Читать книгу Wild Life in Southern Seas - Becke Louis - Страница 9

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History does repeat itself. The story of the Cornish clergyman who in the middle of his discourse jumped down from his pulpit, and, imploring his hearers to “start fair,” raced them to the scene of a promising wreck, has its Polynesian counterpart—clergyman, church, and all. Some little difference there is, however, with regard to other accessories of the South Sea story; as the coloured minister, instead of the regulation surplice and black trousers, wore a white shirt only, and trousers were a missing quantity. He was, as I have said, a native clergyman, and lived and laboured—“laboured” is merely euphemistic, as any one knows who has knowledge of native teachers—on one of the atolls in the Caroline Islands. Service had commenced, and Miti Paulo Ionatani (Anglicè—the Reverend Paul Jonathan) had just given out the first hymn, when there was a sudden commotion among his squatting congregation. A native, his bronzed skin streaming with perspiration and his frame panting with excitement, had put his head and shoulders through one of the low, wide windows of the sacred edifice (from the outside, of course), and the Reverend Paul, in severe but dignified tones, called him an unmannerly pig, and then asked him what he wanted.

“The sharks are coming in, your reverence!”

In an instant the deep religious calm of the congregation was broken up, and half a minute later the church was cleared in a mad rush to get to the beach, launch the canoes, and go a-fishing for sharks, the minister following as hard as he could run, divesting himself of his garment of office by the way. Like his Cornish prototype, he meant to have a share of the plunder. (I wonder whether the Cornish story originated from the Polynesian story, or vice versâ. Both are true.)

But shark-catching means money down there in the Carolines and the equatorial atolls of the North and South Pacific; and sometimes vast numbers of sharks, swimming together in “schools,” like sardines, enter the lagoons at certain seasons of the year and cause no end of excitement among the brown-skinned people; just as much, in fact, as that which occurs when a “school” of bottle-nosed whales is driven ashore by the inhabitants of the Faröe Islands.

Every now and then one may see noted in Australian papers the arrival of an island trading vessel bringing, among other cargo, so many tons of shark-fins; and the uninitiated naturally wonder for what on earth shark-fins are brought to the marts of civilisation. That is easily answered—they are regarded as a great delicacy by John Chinaman. (By the way, it seems an oversight that no one in England thought of presenting Li Hung Chang, when he visited England a year ago, with a string of shark-fins in return for his inexhaustible presents to the British aristocracy of packets of tea; a dozen or so—especially if not quite dried—would have moved him greatly.)

For the last fifty years shark-catching has been followed on a large or small scale by the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, from Tonga in the south to the beauteous Pelews in the far north-west. Until of late years only the fins and tails were cut off, dried on strings, and sold by the natives to either resident traders or wandering trading vessels. By these latter they are taken to Sydney, and there sold to Chinese merchants, who in their turn ship them home to China. But nowadays not only are the fins and tails dried by the natives in increasing quantities, but the whole skin is stripped off, pegged out like a bullock’s hide, and sold to the white men. But the skins do not go to China. They are sold to German trading vessels, and no one even to this day knoweth for what purpose they are used; some new process of tanning the intractable cuticle of Jack Shark has been discovered in Germany, it is said. No one knows more than this; probably the only man who does know is that modern Lokman the Wise, the Emperor William: may he tell us dull English people all about it some day when he, in his Improvement-of-the-Universe Scheme, writes us something on the subject of cross-breeding in sharks, whereby a toothless and amiable variety may replace the present breed, which have no manners to speak of and are always hungry.

But I want to say something of how and where sharks are caught and of those who catch them.

In the high, fertile islands of the North and South Pacific, such as Samoa, the Hervey Group, and the Society Islands there is but little of this dangerous fishing done. Nature there is too bounteous to the brown-skinned people. Born to a fruitful soil, with abundance of both vegetable and animal food, the natives have no need to exploit the ocean day and night in order to live, as do the wild, sun-baked denizens of the low-lying Equatorial atolls of the Gilbert and Marshall groups and the countless coral islets of the Western Carolines, where the people know naught of the joys of the mealy yam or taro, and the toothsome baked bread-fruit and sucking-pig are not. For there is nothing to eat on such islands as those but coconuts and fish, varied occasionally by puraka—a huge, coarse vegetable as thick as an elephant’s leg, with a touch of elephantiasis thrown in.

But there are plenty of sharks. They swarm. Go out in a canoe at night-time; anywhere in one of the lagoons, light a torch of au lama (dried coconut leaves), and look. Perhaps you may only see one or two at first, swimming to and fro at a few fathoms’ depth; in ten minutes you may see fifty! and they are all hungry. A bad short time would a man have did he fall overboard at night. In daylight the natives know no fear of Jack, but they do not like getting capsized in the darkness; and the darker the night the more danger. And even when he is young, and not a fathom long from his nose to his tail, Jack can snap off the arm of a full-grown man as easily as a man can swallow an oyster.

So, there being plenty of sharks, the Ellice, Gilbert, or Marshall islander is resigned to the poverty of his island soil, catches his shark, and is thankful. For he sells Jack’s fins and tail to the trader for tobacco, calico, guns, ammunition, and gin—when gin can be bought; and his wife, when she meets her brown-skinned lord and master on the beach as he returns from fishing, looks anxiously into the bloodstained canoe to see how many kapakau (fins) he has taken. Two or three dozen or so, when dried, may mean that lovely hat trimmed with violent green ribbon on a bilious red and yellow ground that the trader showed her one day. Then she picks up the “take,” puts it into a basket, and an hour later Jack’s motive power is suspended on a cinnet line between two coconut trees, drying for market.

All the people of the Gilbert Islands are expert shark fishermen; but the men of Paanopa (Ocean Island) claim to be, and are, facile princeps in the forcible art of clubbing a shark before he knows what is the matter with him, and what the horrid thing is that has got into his mouth.

First of all, though, something about Ocean Island itself. It is but a tiny spot, rising abruptly from the sea, about 300 feet in height, situated fifty miles south of the Equator, and in 168 deg. 25 min. east longitude, and inhabited by a fierce, turbulent race of dark-skinned Malayo-Polynesians, allied in want of manners and fulness of beastly customs to their Gilbert Island neighbours, three hundred miles to the windward. Half a cable’s length from the land itself, and not twenty yards from the flat shelving coral reef that juts abruptly out from the narrow strip of beach, the water is of great depth—fifty, in some places ninety, fathoms deep.

At the first break of dawn the men, naked save for a girdle of grass around their loins, sally out from their grey-roofed houses of thatch, and launch their canoes for the day’s work. Wonderful canoes these are, too—mere shells composed of small strips of wood sewn together with coconut cinnet. In no one of them will you see a plank more than two feet in length and six inches in width; many are constructed of such small pieces of wood so deftly fitted and sewn together that one wonders how the builders ever had the patience to complete the craft. But wood is scarce on Ocean Island; and whenever—as sometimes happens —a canoe is smashed by the struggles of a more than usually powerful shark, the tiny timbers are carefully picked up by other canoes and restored to the owners, who fit them together by degrees until a new hull is pieced together.

Perhaps twenty or more canoes go out together. No need to go far. Just outside the ledge of the reef is enough, for there Jack is waiting, accompanied by all-sized relatives, male and female. Lying upon the little grating of crossed sticks that reaches from the outrigger to the gunwale is the tackle. Rude it is, but effectual—a huge wooden hook, cunningly trained when it was a young tree-root into growing into the proper shape, and about forty fathoms of strong coconut-fibre rope—as thick as whale-line and as strong. Taking a flying fish, or a piece of the flesh of a shark caught the previous day, a native ties the bait around the curve of the great hook. Then he lowers the line, which sinks quickly enough, for the wooden hook is as heavy as it is big. Presently the line tautens— Jack is there. The steersman strikes his paddle into the water to bring the canoe’s head round, the man holding the line gives it a sudden jerk that makes the outrigger rise a foot out of the water and nearly upsets the little craft, and a third native handles a short iron-wood club expectantly. Perhaps, if Jack is a big fellow, he will obstinately refuse to turn, and make a strenuous effort to get away deep down into the blue gloom, a hundred fathoms below. Sometimes he does; apparently nothing short of a steam-winch at the other end of the line would then stop him; and so fathom by fathom the line descends, and the steersman and “clubber” look anxiously at the few fathoms left coiled up on the outrigger platform. Generally, however, Jack is turned from his direct downward course by a sudden jerk. Then all hands “tail on” to the line to get him to the surface before he gets his head free again for an attempt at another dive.

Meanwhile, every other canoe has got fast to a shark, and now there arises wild clamour and much bad language as the lines get foul, and canoes bang and thump against each other. Perhaps four or five will be in a lump, together with one or two sharks lashing the water into foam in the centre and turning over and over with lightning-like rapidity in the hope of parting the line or smashing the outrigger. This latter is not a nice thing to happen, and so the clubmen anxiously watch for a chance to deal each struggling brute a blow on the head. Often this is not easily effected, and often too it is not needed, for the shark may let his tail come within the reach of the steersman’s arm, and a slashing blow from a heavy-backed, keen knife takes all the fight out of Jack—at one end, at any rate; if it is only a young fish, however, the tail is grasped by a native and cut off before Jack knows that he has lost it.

By and by those natives who are fast to a big fellow call out to their comrades that their shark is too heavy and strong to bring alongside and kill, and ask for an implement known to whalers as a “drogue”—a square piece of wood with a hole through the centre which, attached to the end of a line, gives such resisting power that the shark or whale dragging it behind him is soon exhausted. So the “drogue” is passed along from another canoe, and being made fast to the end of a small but strong line, the canoe is carefully hauled up as near as possible to savage, struggling Jack. At the loose end of the line is a noose, and watching a favourable moment as Jack lifts his tail out of the water, the steersman slips it over, and away goes line and “drogue”—the man who is holding on to the main line casting it all overboard so as to give the shark plenty of room to exhaust himself. In ten minutes more he is resigned to his fate, gives in, is clubbed in peace and towed ashore—that is, if his ocean prowling friends and relatives do not assimilate him unto themselves before his carcase is dragged up on to the reef, and skinned by the savage-eyed Ocean Island women.