By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore - George Lewis Becke (mystery books to read txt) 📗

of the path to Leasse. This barrier was a half circle; the two ends touched the edge of the cliff, and the centre was hidden among the pandanus trees. On the top of this barrier the men of Leasse 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 spaces. 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 cutlass 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 ships. Then before long, we saw the other three boats going back to the ships; in these last were four of Charlik's men who had escaped. The boats were quickly pulled up, and the ships 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 ship 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 ship. 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 ship. 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 fishing, 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 fishing, 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 passed 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 ship 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 ship, 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 shipwrecked 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 fishing 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 passion with me. Voliero and myself went out together frequently, and, did space permit, I should like to describe the fortune that attended us at Peru, as well