202 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept, 15, 19O0. 
Torches on the Reef. 
If any one were to ask rae if I would consent to go 
jacking for chromo fish with the assistance of a piece of 
an umbrella rib rubbed sharp on a stone, I should, of 
course, deny that I could ever be guilty of such a breach 
of the laws of true and honest sport. Yet that I have done 
just this thing will be set forth in this narrative of one 
nifeht's experience in the purple night of the South Sea 
■within the spray of the foaming breakers of the restless 
ocean. The only excuse that can be offered is to plead 
the custom of the country, and Samoa must be taken as 
a fair excuse for all sorts of moral derelictions. It even 
excused on one ghastly occasion the ofifense of dynamiting 
iish— a story that must some other time be told. 
Just why all moral sense vanishes in Samoa must be the 
study of the practical and dogmatic moralist. The coun- 
try and the climate do seem to rip the Decalogue into 
shreds, and the common decencies of sport are a sealed 
book. • Nowhere else in the wide world would one so 
rHUch as dream of killing fish with a flaming torch and a 
barbed spear, btit in Samoa it is the regular thing for all 
the women of the native villages in the dark of the 
moon. 
It has its picturesque side at any rate, To see the 
glare of the torches out at sea, the long alleys of light 
reflected on the still waters of the lagoon, to hear in the 
pause of the thunder of the breakers on the reef the shrill 
cry of women, all this is a scene to attract the attention. 
Add to this the unbroken calm of the windless evening 
when the feathery plumes of the cocoanuts are stilled at 
last, the ebb tide smell of the orange scum which rises 
from the exposed coral, and you haA-e a scene which can- 
not be matched away from the islands of the tropical 
Pacific. 
The reef lay a good long mile seaward from my beach 
in Vaiala, and the beach was only a few feet from the 
front gate of my compound. Out on the reef the torches 
glared like the lights of some city seen from the deck 
of a vessel becalmed in the offing. From time to time a 
torch expires here and there, and the night is so still that 
it takes an act of reason to overcome the imagination 
which makes one think the sound of the hiss is heard as 
the fat leaves fall into the Avater. In a slow progress the 
groups of torches move eastward along the reef until the 
fishers reach the Vailoa sands, a mile or so up the coast> 
where the reef pools cease and there is no fishing grotmd. 
My first source of information was, as usual, young 
Talolo. The young girls of the village had been giving 
me a concert on the veranda— -Lise and Fuatino and 
Manima, who was a grotesque young imp of not quite ten 
years. Talolo had engineered the concert and had dis- 
tributed the reward in the shape of handfuls of sugar 
candy lozenges, which some enterprising trader had had 
manufactured in the colonies with Samoan mottoes in 
birlliant red, such as "Talofa" (love) and "Lara Pele" 
(my darling). In addition to his duties as impresario, Ta- 
lolo had used his horsehair fly flapper to keep me free from 
the poisonous attacks of the mosquitoes, which make the 
dark a torment in the islands. When Fa-agaoi. the boy 
whose name carried an unsolved romance of kidnapping, 
had paraded the beach with the rattle of the wooden 
drum which serves for curfew, the other children had 
scattered to their homes. But Talolo remained, for he 
seemed to hold himself superior to all the laws of the 
elders and the village schoolmaster, perhaps because he 
was th6 son of the village chief. Meanwhile he waged 
war on the mosquitoes and idly steered his conversation 
in the direction of showing how much he was entitled to 
a sixpence or a tin of salmon or a pen and a sheet of 
letter paper, or some other of the means whereby the lad 
made his devotion to me profitable to himself. 
Such talks with Talolo called for little close attention. 
I knew that if he kept up his liquid flattery long enough 
I would yield to his blandishments, for after all, a tin 
of beef or salmon more or less amounted to little at the 
time. Idly listening to the lad and idly looking out upon 
the lonely sea beyond which lay home and the land where 
life Was less dependent on the can-opener, sparks of 
light began to flash out upon the night from the sea itself 
and to attract my curiosity. 
"What are the lights, Talolo?" I asked. 
"Oi ! Oi ! Oi ! Se mea fa'atauvaa. Nothing much," 
he lazily replied. "Only the women on the reef, that's 
all. Samalia and Fa'afili and Salatemu — that's my mother 
now. you know ; they are catching fish, good for eat for 
me for you to-morrow. I'll bring you some. If they 
bother you I'll make them stop until you go sleep." 
Really, there never seemed any limit to the things 
which young Talolo could do when he set about it, and 
if I had only given him pernnission he would surely have 
stopped the fishing even if it did bring a morning famine 
on Vaiala. But it is not in my nature to put a stop to 
anything that has to do with fish, not e'ven the eloquent 
language of a Billingsgate fishwife. Accordingly. I for- 
bade the boy to interfere with the torches on the reef, and 
asked him only to tell me how the women with the lights 
caught the fish. 
"Tailo, tama'itai, ou te le iloa," he replied. "I don't 
know, lady; I know not at all. That is the women's 
fishery, and I am a man. How should I know what they 
do?" The little wretch was only a boy, after all. He 
had not even advanced to the stage of being tatooed, but 
he had all the masculine scorn of female employment. 
"But I am a woman, Talolo." I said, "and as such T 
am entitled to know. Won't you tell me how Samalia and 
Fa'afili and your mother Salatemu and the other women 
catch the fish for yott and all the rest of the men to eat 
in the morning after you have sung your hymn and said 
the prayer?" 
"Moni lava." replied the boy. "That is true indeed. 
The Papalangi men are such fools. T have Ifeen wonder- 
ing whether the Fa'amasino Sili would always give you 
salmon and pisupo to eat in the morning when other 
women here have to go out and get the fish for their 
men to eat. I will tell Salatemu to take you out on the 
reef to-morrow night and teach you how to get the fish 
as women ought to do. But you must get ready. Have 
yon a spear? Do you know how to make your torches?" 
t ha*} to t'*0)ifesS my ignun-iwcc anc| laclf of preparation^ 
But Talolo saw to it that the •rrof sliould be corrected. 
"Tanoae," he called to my servant, who was str»tchcd 
on a mat around the corner of the veranda waiting to 
shut up the hbuse when I should feel sleepy. "Tancm, the 
tama'itai goes to-morrow night upon the reef to catch 
the fish for the Fa'amasino Sili to eat in the morning, fdr 
he has grown weary of giving ber things to eat, and now 
she must feed him. In tlie morning yon much teach her 
how to make the torches and you must make her the spear 
to take the fish Avith. Now you can bring me a tin of 
sardines, which will be her loving gift to me for telling 
her what s\i£ shall do, and then I will tell Salatemu to 
teach her how the fish are caught at nigtst when they 
come to the torch." 
The first thing in the morning I found tlie sunny side 
of my compound strewn with leaflets of dead cocoanut 
leaves. Long before I had aroused for my morning 
swim the faithful Tanoa had begun the preparation of the 
torches for the coming night. In case of any need, the 
South Sea islander falls back upon the cocoanut with a 
reliance upon its qualities which the expei^nce of ages 
has shown to be well grounded. A single leaf of the 
cocoanut may range from 10 to 30 feet in length. On the 
tree when the trade wind blows it seems as light as a 
feather; in the still night when it falls to the ground a 
massive weight, which could knock a man senseless if it 
should hit him in the descent. It is only in the evening 
calm that these leaves fall, and the prudent when they are 
abroad at night keep away from the cocoamit shade lest 
they be struck by falling leaves or ripe nuts. Each leaf 
has about a hundred lance-like leaflets, each 4 or 5 feet 
long and some 2 inches broad. These leaflets are full 
of oil, and when dried in the sun burn with a brigH: 
flame and a dense cloud of aromatic smoke. It was 
these leaflets that Tanoa had spread out in the sun to 
give them a thorough drying before making the torches 
which I was to carry for my fishing. Each torch consists 
of ten leaflets laid together in a neat bundle with ends 
alternating, half of the tips and half of the butts brought 
together. Every few inches the leaflets are tied with a 
strip of dry hibiscus fiber which in the islaads is nature's 
substitute for the ball of twine of civilization. But here 
enters the comical division of labor between the sexes in 
Samoa. Tanoa could gather the l«aves and strew them in 
the sitn to dry, btvt when it caime to collecting them in 
bunches and putting the cords abotjt them, he was for- 
bidden to help, for that was women's work, and I had 
to wait for Salatemu to come under the guidance of 
Talolo, 
The making of the apear, however, was entirely man's 
work, and Tanoa set about it. The sole requisites were a 
10- foot pole and an old umbrella rib. The latter was 
easily supplied in a land where tkere are four months of 
unintermitting downpour of rain, and where every day in 
the sunny season a shower may be expected. And the 
gales of the hurricane season turn so rhany umbrellas in- 
side out that in every hotise thsre is a stock of gamps 
which have served their usefulness. 
Having selected the rib from one of the broken um- 
brellas, Tanoa cut it across about an inch above the 
threader and half an inch below it. The spreader itself 
he cut off at a distance of half a foot from tf* rib, thus 
leaving a wire shaft with a toggle an inch and a half 
long. The two ends of this toggle lie reduced to sharp 
points by dint of much rubbing on a lapstone of smooth 
basalt. When his hours of industry had accomplished the 
proper degree of sharpening, he set the toggle in relation 
to the shaft so that its shorter enU formed a sharp angle 
with the spreader, and then liommjired the joint so that 
the two parts would retain that rektiv*. position under 
ordinary circumstances, yet not so tight as to prevent the 
toggle from pulling out to a right angle when dra-wn upon 
by the struggles of a fish imjialed upon the sharp instru- 
ment. When tliis had been completed to his satisfaction, 
he lashed the device with cocoanut husk sennit on the 
end of the stick. The remainder oif the equipment was a 
ba.sket of cocoanut leaf with a braide\d sord t|e sling about 
my neck to carry tbe catch. 
By this time Talolo brsught Salatetnu to inspect the 
preparations, both hungry, of course. After they had 
been fed a light re4>ast of a couple of bread-fruit and a 
pound of tinned corned beef apiece, Salatemu assiired 
me tiiat all the requisites Iwd been provided and that 
she wotdd tie up my torches. Before that task had been 
completed, mother and son needed the slight refo-eshment 
of a tin of salmon and a hunk of cold, boil&d taro for 
each, it being understood that Tanoa assisted at each of 
these snacks just to show that there was no Iwrd feaJing, 
even though I could not join in the meal. I have never 
been able to go the limit of what Samoan.? will take in 
the way of food ; no matter how inuch I have given them 
by way of experiment, they have alwjays seemed capable 
of taking more. 
After Salatemu had eaten al! that I was prepared to 
place before her, and had declared my outfit all that 
could be required, I asked about the c4othing I should 
wear, 
"Well, yoii walk some and yotr swim, some oh the reef." 
was her answer, "so you wear wlrat you swim in." This 
made it plain that bathing dress was the proper garb 
for the reef fishing. But tkere had to be- an arldition. 
The.se Samoans go barefoot all their lives, and it is nothing 
to them to parade upon the reef in their natural feet. But 
unless one has undergone a preliminary training of him- 
dred-yard dashes over broken bottles or solemn parades 
over hot ploughshares like the early Christian martyrs, no 
civilized woman used to going slxxl couki ever venture 
on the reef with its jagged sprigs of coral. In prepara- 
tion for the emergency, I took an old pair of canvas 
pumps or Oxford ties belonging to a larger-tfooted mem- 
ber of the family, and had TanOa stitch an armament of 
Manila rope all over the sole*. Experience has shown 
that for wading in tlie coral waters there is nothing like 
Manila hemp ; even leather is cut to tatters in a few mo- 
ments. This will serve to show the texture of the soles 
of these Samoan women who walk on the reefs barefoot 
and suffer no harm. 
In the early evening when the tide was ebhiaig, Salatemu 
came back to see if I wais read}-, An soon a,"* the shore 
jjatclies of coral began to appeiar above the reaeding 
tide. I took my spear and filung the bundle of torche- 
and the creel upon my bask, firmly fast«ned ray fop*-EoIed 
■-■hne? upon my feet.' and set forth seaward. The water 
\va!< plea»ntl»y warvn. and for the first part of the way the 
going was easy, for we took advantage of a slant of sand 
which extended out in front of the house. I could see 
little to help my steps, for the torches were not to be 
kindled until we reached the reef. But I could just dis- 
cern Salatemu in the darkness as my guide, and on the 
right hand and the left I could hear the chatter of the 
other women of the village. 
All at once the bottom dropped out of the sea. There 
was nothing to step on, and I found myself soused over 
head and all into the warm water. My spear lost itself 
instantly, and I had to swim out. When I came again to 
the surface, I found that I had dropped into a tide pool, 
while my guide had kept on the rim, only a few feet away 
from me. With her aid I recovered the spear and found 
footing once more. My torches were wet, of course, but 
that made no difference, for the water does not stick to 
the cocoanut leaflets. It was not the last time I had such 
a ducking, for the reef is full of these deep pools, and 
it is impossible to see them in advance. While our torches 
were yet unlighted, the only light was the will-o'-the-wisp 
glow of the coral and the sharp phosphorescence of the fish 
darting from pool to pool as our advance scared them 
out of cover. 
At last Salatemu and I reached the dry footing of the 
barrier reef. It is about 50 feet in width, broken chips of 
coral for a footing, here and there a pool, and seaward the 
majestic wall of the breakers thundering in from sea as 
high as a house and combing over in flame-specked foani, 
and at intervals brokeri by deep passages where the waves 
coursed shoreward. It is close to the reef that \vc catch 
the fish with jack and spear, the small fish on the shore- 
ward face of the barrier coral, and the large fish such 
as mullet and bonito in the passes. 
When we had reached the reef it was time to kindle 
the torches. Every woman had brought her store of 
rnatches, and had kept them dry in a manne'r tliat they 
alone cottld have thought of. The matches had been 
tucked into their hair, and no matter how often the 
women had been forced to swim, the matches remained 
dry, because her hair was so soaked with cocoanut oil that 
the water could not reach the matches. All along the 
reef for a inile the torches began to gleam, and by their 
light Ave could make out the dripping forms of broAvn 
women holding torches aloft in the left hand and poising 
the spear in the right as they skirted the reef pools. ., ■ . >, 
Salatemu had stationed me at the edge of a I0-fo6t pool 
Avitli a clear, sandy bottom. At first I could scarcely see a 
thing until I learned the knack of holding my torcli both 
above and behind me, and of keeping my own shadow 
off the strip of water Avhich I Avas Avatching. There Avere 
fish there, fi,sh in plenty, for I could see them darkly flash 
across the line of light. As soon as I spotted a dark 
body sloAvly moAang over the illuminated sand, I cast my 
spear. It struck in the sand 2 feet beyond the mark, which 
continued its slow progress. Then I recalled my knoAvl- 
edge of refraction and remembered hoAV the water lifts 
any object and makes it necessary to aim below. The 
second time I struck the object at Avhich I aimed and 
brought it to the surface. But Salatemtt's laugh of scorn 
soon convinced me that it was not worth the taking — 
one of the leathery sea-cucumbers a foot in length, neither 
ornamental nor edible, although a close relatiA'^e of the 
trepang, which is also found, though rarely noAV, atid is 
Avorth its weight m silver Avhen smoked and dried for 
the Chinese market. By the time I had cleared my 
spear, the pool was filled Avith a school of fish, and I 
cast at random. 
Beginner's luck ! I drove my spear quite through one 
fish and into a second, and landed both. Salatemu began 
to think that she had nothing to teach me, and I was 
camiy enough to take all the credit that was coming to 
me for the chance shot. The fish Avere misshapen cob- 
bler fish, each as large as a saucer and decorated Avith 
long frills, but for all their picturesque appearance I knew 
tffem to be good in the pan. 
The next feAV casts were blank, until I discovered the 
not unnatural mistake I Avas making. The light of my 
torch Avas so sharp, the Avater so clear, and the bed of 
sand so devoid of dull shade, that I Avas aiming not at 
the fisji, but at their shadoAvs on the sand, and, of course, 
overshooting every time. But this pool Avas noAV ex- 
hattsted. and Salatemu and I moved along to another. 
After bringing up tAvo or three small fish, I made a 
cast and lost my spear. I could see the shaft sticking up 
a little beloAV the surface, but that Avas all — the point had 
stuck in the coral at the bottom. I Avas helpless, for the 
tricks of jacking on the reef Avere new to me. But Sala- 
temit came to my rescue, for she was familiar with such, 
incidents. Like a fish herself she took a header into the 
pool, and I stood by and Avatched her descent. At the 
bottom she gave a tug on the spear and disengaged it from 
the coral branch into which I had driven it. But that 
plunge scared all the fish aAvay from that pool, and Ave 
moved on. 
Next we came to a deep passage in the reef which we 
had to swim across. While Salatemu was showing mo 
hoAv to arrange a raft of my spare torches on Avhich to 
float my ligl*ed one Avhile SAvimming, I heard a rhythmical " 
splasliing inshore of us. All at once there flashed into 
sight a gleam of light leaping from the water. I did not 
knoAV just Ayhat it was, but instinctively I cast my spear 
at the spot Avhere I thought it Avould next emerge. More 
good liLtck ! The spear pierced a leaping fish in its flight 
through the air. Involuntarily I followed the spear, for 
T toppled over into the channel and came up within reach 
of the shaft before the fish had had the time to recover its 
motion. Seeing Avhat Avas up, Salatemu followed me, and 
Avith united efforts we brought to the solid reef a brilliant 
mullet, AA'hich I found afterward Aveighed all of 8 pounds. 
That ended my fishing for the night. I had convinced 
all the Samoan women that I Avas capable of doing better 
than they, that I could land tAVO fish on a single drive, and 
that it was nothing at all to me to kill a fi.sh in tlie midst 
of its leap. I Avas afraid that any further attempts AA'-ouId " 
spoil the record, and Avisely I desisted. Just about the 
.same time Salatemu came to gr?ef by stepping on a .sea 
urchin. Quoting the old proverb, "fofo alamea," Avhich 
is nearly the equivalent of our proverb about "a hair of 
the dog that bit a'Ou," Salatemu lifted up her foot and 
picked off the offending urchin Avith a body about the 
s'r/c of a tennis ball, and armed on its upper hemisohere 
Avith spines all of 2 inches long. These snines can inflict 
a very tigly AVOtind, and one that is likely to suppurate 
and prove very obstinate in heaHng. Following her native 
