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Updated: May 7, 2025
In the maw there were, besides a large quantity of dismembered squid of great size, a number of fish, such as rock-cod, barracouta, schnapper, and the like, whose presence there was a revelation to me. How in the name of wonder so huge and unwieldy a creature as the cachalot could manage to catch those nimble members of the finny tribe, I could not for the life of me divine!
At least, I remembered only some confused account of a conflict having taken place at the latter spot, which, being our show-place, I had often seen and knew well. "Well," said Old Colonial, "there's no time now; but we've got to get some schnapper for supper to-night, so you and I will go and fish down the Arapaoa yonder; then I'll tell you."
What a beautiful fish is a ten-pound schnapper a brilliant pink back, sides and tail, dotted over with tiny spots of a wonderful, gleaming blue that sparkle like miniature diamonds; the bream-shaped head a deep reddish-purple, with nose and lips of palish pink; the belly a pure, shining white.
Alligators, by the way, do the same thing there, and are sometimes captured, perfectly helpless, in the folds of the nets, in which they have rolled themselves over and over again, tearing it beyond repair with their feet, but eventually yielding to their fate. The schnapper, the best of all Australian fish, is too well known to English visitors to describe in detail.
Every now and then we go in for fish. There are schnapper, rock-cod, mullet, mackerel, and herring, or species that answer to those, to be had for very little trouble. There are also soles, which we catch on the mud-banks and shallows at night, wading by torchlight, and spearing the dazzled fish as they lie. When we make a great haul we salt, dry, or smoke the capture for lasting use.
On reaching the deck we found the officers and crew hauling in schnapper as fast as they could bait their hooks. We were all soon engaged in the same sport. Each line had four hooks on, and the fish were so plentiful that often when a line was pulled up with, as one thought, one big fish on it, there would be three or four, some hooked through the eye, others by the tail.
However, as leather-jackets make excellent schnapper bait, two of us were told off to fish for them with bream-lines and wire-snoozed small hooks, and we soon had the satisfaction of catching a dozen of the thieves. These were quickly skinned and cut up; then we lifted anchor and pulled southward for about half a mile, knowing we should catch but few schnapper where leather-jackets were.
The inlets teemed with flathead, mullet, perch, schnapper, oysters, and sharks, and also with innumerable water-fowl. The rivers yielded eels and blackfish. The sandy shores of the islands were honey-combed with the holes in which millions of mutton-birds deposited their eggs in the last days of November in each year. Along many tracks in the scrub the black wallabiesand paddy-melons hopped low.
In a quarter of an hour we had caught but four schnapper and lost a dozen or more hooks; my own line was bitten through at about five fathoms from the surface a piece of meat skin had wound itself round it and had been discovered by one of these predatory villains. No wonder that the Samoans and natives of the Tokelau Islands term the leather-jacket isumu moana the sea-rat.
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