The Paumotu Islands
Chapter X The People of the Atolls — Including Mr. Mumpus
From the moment I first set eyes on an atoll it fascinated me, and its lure has not departed with the years.
Think of any place in the world that you have seen, and an atoll is different. It is the fairy ring of the sea. Out of the depths it comes, rearing a vegetation and people of its own, and often into the depths it goes, leaving no trace. How? Why? Scientists murmur something about the coral polyp; but, not being a scientist, I prefer my theory of the fairy ring. That was how it looked to me many years ago, and that was how it looked again from the masthead of the dream ship.
We had left the Marquesas seven days previously, and were now becalmed in that maze of atolls known as the Paumotu or Low Archipelago.
Imagine a circular beach of glistening coral sand and green vegetation from five to fifty yards wide, thrust up through the sea for all the world like a hedge, and enclosing a garden of coral fronds submerged under water so still and clear as to be hardly visible, and you have an atoll as I saw it from the masthead.
And there were myriads of them—big atolls, little atolls, fat and thin atolls—fading away into the shimmering heat haze of the horizon. The fairies must have been mighty busy down this way.
I descended to the deck and things mundane. What to do when becalmed in a network of coral reefs and seven-knot currents was the problem that confronted us. I had no text book on the subject, but by some miracle the monstrosity was persuaded to fire on two cylinders.
Imagine yourself, then, passing through the narrow gateway in the hedge—I should say, passage in the reef—and coming to anchor in the garden—I mean lagoon.
It is sunrise, and already the pearling canoes are putting out from the village and scurrying to the fishing grounds over the glassy surface of the lagoon.
A fine people, these of the atolls—upstanding, deep of chest, a race of mermen if ever there was one. From birth up, if they are not in the water they are on it or as close to it as they can get. Take them inland and they die. So they squat on their canoe outriggers, smoking, chatting, laughing, until the spirit moves them (nothing else will), and one of their number drops from sight, feet first, with hardly a ripple.
You look down and you see him, as though through green-tinted glass, crouched on the sloping floor of the lagoon. He is plucking oysters as one would gather flowers in a garden. There is no haste in his movements, nothing to indicate that there is any time limit to his remaining down there, under anything from five to fifteen fathoms of water.
A minute passes, two minutes; still he pursues his leisurely way, plucking to right and left and thrusting the shells into a network bag about his neck.
The man of the atolls is in a world of his own where none but his kind can follow, and they still squat on their outriggers, chatting and laughing like a crowd of boys at a swimming pool.
One alone seems interested in the diver’s movements: his mate, a fair-skinned woman, with streaming blue-black hair, leans over the gunwale of the canoe, looking down through a kerosene tin water-glass.
The diver’s dark figure against the pale-green coral becomes more blurred; a stream of silver air bubbles floats upward. Three minutes by the watch have come and gone. To the landsman it seems incredible; and even then there is no haste, no shooting to the surface and gasps for breath.
The dark body becomes clearer in outline as it emerges from the depths, and slowly, quite slowly, floats upward until a jet-black head breaks water and the diver clings to the gunwale of the canoe, inhaling deep but unhurried breaths and exhaling with a long-drawn whistle peculiarly his own.
In what way this whistle helps matters it is impossible to say, but whether a habit, a pose, or an aid in the regaining of breath, it is universal throughout the Paumotus; so much so that a busy afternoon with the pearlers sounds more like a tin-whistle band than anything else.
With the people of the atolls the ability to remain under water for long periods is more than an art; it is second nature. Instinctively, they do just those things that make one breath suffice for three minutes and sometimes four.
Preparatory to a descent they do not take a deep breath and hold it until the surface is reached again. They fill their lungs with a normal amount of air, which lasts them about a minute and a half; the other minute and a half is occupied in its exhalation. Then, too, every movement below water is made with the utmost conservation of energy; yet a good diver can bring up a hundred and fifty kilos of shell in a day, which means in the neighbourhood of six hundred francs.
And it is just these same nimble francs that tempt the Paumotan to abase his talents, even as others are tempted the world over. For the sake of a few more shells, another cluster a little farther down, he remains below just that trifle longer than is good for him, and in time it tells. The eyes become bloodshot and start from the head, he goes deaf, or paralysis seizes him.
“But the women are the worst,” a sun-baked trader informed me; “the worst or the best, as you like to put it,” he added, grinning. “They’ll go on till they burst, or pretty near it. Bargain-counter instinct, I guess. We call it the ‘bends.’”
‘“The bends?’”
“Yes, one of ’em goes down, and down; sees some more shell a bit lower, and some more a bit lower than that. Then she’s reaching out for one last flutter at something like twenty fathoms when they get her the ‘bends,’ I mean. You can see her fighting against them, but it’s no good; they bring her knees to her chin, and she can’t straighten up, and she drops the last lot of shell she’s gathered, and hates that worse than the ‘bends’.”
“What does she do?”
“Nothing, except lie there crumpled up until her mate fetches her up and massages her back to life. Then she’s no sooner conscious than she’s down again.
“Water never kills this crowd; it takes dry land to do that. Why, there’s a diver close on fifty years old here, paralyzed clean down one side. He can’t walk, but he can swim. He gets them to carry him down to the reef and heave him in; says it’s the only place he can get any comfort.”
“How about sharks?”
“Oh, there are sharks all right, but the diver’s mate looks after that; gives the signal, and they’re all in after him double quick.”
“Finish him off with knives, eh?”
The sun-baked trader smiled reminiscently.
“Well, hardly,” he said. “A dead shark makes a square meal for the others, and that’s all. What they need is an example, and they get it. They’re cruising about sometime when they come on one of their number with no tail, one fin, and sundry other decorations that wouldn’t exactly please the S.P.C.A. He is not nice to look at, and they clear out of a place where such things are possible.
“When an island’s thrown open for pearlings, we spend weeks mutilating sharks before the divers’ll go down, and small blame to them, I say. Sharks are—well, sharks.”
The casual reader picks up a good deal of information about “gold rushes” and such-like romantic undertakings from the plethora of novels on the subject; but who has ever heard of a pearl-rush? Yet they occur every year in the Paumotus.
The group belongs to the French, and is administered from the local seat of government at Papeete, Tahiti. Here a heterogeneous collection of humanity awaits the opening of the pearling season like a hovering cloud of mosquitoes.
There are pearl buyers from Paris and London, representatives of shell-buying concerns from Europe and America; British, Chinese, and Indian traders, speculative schooner skippers and supercargoes, not to mention the riff-raff of the beaches, all intent on pickings from the most prolific pearling islands in the South Pacific.
And this is the law of the group—infringed, circumvented, broken, but still the law—that although under French Government, the Paumotus and all they produce belong to the Paumotans.
Still further to protect the native, diving apparatus is banned throughout the group. The oyster, as he brings it from the water, is the diver’s property. He must open the shell aboard his canoe before touching land, remove the flesh, and, after testing it for pearls (usually by kneading it so thoroughly between finger and thumb as to crush the life out of it), throw it back into the lagoon to propagate its species. Should he find a pearl, it is his also.
It is then up to the cloud of “mosquitoes” before mentioned to get both shell and pearl out of him as best it can. One can imagine the buzzing and biting that ensue.
From the buyer’s point of view, the sooner and the deeper he gets a good diver into his debt the better. He then has some hold. Consequently, he spoon-feeds his selected divers like the infants that they are. Tinned delicacies of all sorts, Prince Albert suits of unbelievable thickness and cut, silk socks, and stockings are a good diver’s for the asking during the closed season.
With shell at one thousand dollars a ton in Philadelphia (the largest consumer at the present time), and pearls soaring to apparently limitless heights, all will be well when work starts.
And the diver? From long experience of “mosquitoes,” he is by no means slow. Shortly before the season opens he is presented with a bill that would cause most of us to register apoplexy. He looks at it, grins, and proceeds to dive. He also proceeds to make caches of shell on the floor of the lagoon, only bringing up half of what he collects in payment of his debts. At night he retrieves his cache and sells for cash to the smaller “mosquitoes” who infest the beach. As for pearls, from the moment the diver’s finger and thumb encounter foreign matter in the flesh of the oyster, he becomes about as communicative on the subject as his catch. Should the truth leak out, his find will promptly be confiscated in payment of his everlasting debts, or the wily pearl-buyer will use threats of exposure to reduce the price.
No, the diver, if he is up to snuff, will work his passage to Papeete on a schooner, sell to a Chinaman, who neither asks questions nor tells tales, and proceed to enjoy himself according to his lights.
Blossoming into a Prince Albert suit, a red tie, and silk socks, he will hire a car, load it up with lady friends and execrable rum, and vanish into thin air for a fortnight, at the end of which time he has somehow contrived to get rid of all he possessed and is perfectly prepared to return to his atolls and his debts. He has lived like a white man and cheated the “mosquitoes”; what more can Paumotan heart desire?
The thing we call progress has slain the picturesque in most industries of this world, but not so with pearling in the Paumotus. During the season, the beach of one of these atolls resembles an Old-World fair more than anything I can call to mind.
A crazy merry-go-round brays and rocks in the shade of the palms, luring the adventurous to invest three pearl shells in a ride on a broken-necked camel. The ubiquitous movie “palace” has reared its unlovely head, and for more shell or five cocoanuts one may witness on the shores of a South Sea lagoon the battered remnants of a love affair enacted not far from Los Angeles. I have often wondered what happens to all the worn-out films in the world. Now I know.
This season, and for the first time, the people of the atolls are to be initiated into the mysteries of ice-cream. Truly, the “mosquito” stops at nothing.
It was down in this part of the world that I met Mr. Mumpus, though that is not his name. To reach him you must pick your way with the motor auxiliary through a maze of reefs, lie off and on, because there is no pass into his lagoon, and plod through blazing sand in a temperature of ninety in the shade, which there is not. But it is worth it.
You will probably find him in the pearl orchard, a green-lined umbrella in one hand and a dripping oyster shell in the other. He will stare fixedly at you for upward of half a minute and then say: “How the devil did you get here?” with a brusqueness that is alarming until you get used to it.
In my own case I indicated the dream ship, looking particularly smart in her recent coat of white paint.
“What! In that thing?” remarked Mr. Mumpus.
I was smitten to silence for a space.
“I heard you were making pearls,” I told him on regaining something of my equanimity, “and thought you might be so good as to tell me about it.”
“Come up to the house,” he barked, and led the way to a rambling erection of corrugated iron and palm leaves containing, as far as I could make out, a gaping “boy” of uncertain origin, some empty soap boxes, and a microscope.
“There’s nothing new in what I’m doing here,” he told me over two brimming shells of cocoanut milk, “nothing that the Chinese have not been doing for centuries. The pearl is a disease of the oyster; introduce the disease and you will get a pearl.”
“Quite,” said I.
“No one has succeeded up to the present,” continued Mr. Mumpus, “but there is no reason why it should not be done in time, no reason at all. I am appreciably nearer than I was a year ago, for instance. In the meantime, I am producing the ordinary blisters, or half pearls, with various foundations. You see, the cestoid——”
But I cannot hope to set down here all that this amazing man told me in scientific jargon, as he strode back and forth across his mat-strewn floor.
He was a doctor by profession, had tired of it, and come to the islands to pursue his hobby of pearl culture. He takes an oyster from the lagoon, opens it very carefully by the slow insertion of a wooden wedge, and places a pilule of beeswax against the main muscle. The mantle of the oyster then covers it with mother-of-pearl, and in the course of a few months our friend cuts from the shell a very fair imitation of a half pearl.
But, as most people are aware, the real pearl comes from the flesh of the oyster, and it is on the production of the genuine article that Mr. Mumpus centres his efforts. He breeds oysters in the lagoon and dissects them under the microscope for signs of the parasite that undoubtedly causes the pearl. He injects into the flesh of others all manner of foreign matter.
Down there on his speck of an atoll he treats the oyster as a surgeon treats an interesting case and—who knows?—some day there may burst upon an astonished world the name of a man who can make pearls, and that name will not be Mr. Mumpus.