TALES OF THE SOUTH SEAS

Taranaki Daily News, 8 October 1921, Page 12

TALES OF THE SOUTH SEAS

NATIVE MAGIC. ATTACKED BY A SHARK AND SWORDFISH. Fascinating tales of the South Seas—cf sorcery and shipwreck and Robinson Crusoe adventures —axe told in two books reviewed below. It is strange that the lure of that remote South Sea Island, Tahiti, should have drawn to it two such men as George Calderon and Rupert Brooke, both writers of rare gifts, and both destined in after years to fall in that same fatal. expedition to Gallipoli— Calderon in the thunder of battle at Cape Helles and Brooke of fever before the landing. As their ways crossed at Tahiti, so they came together at death. And it is another most curious chance that two books dealing with their visits to Tahiti should be published by two different firms on the same day. The first is George Calderon’s posthumous work, “Tahiti” (with fifty illustrations by the author; Grant Richards, 25s net) ; the second, Mr. F. O’Brien’s “Mystic Isles of the South Seas” (Hodder and Stoughton, 20s net). Calderon lived in Tahiti as a native, making the Islanders—as he afterwards made the privates of his platoon—his personal friends. His vivid descriptions of Papeete, Tahiti’s chief town, are touched with his peculiar genius and bring up the whole scene. “The air is heavy with the smell of unknown spicy things, and trembles to the ‘lily-slender’ voice of innumerable cicadas. There is too much outcry for understanding; it is like bells ringing inside the skull; one feels a certain uneasiness, a vague stirring of regret and undefined desire.” The scenery is “overwhelming.” “Instead of trees, great palm-topped things which ought to be in flower-pots but which rise up to the sky instead. It has the look of something mysterious as seen in a dream, where everything is larger, clearer, more story-bookfly beautiful than in feal life.” BREAD-FRUIT DIET. The very sea-shore is 9Xtraordinary: “Big land-crabs sun themselves "in the mouths of tljeir burrows like Chinamen in their shop-fronts, and drive sdftly hi as the traveller approaches. Little seashells of every kind go capering in thousands over the path, moved by tiny hermit-crabs. The earth is like the. surface of some unhealthy, parasite-infest-ed body.”

He tried a diet of bread-fruit, but found it “white and mealy, like an old potato; it tasted something like the smell of a garden bonfire.” He ate “cakes made from the stem of the giant arum lily, served up in a green bamboo cane,” which gave them a delicate perfume.

Mr. O’Brien met Brooke in Tahitikand swam and travelled over the island with him. sharing his and Calderoirs belief that it was “the most ideal place in tfye world to work and live in.” Seen from the sea, as Mr. O’Brien describes it, Tahiti is loveliness made material: “A dim shadow in the far offing, a dark speck in the lofty clouds, a mass of towering green upon the blue water, the fast unfoldment of emerald, pale hills and glittering reef. Nearer as sailed our ship, the panorama was lovelier. It was the culmination of enchantment, the fulfilment, of the wildest fantasy of wondrous color, strange form, and lavish adornment.”

And the climate is “unexcelled for the tropics,” with a sky and a people “the most loveable,” so that Mr. O’Brien declares it made him dance or skip. The fish are a feast of color: “Pale blue; brilliant yellow; black as charcoal; sloe with orange stripes; scarlet, spotted and barred in rainbow tints. The parrot fish are especially splendid in spangling radiancy.” Tn ere is a touch of the uncanny in the account of Mr. O’Brien gives of a native sorcerer, whom he saw “walking the fire,” which consisted of stones vhite-hot: “He traversed the entire length barefoot, with no single flinching of his muscles or flutter of his eyelide to betray pain or fear. The native spectators barefooted marched over the path he took. Six times the throng were led by him forwards and backwards oyer "the stones. A woman who looked down and stumbled left the ranks and cried out that her leg was burned. She had an injury that was weeks in curing.” The legs and feet of the others were examined by Mr. O’Brien, but no trace of burn or injury was to be discerned. GIANT SHARK ATTACKS. This book narrates one very curious, coincidence. Someone picked up and read out the list-of missing Pacific ships. Among them was the schooner El Dorado, of which nothing had been heard for months. Next day a ship’s boat came into sight from* a wreck, with three men on board her. They were the survivors of the El Dorado, after a voyage over the Pacific in their little craft which for its perils and hair-breadth escapes surpasses the wildest adventures. They had rowed and sailed thousands of miles, first from near the Chilian coast to Easter Island; then from Easter Island to Tahiti. They bad passed through storms when “the entire heavens were a mass of coruscating electricity and they could feel the air alive with it r They were shocked by the very atmosphere and feared for their lives every moment.”

After the storm and.the terrific seas came the fish: “Five times a giant shark launched himself at their boat., head on, and drove them frantic with his menace of sinking them. They were able to kill him with a blow. The next day a swordfish of alarming size played about them, acting in such manner that they felt sure lie was challenging the boat as a strange fish. One thrust of his bony weapon and they might be robbed of their chance for life. They shouted and banged on the gunwales and escaped.” Here is the veritable romance of the South Seas.