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I have hardly ever observed a person so dull or unimaginative that his eye did not glisten as he watched a shoal of flying-fish rise from the sea, and skim along for several hundred yards. There is something in it so totally dissimilar to everything else in other parts of the world, that our wonder goes on increasing every time we see even a single one take its flight.
About seventy people were to go, and all that day the little village busied itself in preparing for the Nanomeans gifts of foods cooked PURAKA, fowls, pigs, and flying-fish. Atupa, the heathen chief, was troubled in his mind in those days of August 1872. The JOHN WILLIAMS had touched at the island and landed a Samoan missionary, who had pressed him to accept Christianity.
We sailed along day after day over the land-waves as on a voyage. To ride over those lonely divides in the fresh morning air made us feel as if we had breakfasted on flying-fish. We felt what Shelley sings of the power of "all waste and solitary places;" we felt their boundlessness, their freedom, their wild flavor; we were penetrated with their solemn beauty.
One day it would be a flying-fish that had leaped on board, and paid the penalty of its indiscretion by doing duty next morning on the captain's breakfast-table; another day a small sword-fish performed a similar exploit; while on a third a heavy rain provided the great unwashed of the forecastle with the unaccustomed luxury of copious ablutions in fresh water. But not a sail was to be seen.
This place is famed for its large flying-fish, of which some are from 18 to 24 inches in length: and not a little so, for those monsters of the finny tribe called sharks. On the 24th a continuation of westerly winds* brought us in sight of St.
Each succeeding night, as the various clusters rose, crossed the meridian, and sunk again into the western waves, we came more and more into the way, not only of speaking, but thinking of them, under their conventional titles of hydras, doves, toucans, phoenixes, and flying-fish, not forgetting the enormous southern whale, whose beautiful eye, called Fomalhaut, while it flames in the zenith of the Cape, is hardly known to the astronomers of this country, from its greatest altitude, as seen by them, not being ten degrees.
We made a wide circle round him, to draw the flying-fish bait near him. But before we could get it near he went down. The same old story, I thought, with despair these floating fish will not bite. We circled over the place where he had gone down, and I watched my bait rising and falling in the low swells.
Sighting a school of flying-fish, which had been driven to frantic leaps from the sea by pursuing bonito, he begins to descend. First his coming down is like that of an aeroplane, in spirals, but a thousand feet from his prey he volplanes; he falls like a rocket, and seizing a fish in the air, he wings his way again to the clouds.
She passed within a few hundred feet of me, and I saw that she was the Marara, the Flying-Fish. I did not know it then, but I was to go on that little vessel to the blazing atolls of the Dangerous Archipelago, and to see stranger and more fascinating sights than I had dreamed of on the Noa-Noa during my passage to Tahiti.
At one haul there was brought on board a mass of flying-fish spawn, about ten pounds in weight, looking like nothing so much as a pile of ripe white currants, and clinging together in a very similar manner.
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