The South Seas.

Auckland Star, Volume XXII, Issue 145, 20 June 1891, Page 4 (Supplement)

The South Seas.

By ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Author of "Treasure Island," "Kidnapped, "The Strange. Story of Dr. Jckyll and Mr. Hyde" etc.

[COPYRIGHT.]

PART lI.—LOW ISLANDS

CHAPTER XV.

fakarava: an atoll at hand. By a little before noon we were running down the coasb of our destination, Fakarava. The air very light, the eea near smooth, though still we wore accompanied by a continuous murmur from the beach, like the sound of a distant train. The iele is of a huge longitude, the enclosed lagoon thirty milts by ton or twelve, and the coval towpath, which they call the land, some eighty or ninety miles by (possibly) one furlong. That part by which we sailed was all raised, the underwood excellently green, the topping wood of cocoa palms continuous—a mark, if 1 had known it, of man's intervention. For once more, and once more unconsciously, we were within hail of fellow creatures, and that vacant boach was but a pistol shot from the capital city of tho archipelago. Bub the life of an atoll, unless it be encloßed, passes wholly on the shores of the lagoon. It i* there the villages are seated, there the canoes ply and 'are drawn up, and tho beach of the ocean ie a place accursed and deserted, the fit scene only for wizardry and shipwreck, and in the native belief a haunting ground of murderous spectres. By-and-bye we might perceive a breach in tho low barrier. The woods ceased, a glittering point ran into the sea, tipped with an emerald shoal, the mark of entrance. As we drew near we met a little run of sea—the private sea of the lagoon havino- there ite origin and end, and here, in the jaws of the gateway, trying vain conclusions with the more majestic heave of the Pacific, the Casco scarce avowed a shock. Bub there are times and circumstances when these harbour mouths of inland basins romit floods, deflecting, burying, and dismasting ships. For, conceive a lagoon perfectly sealed but in the one point, andthat of merely navigable width. Conceive the tide and wind to have heaped for hours together in thai) coral fold a superfluity of waters, and tho tide to change and the wind fall. Tho open sluice of some great reservoirs at home will give an image of thab unstemmable effluxion.

We were scarce well headed for the pass before all heads were craned over the rail. For the water, shoaling under our board, became changed in a moment to surprising hues of blue and grey ; and in its excellent transparency the coral branched and blossomed, and the fish of the inland sea cruised visibly below us, stained and striped, and even beaked like parrots. I have paid in my time to view many curiosities ; never one so curious as that first sight over the ship's rail in the lagoon of Fakarava. But let nob the reader be deceived with hope. I have since entered, I suppose, some dozen of lagoons in different parts of the Pacific, and the experience hae nover been repeated. That exquisite hue and transparency of submarine day, and these shoals of rainbow fish, have not enraptured me again. Before we could raise our eyes from that engaging spectacle the schooner had slipped betwixt the pierheads of the reef, and was already quite committed to the sea within. The containing shores are so little erected, and the lagoon itself is so great, that, for the more part, it seemed to extend, without a check, to the horizon. Here and there, indeed, where the reef carried an islet, like a signet ring upon a linger, there would beapencillingof palms: here and there the green wall of wood ran solid for a longth of miles ; and on the port hand, under the highest grove of treee, a few houses sparkled white—Rotoava, the metropolitan settlement of the Paumotus. Hither we beat in three tacks, and to an anchor close inshore, in the firsb smooth water since we had left San Franciaco, five fathoms deep, where a man might look overboard all day at the vanishing cable, the coral patches, and the many coloured fish.

Fakarava was chosen to bo the seat of Government from nautical considerations only. It is eccentrically situated ; the productions, even for a low island, poor ; the population neither many nor—for low islanders—induetrious. But the lagoon has two good passages, one to leeward, ono_ to windward, so that in all states of the wind it can be left and entered, and this advantage, for a government of scattered islands, was decisive. A pier of coral, landing stairs, a harbour light upon a staff and pillar, and two spacious Government bungalows in a handsome fence, give to the northern end of Rotoava a great air of civilisation. This is confirmed on the one hand by on empty prison, on the other hand by a gendarmerie pasted over with handbills in Tahitian, land-law notices from Papeete, and republican sentiments from Paris, signed (a little after date) •Jules Grdvy, Perifa'dente.' Quite at the far end a belifried Catholic chapel conclude? the town, and between on a smooth floor of candid coral sand and under the breezy canopy of cocoa palms, the houses of the natives stand irregularly scattered ; now close on the lagoon for the sake of the breeze, now back under the palms for love of shadow. About all these conveniences, when we landed there that afternoon, not a soul was to be seen nor a sound heard. But for the thunder of the surf on the far side, it eeemed you mighb have heard a piu drop anywhere about that capital city. There was something thrilling in the unoxpected silence, something yet more so in the unexpected sound. Here before us a sea reached to the horizon, rippling like an inland mere, and behold, close ab our back another eea assaulted with assiduous fury the reverse of the position. At night the lantern was run up and life a vacant pier. We landed and walked long. In one house lights werfa seen and voices heard, where the population (I was told) sat playing-cards. A little beyond, from deep in the darkness of the palm grove, we saw the glow and smelt the aromatic odour of a coal of a cocoanufc husk, a relic of the evening kitchen. Crickets sang; some shrill thing whistled in a tuft of weeds : and the mosquito hummed and stang. There was no other trace that nighb of man, bird, or insect in the isle. The moon, now three days old and still but a silver crescent on a atill risible sphere, shone through the palm canopy with vigorous and scattered lights. The alleys where we walked were smoothed and weeded like a boulevard ; here and there were plants set out ; here and there dusky cottages clustered in the shadow, some with balconies. A public garden by night, a rich and fashionable watering place in a. by-season, offer sights and vistas not dissimilar. And still, on fcbe one side, sti etched the lapping mere, and from the other the deep eoa still growled in the night. Bub ib was most of all on board, in the dead hours, when I had been better sleeping, that the spell of Fakarava seized and held me. The moon was down. The harbour lantern and two of the greater planets drew varied-coloured wanes on the lagoon. From shore the cheerful watch-cry of cocks rang out at intervals above the organ-point of surf. And the thought of this depopulated capital, this protracted thread of annular island, with its crest of cocoa palms and fringe of breakers, and that tranquil inland eea thab stretched before me till ib touched the stars, ran in my head for hours even with delight;.

So long as I stayed upon that isle these thoughts were constant. I lay down to sleep, and woke again with au unblunted sense of my surroundings. I was never weary of calling up the image of that narrow causeway, on which I had my dwelling, lying coiled like a serpent, tail to mouth, in the outrageous ocean, and I was never weary of passing—a mere quarterdeck parade—from the one side to the other from the shady, habitable shores of the lagoon to the blinding deeerb and uproarious breakers of the opposite beacb. The sense of insecurity in such'a thread of residence is more than fanciful. Hurricanes and tidal waves overleap these humble obstacles. Oceanu3 remembers his strength, and where houses stood and palms flourished, shakes hie white beard again over the barren coral. Fakarava itself has sufiered ; the trees immediately beyond my house were all of recent replantation ; and Anaa is only now recovered from a heavier stroke. I knew one who was then dwelling in the isle. He told, me that he and two ship captains walked to the sea beach. There for a while they viewed the oncoming breakers, till one of the Captains clapped suddenly his hand before his eyes and cried aloud that he could endure no longer to behold them. This was in the afternoon : in the dark hours of the night the sea burst upon the island like a Hood. The settlement was razed, all but the church and presbytery ; and, when day returned, the survivors 3aw themselves clinging in an abattis of uprooted cocoa palms and ruined houses. _ Danger is but a small consideration. But men are more nicely sensible of a discomfort ; and the atoll is a discomfortable home. There are some, and these probably ancient, where a deep soil has formed and the most valuable fruit trees prosper. I have walked in one, with equal admiration and surprise, through a forest of huge breadfruits, eating bananas, and stumbling among taro as I went. This was in the atoll of Namorik in the Marshall group, and stands alone in my experience. To give the opposite extreme, which is yet far more near the average, I will describe the soil and productions of Fakarava. The eurfaco of that narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral limestone, like volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I believe sot in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck. Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white, and these parts are the least productive. The plants (such as they are) spring from and love the broken coral, whence they grow with thab wonderful verdancy that makes the beauty of the atoll from the sea. The cocoa palm in particular luxuriates in that stern solum, striking down hia roofc3 to the brackish, percolated water, and bearing his green head in the wind with every evidence of health and pleasure. And yet even the cocoa palm mupt be helped in infancy with some extraneous nutriment, and through much of the low archipelago there is planted with each nut a piece of ship's biscuit and a rusty nail. The pandanus comes next in importance, being also a food tree, and ho, too, does bravely. A green bush called raiki rune everywhere ; occasionally a purao is seen, and thoro are several useless weeds. According to M. Cuzent, the whole number of plants on an atoll such as Fakarava will scarce exceed, even if it'teaches to, one score. Not a blade of grass appears, not a graiD of humus, save when a sack or two has been imported to make the semblance of a garden ; such gardens aa bloom in cities on the window sill. Insect life is sometimes dense. A cloud of mosquitoes, and what is far worae, a plague of flies blackening our food, has sometimes driven us from a ** meal on Apemama, and even in Fakarava the mosquitoes were a peet. The land crab may be eeen scuttling to his hole, and at night the rats besiege the houses and the artificial gardens. The ] crab 4? good eating : possibly so is the rat; I have not tried. Pandanus fruit is made, in the Gilberts, into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle with ab the end of a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no use for it. The rest of the food supply, in a destitute atoll such as Fakarava, can be summed up in the favourite jest of the archipelago—cocoanub beefsteak. Cocoanub green, cocoanub ripe, cocoanut germinated ; cocoanut to eat and cocoanuttodrink; cocoanut rawand cooked, cocoanub hot and cold—such is the bill of faro. And some of the entrees are no doubt delicious. The germinated null, cooked in the shell and eaten with a epoon, forms a good pudding; cocoanub milk— the expressed juice of a ripe nub, not the water of a green one—goes well in coffee, and ia a valuable adjunct in cookery through the South Saas, and cocoanub salad, if you be a millionaire and can afford to eat the value of a field of corn for your desert, is a dish to be remembered with affection. Bub when all is done there is a sameness, and the Israelites of the low islands murmur ab their manna.

The reader may think I have forgob the sea. The two beaches do certainly abound in life, and they are strangely different. In the lagoon the water shallows slowly on a bottom of fine slimy sand, dotted with clumps of growing coral, and, in the morning hour, belted with the shadows of the shoreaide palms. Then comes a strip of tidal beach on which the ripples lap. In the coral clumps the great holy water clam (Tridacne) grows plentifully ; a little deeper Hβ the beds of the pearl oyster and sail the resplendent fish . that charmed us at our entrance ; and these are all more or less vigourously coloured. Bab the other shells are white like lime, or faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible display; many of them dead besides, and badly rolled. On the ocean side on the mounds of the steep beach, over all the widbh of the reef right out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny of the cutting coral, under every scattered fragment, an incredible plenty of marine life displays the most wonderful variety and brilliancy of hues. The reef iteelf has no passage of colour, bub is imitated by some shell. Purple and red and white, and green and yellow, pied and striped and clouded, the living shells wear in every combination the livery of the dead reef—if the reef be dead—so that the eye is continually baffled and the collector continually deceived. I have taken sheila for stones and stones for shells, the one as often as the other. A prevailing character of the coral is to be dotted with small spots of red, and it is wonderful how many varieties of shell have adopted the samo fashion and donned the disguise of the red spot. A shell I had found in plenty in the Marquesas I found here also unchanged in all things else, but there were, the red spots. A lively little crab wore the same marking. The case of the hermit or soldier crab was more conclusive, being the result of conscious choice. This nasty little wrecker, scavenger, and squatter has learned the value of a spotted house ; so it be of the right colour, he will chooae the smallest shard, tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and go about the world half naked ; but I never found him in this imperfect armour unless it was marked with' the red spot.

Some two hundred yards distanb is the beach of the lagoon. Collecb the sheila from each, seb them side fay aide, and you would suppose they came from different hemispheres ; the one so pale, the other so brilliant; the one prevalently white, the obher of a score of hues and infecked with the scarlet spot like a disease. My own double collection of shells, lons* carefully held apart, was ab lasb ruthlessly commingled, and my ignorance ia too complete for reasoning. The fact of this opposition, at two hundred yards of distance, is, however, sure; and ib seems the more strange, since the hermit crabs pass and repaea the island, and I haye met tb,Qin, by.

the residency well, which is about central, journeying either way. Without doubt many of the shells in the lagoon are dead. But why are they dead ? Without doubt the living shells have a very different background set for imitation. But why are these so different ? Wo are only on the threshold of the mysteries. Either beach, I have said, abounds with life. On the sea side and in certain atolls this profusion of vitality is even shocking ; the rock under foot is mined with it. I have broken off—notably in Funafuti and Arorai—great lumps of ancienb weathered rock that rang under my blows like iron, and the fracture has been full of pendans tvorme as long as my hand, as thick as a child's finger, of a slightly pinkish white, and set as clo=e as three or even four to the square inch. Even in the lagoon, where certain shellfish seem to sicken, others (it in notorious) prosper exceedingly and make tha riches of these islands. Fish, too, abound ; the lagoon is a closed fish pond, such as might rejoice the fancy»of an abbot: sharks swarm there, and chiefly round the passages, to feast upon this plenty, and you would suppose that man had only to prepare his angle. Alas, it is not so. Of those painted fish that came in hordea about the entering Casco, some bore poisonous spines and others were poisonous if eaten. The stranger musb refrain, or take his chance of painful and dangerous sickness. The native, on his own isle, is a safe guide ; transplant him to the next, and he is helpless as yourself. For it is a question both of time and place. A fish caught in a lagoon maybe deadly ; the same fieh caught the same day at sea, and only a few hundred yards without the passage, will be wholesome eating. In a neighbouring isle perhaps the case will be reversed, and perhaps a fortnight later you shall be able to eat of them indifferently from within and from without. According to the natives these bewildering vicissitudes are ruled by the movement of the heavenly bodies. The beautiful planet Venus plays a great part in all island tales and customs ; and among other functions, some of them more awful, she regulates the season of good tish. With Venus in one phase, as we had her, certain fish were poisonous in the lagoon ; with Venus in another, the same fiah was harmless and a valued article of diet.

Venus being the Paumotuan star of Hades and timekeeper of the dead, was perhaps not unnaturally saddled with this responsibility ; the light that chases spectres might well be thought to sicken fish. By all accounts besides the periodicity ie, for each island, regular. The difficulty is that ib should vary and be even reversed from isle to isle. Touched with a sense of this, JM. Wilmofc, an able man — the author at least of an able pamphlet on the archipelago—made a number of wellconsidered experiments. Catching , wholesome fish on the outside, he had them sunk in vivaria to different depths and over different bottoms in the lagoon. Over pearl shell it; appears they remained innocuous, but the proximity of certain sorts of coral, above all in the season of its flowering, poisoned them in an exposure of twelve days. M. Wilmot found, ruoreovar, that the time of flowering varied in the different kinds of coral, and that ail appeared to follow the phases of the moon. Here, then, are the elements of a theory agreeing well with native observation. Bub the author must have been damped to find an exception in hisown archipelago—the lagoon of Takaroa, where the fish is at all seasons equally wholesome. And I will give him another. At the isle of Funafuti, the most singular and to me the most odious of atolls, the fiah in the lagoon is always good, the fish in the sea always poisonous.

A crafty theorist may yeb find the means to harmonise these contradictions, and Without doubt there is some truth in this hypothesis of the poieonous coral. It adds a last touch of humour to the thought of this precarious annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is nob of honest work, bue organic—part alive, parb putrescent, even the clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned the most stubborn boulder burrowed in within by worms, the lightest dust venomous as an apothecary's drugs. J. early believed, for instance, that the blowing sand of atolls played a part in the history of those obstinate sores which make the tortures of low island life, and experiment has strengthened the opinion. And here a caution comes in my mind. A naturalist might land upon some atoll, and seek to repeat my collections of shells. The chances are he would be disappointed. I have landed since on many atolls, and I have never even been reminded of that tendency of opposition observed in Fakarava, each of these lawless islands being, it would seem, a law unbo itself. And again, he might; come to Fakarava itself, and even there ib is possible he might be disappointed. During my visit many of the fish were bad. The coral of the lagoon must) have been passing through a deadly period, and perhaps the shells of the lagoon had suffered. Suppose, then, my naturalist to come when the conditions were reversed, and he might look almost in vain for an opposition that stared me in the face. One thing at leasb he might be able to explain. On the outer reef, where all life seems bound to imitation, two creatures stand oub trenchantly withoub the least concealment; ink-black eea urchine, and horrible ink-black sea slugs. The latter, ib ia true, will sometimes bedusb themselves with eand till scarce distinguishable. The firsb, with their coronet of sable spikes, are always crudely conspicuous, f]

{To ha Continued.)