks. Charlik was in the first boat; he was standing in the bow pointing out the way. When he came very close they all fired together, and Charlik's life was gone. He fell dead into the sea. Then the boats all turned seaward, and pulled hard for the s.h.i.+ps. Then before long, we saw the other three boats going back to the s.h.i.+ps; in these last were four of Charlik's men who had escaped. The boats were quickly pulled up, and the s.h.i.+ps sailed away, for those on board were terrified when they heard that all the white men they had sent to fight were dead.

"Letya did not die at once--not for two days. Cerita his wife and two white men watched beside him all this time. Before he died he called the head men to him, and said that he gave his small s.h.i.+p to the two white men, together with many other things. All his money he gave to his wife, and told her she must go away with the white men, who would take her back to her own people. To the head men he gave many valuable things, such as tierces of tobacco and barrels of powder. This was quite right and proper, and showed he knew what was correct to do before he died. We buried him on the little islet over there called Besi.

"The two white men and Cerita and her two children went away in the little s.h.i.+p. But they did not go to Cerita's country: they remained at Ponape, and there the tall man of the two--the officer--married Cerita.

All this we learnt a year afterwards from the captain of a whaling s.h.i.+p.

It was quite right and proper for Letya's widow to marry so quickly, and to marry the man who had been a friend to her husband."

_A Hundred Fathoms Deep_

There is still a world or discovery open to the ichthyologist who, in addition to scientific knowledge, is a lover of deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng, has some nerve, and is content to undergo some occasional rough experiences, if he elects to begin his researches among the many island groups of the North and South Pacific. I possessed, to some extent, the two latter qualifications; the former, much to my present and lasting regret, I did not. Nearly twenty-six years ago the vessel in which I sailed as supercargo was wrecked on Strong's Island, the eastern outlier of the fertile Caroline Archipelago, and for more than twelve months I devoted the greater part of my time to traversing the mountainous island from end to end, or, accompanied by a hardy and intelligent native, in fis.h.i.+ng, either in the peculiarly-formed lagoon at the south end, or two miles or so outside the barrier reef.

The master of the vessel, I may mention, was the notorious, over maligned, and genial Captain Bully Hayes, and from him I had learnt a little about some of the generally unknown deep-sea fish of Polynesia and Melanesia. He had told me that when once sailing between Aneityum and Tanna, in the New Hebrides, shortly after a severe volcanic eruption on the former island had been followed by a submarine convulsion, his brig pa.s.sed through many hundreds of dead and dying fish of great size, some of which were of a character utterly unknown to any of his native crew--men who came from all parts of the North and South Pacific. More remarkable still, some of these fish had never before been seen by the inhabitants of the islands near which they were found. There were, he said, some five or six kinds, but they were all of the groper family.

One of three which was brought on board was discovered floating on the surface when the s.h.i.+p was five miles off Tanna. A boat was lowered, but on getting up to it, the crew found they were unable to lift it from the water; it was, however, towed to the s.h.i.+p, hoisted on board, and cut into three parts, the whole of which were weighed, and reached over 300 lbs. In colour it was a dull grey, with large, closely-adhering scales about the size of a florin; the fins, tail, and lips were blue. Another one, weighing less, had a differently-shaped head, with a curious, pipe-like mouth; this was a uniform dull blue. A similar upturning from the ocean's dark depths of strange fish occurred during a submarine earthquake near Rose Island, a barren spot to the south-west of Samoa.

The disturbance threw up vast numbers of fish upon the reefs of Manua, the nearest island of the group, and the natives looked upon their great size and peculiar appearance with unbounded astonishment.

Without desiring to bore the reader with unnecessary details of my own experiences in the South Seas, but because the statement bears on the subject of this article--a subject which has been my delight since I was a boy of ten years of age--I may say that, nine years after the loss of Captain Hayes's vessel on Strong's Island, I was again s.h.i.+pwrecked on Peru, one of the Gilbert, or, as we traders call them, the "Line"

Islands. Here I was so fortunate as to take up my residence with one of the local traders, a Swiss named Frank Voliero, who was an ardent deep-sea fisherman, and whose catches were the envy and wonder of the wild and intractable natives among whom he lived; for he had excellent tackle, which enabled him to fish at depths seldom tried by the natives, who have no reason to go beyond sixty or eighty fathoms. In the long interval that had elapsed since my fis.h.i.+ng days in the Carolines and my arrival at Peru Island, I had gained such experience in my hobby in many other parts of the Pacific as falls to few men, and the desire to fish in deep water, and get something that astonished the natives of the various islands, had become a pa.s.sion with me. Voliero and myself went out together frequently, and, did s.p.a.ce permit, I should like to describe the fortune that attended us at Peru, as well as my fis.h.i.+ng adventures at Strong's Island.

In a former work I have endeavoured to describe that extraordinary nocturnal-feeding fish, the _palu_, and the manner of its capture by the Malayo-Polynesian islanders of the Equatorial Pacific, and in the present article I shall try to convey to my readers an idea of deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng in the South Seas generally. When I was living on the little island of Nanomaga (one of the Ellice Group, situated about 600 miles to the north-west of Samoa), as the one resident trader, I found myself in--if I may use the term--a marine paradise, as far as fis.h.i.+ng went.

The natives were one and all expert fishermen, extremely jealous of their reputation of being not only the best and most skilful men in Polynesia in the handling of their frail canoes in a heavy surf, but also of being deep-learned in the lore of deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng.

My arrival at the island caused no little commotion among the young bloods, each of whose chances of gaining the girl of his heart, and being united to her by the local Samoan missionary teacher, depended in a great measure upon his ability to provide sustenance for her from the sea; for Nanomaga, like the rest of the Ellice Group, is but little more than a richly-verdured sandbank, based upon a foundation of coral, and yielding nothing to its people but coconuts and a coa.r.s.e species of taro, called puraka. The inhabitants, in their low-lying atolls, possess no running streams, no fertile soil, in which, as in the mountainous isles of Polynesia, the breadfruit, the yam, and the sweet potato grow and flourish side by side with such rich and luscious fruits as the orange and banana, and pineapple--they have but the beneficent coconut and the evergiving sea to supply their needs. And the sea is kind to them, as Nature meant it to be to her own children.

The native missionary at Nanomaga was a Samoan. He was intended by nature to be a warrior, a leader of men; or--and no higher praise can I give to his dauntless courage--a boat-header on a sperm whaler. Strong of arm and quick of eye, he was the very man to either throw the harpoon or deal the death-giving thrust or the lance to the monarch of the ocean world; but fate or circ.u.mstance had made him a missionary instead. He was a fairly good missionary, but a better fisherman.

Three miles from Nanomaga is a submerged reef, marked on the chart as the Grand Coral Reef, but known to the natives as Tia Kau, "the reef."

It is in reality a vast mountain of coral, whose bases lie two hundred fathoms deep, with a flattened summit of about fifty acres in extent, rising to within five fathoms of the surface of the sea. This spot is the resort of incredible numbers of fish, both deep-sea haunting and surface swimming. Some of the latter, such as the _pala_ (not the _palu_)--a long, scaleless, beautifully-formed fish, with a head of bony plates and teeth like a rip-saw--are of great size, and afford splendid sport, as they are game fighters and almost as powerful as a porpoise.

They run to over 100 lbs., and yet are by no means a coa.r.s.e fish. In the shallow water on the top of this mountain reef there are some eight or nine varieties of rock cod, none of which were of any great size; but far below, at a depth of from fifty to seventy fathoms, there were some truly monstrous fish of this species, and I and my missionary friend had the luck to catch the four largest ever taken--221 lbs., 208 lbs., 118 lbs., and 111 lbs. I had caught when fis.h.i.+ng for schnapper, in thirty fathoms off Camden Haven, on the coast of New South Wales, a mottled black and grey rock cod, which weighed 83 lbs., and was a.s.sured by the Sydney Museum authorities that such a weight for a rock cod was rare in that part of the Pacific, but that _beche-de-mer_ fishermen on the Great Barrier Reef had occasionally captured fish of the same variety of double that size and weight.

Not possessing a boat, we fished from a canoe--a light, but strong and beautifully constructed craft, with "whalebacks" fore and aft to keep it from being swamped by seas when facing or running from a surf. The outrigger was formed of a very light wood, called _pua_, about fourteen inches in circ.u.mference. With the teacher and myself there usually went with us a third man, whose duty it was to keep the canoe head to wind, for anchoring in deep water in such a tiny craft was out of the question, as well as dangerous, should a heavy fish or a shark get foul of the outrigger. Capsizes in the daytime we did not mind, but at night numbers of grey sharks were always cruising around, and they were then especially savage and daring.

Leaving the pretty little village, which was embowered in a palm grove on the lee side of the island, we would, if intending to fish on the Tia Kau, make a start before dawn, remain there till the canoe was loaded to her raised gunwale pieces with the weight of fish, and then return.

Night fis.h.i.+ng on the Tia Kau by a single canoe was forbidden by the _kaupule_ (head men) as being too dangerous on account of the sharks, and so usually from ten to twenty canoes set out together. If one did come to grief through being swamped, or capsized by having the outrigger fouled by a shark, there was always a.s.sistance near at hand, and it rarely happened that any of the crew were bitten. In 1872, however, a fearful tragedy occurred on the Tia Kau, when a party of seventy natives--men, women, and children--who were crossing to the neighbouring Island of Nanomea, were attacked by sharks when overtaken on the reef by a squall at night. Only two escaped to tell the tale.[14]

If, however, we meant to try for _takuo_, a huge variety of the mackerel-tribe, or _lahe'u_, a magnificent bream-shaped fish, we had no need to go so far as the dangerous Tia Kau; three or four cable-lengths from the beach, and right in front of the village, we could lie in water as smooth as gla.s.s, and seventy fathoms in depth. Our bait was invariably flying-fish, freshly caught, or the tentacles of an octopus.

My lines were of white American cotton, and I generally used two hooks, one below and one above the sinker, both baited with a whole flying-fish, while my companions preferred wooden or iron hooks, of their own manufacture, and lines made from hibiscus bark or coconut fibre.