My arrival at the island caused no little commotion among the young bloods, each of whose chances of gaining the girl of his heart, and being united to her by the local Samoan missionary teacher, depended in a great measure upon his ability to provide sustenance for her from the sea; for Nanomaga, like the rest of the Ellice Group, is but little more than a richly-verdured sandbank, based upon a foundation of coral, and yielding nothing to its people but coconuts and a coarse species of taro, called puraka.  The inhabitants, in their low-lying atolls, possess no running streams, no fertile soil, in which, as in the mountainous isles of Polynesia, the breadfruit, the yam, and the sweet potato grow and flourish side by side with such rich and luscious fruits as the orange and banana, and pineapple—­they have but the beneficent coconut and the evergiving sea to supply their needs.  And the sea is kind to them, as Nature meant it to be to her own children.

The native missionary at Nanomaga was a Samoan.  He was intended by nature to be a warrior, a leader of men; or—­and no higher praise can I give to his dauntless courage—­a boat-header on a sperm whaler.  Strong of arm and quick of eye, he was the very man to either throw the harpoon or deal the death-giving thrust or the lance to the monarch of the ocean world; but fate or circumstance had made him a missionary instead.  He was a fairly good missionary, but a better fisherman.

Three miles from Nanomaga is a submerged reef, marked on the chart as the Grand Coral Reef, but known to the natives as Tia Kau, “the reef.”  It is in reality a vast mountain of coral, whose bases lie two hundred fathoms deep, with a flattened summit of about fifty acres in extent, rising to within five fathoms of the surface of the sea.  This spot is the resort of incredible numbers of fish, both deep-sea haunting and surface swimming.  Some of the latter, such as the pala (not the palu)—­a long, scaleless, beautifully-formed fish, with a head of bony plates and teeth like a rip-saw—­are of great size, and afford splendid sport, as they are game fighters and almost as powerful as a porpoise.  They run to over 100 lbs., and yet are by no means a coarse fish.  In the shallow water on the top of this mountain reef there are some eight or nine varieties of rock cod, none of which were of any great size; but far below, at a depth of from fifty to seventy fathoms, there were some truly monstrous fish of this species, and I and my missionary friend had the luck to catch the four largest ever taken—­221 lbs., 208 lbs., 118 lbs., and 111 lbs.  I had caught when fishing for schnapper, in thirty fathoms off Camden Haven, on the coast of New South Wales, a mottled black and grey rock cod, which weighed 83 lbs., and was assured by the Sydney Museum authorities that such a weight for a rock cod was rare in that part of the Pacific, but that beche-de-mer fishermen on the Great Barrier Reef had occasionally captured fish of the same variety of double that size and weight.