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But twice every year the people of Funafuti betake themselves to Funâfala to gather the cocoa-nuts, which in the silent groves ripen and fall and lie undisturbed from month to month; then for a week or ten days, as the men husk the nuts, the women and children fish in the daytime among the pools and runnels of the inner reef, and at night with flaring torches of palm-leaf they stand amid the sweeping surf on the outer side of the narrow islet, and with net and spear fill their baskets with blue and yellow crayfish.
And a month later, when Captain Bully Hayes came on board the Indiana in Funafuti Lagoon, he gravely told Packenham that a lot of people were saying the letters stood for "Bloody Pirate." But all this has nothing to do with this story. As I have said, the brig was running before a stiff southerly gale.
Funâfala is one of the many islands which encircle Funafuti lagoon with a belt of living green, and to Funâfala "the island of the pandanus palm" Senior and I had come with a party of natives from the village on the main island to spend a week's idleness.
In the year 1872 we were lying inside Funafuti Lagoon, in the Ellice Group. The last cask of oil had been towed off to the brig and placed under hatches, and we were to sail in the morning for our usual cruise among the Gilbert and Kingsmill Islands. Our captain, a white trader from the shore, and myself, were sitting on deck "yarning" and smoking.
A hawk-bill turtle, huge, black, and misshapen, slid out from beneath the dark ledge of the reef, and swam slowly across the pool, and then, between the masts, sank to the bottom. "'Twas six years ago," said Nerida, as we raised our heads. That night, as the PALESTINE sped noiselessly before the trade wind to the westward she told me, in the old Funafuti tongue, the tragedy of the ALIDA.
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