Friendly Islanders

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31077, 4 June 1966, Page 4

Friendly Islanders

Harpoon In My Hand. By Olaf Ruhen. Minerva, Auckland. With 26 photographs and a map of the Tongan group of islands. 183 pp.

This is a friendly, informative book about the friendly people of the well-named Friendly Isles—more formally, the Kingdom of Tonga. A former New Zealander now living in Sydney, Mr Ruhen brings the eye of an artist and the touch of a poet to his prose, and in consequence the reader receives a very alive impression of the scenery and the sea, and of the poor but kindly people the author is proud to call his friends.

Mr Ruhen loves the sea and the people who go down to it in ships. He it was who wrote the best-selling “Minerva Reef,” an account of an epic shipwreck of some years ago, and his admiration for the gallant survivors of that tremendous trial of courage and stamina persuaded him to take his wife Madeleine to Nukualofa to renew friendships so valued.

“We’ll build you a little hut by the beach,” one bf the survivors, David Fifita, had said. “We’ll make it out of coconut fronds and furnish it Tonganstyle, and you can live like Tongans, you and Madeleine. Then in the evenings we’ll dance and sing and drink a little kava, and all our friends will come. You’ll find out what it really means to be a Tongan. We’ll build a whaleboat and when it’s fiinished we’ll go whaling. ...” And that it how It was, except that instead of building

a boat they repaired and equipped an old one, the author helping the naturailyexpert island craftsmen. It was his ambition to catch a whale and see how these intrepid men take a frail craft within harpoon and lance distance of the gigantic sea mammal, which drags them along till it succumbs and is then towed home for expeditious butchering into prized meat. Alas, Mr Ruhen’s boat did not catch a whale. They harpooned a monster, but after towing them excitingly it got away with harpoon and broken line. They encountered many others; they saw and heard them blowing, and saw them frolicking in stupendous jumps high out of the sea; but fate was against them as far as a capture was concerned. Nevertheless, there is much excitement in his book, including the authenticated story of Totau, who captured a whale single-handed and without benefit of boat. From a boat he harpooned a whale calf (a very heavy, active animal in spite of its youth). On the end of a rope, he followed it into the sea and, except once, remained attached when the quarry dived. The exception was when the dive was for so long that Totau had to let go and surface. But so good were his judgment and his swimming that he was in the right place when the calf came up for air. He recovered the trailing rope and got near enough to give the harpoon a final, fatal thrust. This sounds like a fish story, but Mr Ruhen knew Totau and men who could vouch for it