up to it, the crew found they were unable to lift it from the water; it was, however, towed to the ship, hoisted on board, and cut into three parts, the whole of which were weighed, and reached over 300 lbs.  In colour it was a dull grey, with large, closely-adhering scales about the size of a florin; the fins, tail, and lips were blue.  Another one, weighing less, had a differently-shaped head, with a curious, pipe-like mouth; this was a uniform dull blue.  A similar upturning from the ocean’s dark depths of strange fish occurred during a submarine earthquake near Rose Island, a barren spot to the south-west of Samoa.  The disturbance threw up vast numbers of fish upon the reefs of Manua, the nearest island of the group, and the natives looked upon their great size and peculiar appearance with unbounded astonishment.

Without desiring to bore the reader with unnecessary details of my own experiences in the South Seas, but because the statement bears on the subject of this article—­a subject which has been my delight since I was a boy of ten years of age—­I may say that, nine years after the loss of Captain Hayes’s vessel on Strong’s Island, I was again shipwrecked on Peru, one of the Gilbert, or, as we traders call them, the “Line” Islands.  Here I was so fortunate as to take up my residence with one of the local traders, a Swiss named Frank Voliero, who was an ardent deep-sea fisherman, and whose catches were the envy and wonder of the wild and intractable natives among whom he lived; for he had excellent tackle, which enabled him to fish at depths seldom tried by the natives, who have no reason to go beyond sixty or eighty fathoms.  In the long interval that had elapsed since my fishing days in the Carolines and my arrival at Peru Island, I had gained such experience in my hobby in many other parts of the Pacific as falls to few men, and the desire to fish in deep water, and get something that astonished the natives of the various islands, had become a passion with me.  Voliero and myself went out together frequently, and, did space permit, I should like to describe the fortune that attended us at Peru, as well as my fishing adventures at Strong’s Island.

In a former work I have endeavoured to describe that extraordinary nocturnal-feeding fish, the palu, and the manner of its capture by the Malayo-Polynesian islanders of the Equatorial Pacific, and in the present article I shall try to convey to my readers an idea of deep-sea fishing in the South Seas generally.  When I was living on the little island of Nanomaga (one of the Ellice Group, situated about 600 miles to the north-west of Samoa), as the one resident trader, I found myself in—­if I may use the term—­a marine paradise, as far as fishing went.  The natives were one and all expert fishermen, extremely jealous of their reputation of being not only the best and most skilful men in Polynesia in the handling of their frail canoes in a heavy surf, but also of being deep-learned in the lore of deep-sea fishing.