CHAPTER XI 

 ANGLING FOR SHARKS 



I know a magic circle in the Sea 

 Etched on the blue with pale gray coral sand ; 

 A mountain sank there once, and patiently 

 Its widening eddies stiffened into land 

 With lazy surges flapping on the strand. 



Rhyme of Mary Atoll. 



HE biggest fish you can take on a line is a shark, 

 but we do not fish for them with a fly. To land 

 the beast in the basket it takes the biggest kind 

 of a hook, with an iron chain, and a whole ship- 

 load of eager assistants, or a whole wharf full of idlers, 

 to pull on the rope and chain. Here is a record of a few- 

 successful days of shark fishing. 



Away down in the warm South Seas, not far from the 

 equator, and also not far from the meridian, where you 

 sail out of the end of to-day into the beginning of day after 

 to-morrow, lies the charming atoll known as Mary Island. 

 It is a narrow and irregular circlet of coral, about five miles 

 across. Like other atolls, it is made of a rim of broken coral 

 a few feet above high water, and a few rods wide, inclos- 

 ing a deep blue lagoon, which on the west side connects with 

 the sea by a narrow break a couple of rods wide. Most of 

 the atoll is bare, the broken corals piled up like scrap iron, 

 for we must understand that the coral polyp does not build 

 the reef. The reef is made of their dead skeletons of carbo- 

 nate of lime, broken and piled up by the waves, and finally 

 cemented into a hard porous rock by the lime which comes 

 from the coral structures themselves. 



On the east side of Mary Island are palm trees and other 



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