For my part, on the subject of the demoniacal work of the swordfish, I regaled them with accounts of damage wrought to big ships; of how a bony sword had penetrated the hull of the Fortune, of Plymouth, cutting through copper, an inch of under-sheathing, a three-inch plank of hard wood, twelve inches of solid, white-oak timber, two and a half inches of hard oak ceiling, and the head of an oil cask; of the sloop Morning Star, which had to be convoyed to port with a leak through a hole in eight and a half inches of white oak; of the United States Fish Commission sloop, Red Hot, rammed and sunk; of the British dreadnaught, which was pumped to Colombo where the leak made by the fish was found, and 15,000 francs insurance paid.

“Our fathers never went fishing until they had implored the favor of the gods,” said Red Chicken.  “I am a Catholic, but it may be the sea is so old, older than Christ, that the devils there obey the old gods we used to worship.  If that largest Spear of the Sea that we saw had attacked me or our boat, he would have killed us and sunk the canoe, for he was four fathoms long, and his weapon was as tall as I am.”

The tatihi nodded his head gravely.  His soul was still in the keeping of the gods of his fathers, and-he saw in Red Chicken’s wound the vengeance of the un-appeased Aavehie.

I was amazed to find that Red Chicken had no fever, and was recovering rapidly.  Without modern medicine or knowledge of it, the tatihi had healed the sufferer, and I drew him on to talk of his skill.

His surgical knowledge was excellent; he knew the location of the vital organs quite accurately from frequent cutting up of bodies for eating.  He had treated successfully broken bones, spear-wounds through the body, holes knocked in skulls by the vicious, egg-sized sling-stones.  If the skull was merely cracked, with no smashing of the bone, he drilled holes at the end of each crack to prevent further cleavage and, replacing the skin he had folded back, bound the head with cooling leaves and left nature to cure the break.  If there was pressure on the brain or a part of the skull was in bits, his custom was to remove all these and, trimming the edges of the hole in the brainpan, to fit over it a neat disk of cocoanut-shell, return the scalp, and nurse the patient to health.

He had known of cases when injured brain matter was replaced with pig-brains, but admitted that the patient in such cases became first violently angry and then died.  Lancing boils and abscesses with thorns had been his former habit, but he favored a nail for the purpose nowadays.

Fearing lest fever should attack Red Chicken, he had prepared a decoction from the hollow joints of the bamboo, which he administered in frequent doses from a cocoanut-shell.  It was milk-white, and became translucent in water, like that beautiful variety of opal, the hydrophane.  There was a legend, said the tatihi, that the knowledge of this medicine had been gleaned from a dark man who had come on a ship many years before, and with this clue I recognized it as tabasheer, a febrifuge long known in India.