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And it was his little girl the little Fetu from whom he had parted at Nukufetau two years before. Sitting with his great arms clasped lovingly around his daughter, Big Harry told his tale.
The Gilbert Islanders call it te ika ne peka a name that cannot well be translated into bald English, though there is a very lucid Latin equivalent. In 1882 I took passage from the Island of Nukufetau in the Ellice Group for the Caroline Islands. The vessel was a fine brigantine of 160 tons, and was named the Orwell.
She was, unfortunately, commanded by an incompetent, obstinate, self-willed man, who, though a good seaman, had no meteorological knowledge and succeeded in losing the ship, when lying at anchor, on Peru Island, in the Gilbert Group, ten days after leaving Nukufetau, simply through disregarding the local trader's advice to put to sea.
On coral atolls, where the danger was most plainly obvious, these were enforced by law and sanctioned by punishment. On Vaitupu, in the Ellices, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufetau, but one. On the latter the punishment was by fine; and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid, and the child spared. This is characteristic.
"Flee! flee!" she gasped. "My uncle, and Fetu, and all with them are killed.... The white men on the ships have killed them all." Like bees from their hives, the terrified natives ran out of their houses, and in ten minutes every soul in the village had fled to the beach, and launching canoes, were paddling madly across the lagoon to the main island of Nukufetau lagoon.
It is at this time that the natives of Nukufetau and some other islands have some glorious sport, for in addition to the huge eels and rock-cod many other deep-sea fish flock into the shallower lagoon waters all in pursuit of the atuli and all eager to take the hook. As soon as the natives had left the house, Marèko turned to me with a beaming smile.
Great results sometimes attend upon the merest trifles, and so it fell about now, for by a simple accident were some hundreds of these innocent, unsuspecting people of Nukufetau saved from a dreadful fate; for just as Mana, who was the chiefs brother and the uncle of the two poor half-caste children in the canoe, was about to go below, followed by his people, one of the boat's crew on the starboard side dropped the butt of his musket heavily on the naked foot of a young Chileno boy, who uttered an exclamation of pain.
And down below in the stifling, sweating hold, with two hundred miserable captives like herself, torn from various islands and speaking a language akin to her own, lay the heart-broken and despairing daughter of Big Harry of Nukufetau. And now comes the strange part of this true story.
It has been identified with Nukufetau, in the Ellice group. They had been sixty-two days at sea and were sadly in want of a change of diet. Seventeen days later, they sighted the small islands and rocks which they called Baixos de la Candelaria, Candlemas Reefs; these have been identified with Lord Howe Islands, lately ceded to England by Germany.
The feeling had been accentuated by my good friend the Samoan teacher on Nanomaga, himself an ardent fisherman, writing to his brother minister on Nukufetau and informing him that although I was not a high-class Christian I was all right in all other respects, and a good fisherman "all that he did not know we have taught him, therefore," he added slyly, "let your young men watch him so that they may learn how to fish in deep and rough water, such as ours."
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