74 
Wild Life in Southern Seas. 
day. Then she picks up the “ take,” puts it 
into a basket, and an hour later Jack’s motive 
power is suspended on a cinnet line between 
two coconut trees, drying for market. 
All the people of the Gilbert Islands are ex¬ 
pert shark fishermen ; but the men of Paanopa 
(Ocean Island) claim to be, and are, facile 
princeps in the forcible art of clubbing a shark 
before he knows what is the matter with him, 
and what the horrid thing is that has got into 
his mouth. 
First of all, though, something about Ocean 
Island itself. It is but a tiny spot, rising 
abruptly from the sea, about 300 feet in 
height, situated fifty miles south of the 
Equator, and in 168 deg. 25 min. east longi¬ 
tude, and inhabited by a fierce, turbulent race 
of dark-skinned Malayo - Polynesians, allied 
in want of manners and fulness of beastly 
customs to their Gilbert Island neighbours, 
three hundred miles to the windward. Half 
a cable’s length from the land itself, and not 
twenty yards from the flat shelving coral reef 
that juts abruptly out from the narrow strip 
of beach, the water is of great depth—fifty, 
in some places ninety, fathoms deep. 
