even an hour after death was very handsome, and in shape they
were much like a very plump trout. In the stomachs of some we found
small flying squid, little shrimps, and other Crustacea.

Our Manila-man cook, although not a genius, certainly knew how to fry
fish, and that morning we had for breakfast some of Jack Shark's
pilots--the most delicately-flavoured deep-sea fish I have ever
tasted--except, perhaps, that wonderful and beautiful creature, the
flying-fish.

_The "Palu" of the Equatorial Pacific_

During a residence of half a lifetime among the various island-groups of
the North-western and South Pacific, I devoted much of my spare
time--and I had plenty of it occasionally--to deep-sea fishing, my
tutors being the natives of the Caroline, Marshall, Gilbert, and Ellice
Groups.

The inhabitants of the last-named cluster of islands are, as I have
said, the most skilled fishermen of all the Malayo-Polynesian peoples
with whom it has been my fortune to have come in contact. The very
poverty of their island homes--mere sandbanks covered with coconut and
pandanus palms only--drives them to the sea for their food; for the
Ellice Islanders, unlike their more fortunate prototypes who dwell in
the forest-clad, mountainous, and fertile islands of Samoa, Tahiti,
Raratonga, &c., live almost exclusively upon coconuts, the drupes of the
pandanus palm, and fish. From their very infancy they look to the sea as
the main source of their food-supply, either in the clear waters of the
lagoon, among the breaking surf on the reef, or out in the blue depths
of the ocean beyond. From morn till night the frail canoes of these
semi-nude, brown-skinned, and fearless toilers of the sea may be seen by
the voyager paddling swiftly over the rolling swell of the wide Pacific
in chase of the _bonito_, or lying motionless upon the water, miles and
miles away from the land, ground-fishing with lines a hundred fathoms
long. Then, as the sun dips, the flare of torches will be seen along the
sandy beaches as the night-seekers of flying-fish launch their canoes
and urge them through the rolling surf beyond the reef, where, for
perhaps three or four hours, they will paddle slowly to and fro, just
outside the white line of roaring breakers, and return to the shore with
their tiny craft half-filled with the most beautiful and wonderful fish
in the world. The Ellice Island method of catching flying-fish would
take too long to explain here, much