The Marquesan methods of fishing are not so varied to-day as when their valleys were filled with a happy people delighting in all forms of exercise and prowess and needing the fish to supplement a scanty diet.  For many weeks before I came, they said, no man had gone fishing.  There were so few natives that the trees supplied them all with enough to eat, and the melancholy Marquesan preferred to sit and meditate upon his paepae rather than to fish, except when appetite demanded it.  There is a Polynesian word that means “hungry for fish,” and to-day it is only when this word rises to their tongues or thoughts that they go eagerly to the sea or to the tooth-like base of the cliffs.

Often we took large quantities of fish among these caves and rocks by capturing them in bags, using a wooden fan as a weapon.  The sport called for a cool head, marvelous lungs, and skill.  It was extremely dangerous, as the sharks were numerous where fish were plentiful, and the angler must needs be under the water, in the shark’s own domain.

[Illustration:  Pascual, the giant Paumotan pilot and his friends]

[Illustration:  A pearl diver’s sweetheart]

The best hand and head for this sport in all Hanavave was a girl, Kikaaki, a name which means Miss Impossibility.  She was not handsome, save with the beauty of youth and abounding health, but her wide mouth and bright eyes were intelligent and laughter-loving.

Starting early in the morning, we would go to the edge of the bay, where the coral rises from the ocean floor in fantastic shapes and builds strange grottoes and cells at the feet of the basalt rocks.  While I held the canoe, Miss Impossibility would remove her shapeless calico wrapper, and attired only in scarlet pareu, her hair piled high on her head and tied with the white filet of the cocoanut-palm, she would go overboard in one curving dive, a dozen feet or more beneath the sea.

When the water was quiet and shadowed by the cliffs, I could see her through its green translucence, swimming to the coral lairs of the fish that gleamed in the reflected, penetrating sunlight.  Walking on the sandy bottom, a hand net of straw in one hand, and a stick shaped like a fan in the other, she would cover a crevice with the net and with the fan urge the fish into it.

Foolish as was their conduct, the fish appeared to be deceived by the lure, or made helpless by fear, for they streamed into the receptacle as Miss Impossibility beat the water or the coral.  She would have seemed to me well named had I never seen her at the sport.

She would usually stay beneath the water a couple of minutes, rising with her catch to rest for a moment or two with her hand on the edge of the boat, breathing deeply, before she went down again.  Losing sight of her among the under-water caves one day, I waited for what seemed an eternity.  I cannot say how long she was gone, for as the time lengthened seconds became minutes and hours, while I was torn between diving after her and remaining ready for emergency in the boat.  When at last she came to the surface, she was nearly dead with exhaustion, and I had to lift her into the canoe.  She said her hair had been caught in the branching coral, and that she had been barely able to wrench it free before her strength was gone.