ds in a
cleft of the coral rock, and Kinie, the pretty twelve-year-old daughter
of Kusis, treading upon it, cut her left foot to the bone. Her
father and myself sprang to her aid, and whilst I was tying the one
handkerchief I possessed tightly round her leg below the knee so as
to stay the terrible flow of blood, he rapidly skinned a large leather
jacket by the simple process of cutting through the skin around the head
and shoulders and then dragging it off the body by holding the upper
edge between his teeth and then with both hands pulling it downwards
to the tail. In less than five minutes the sheet of tough fish-skin
was deftly and tightly wrapped round the child's foot, the handkerchief
taken off and replaced by a coir fibre fishing-line, wound round and
round below and above the knee. The agony this caused the poor child
made her faint, but her father knew what he was about when he ordered
two of the women to carry her ashore, take off the covering of
fish-skin, cover the foot with wood-ashes, and bind it up again. This
was done, and when we returned to the village an hour or two later
I found the girl seated in her father's house with her injured foot
bandaged in a way that would have reflected credit on a M.R.C.S.

After exploiting the large pool we turned our attention to some of those
which were wider, but comparatively shallow; and in these, the bottoms
of which were sandy, we obtained some hundreds of mullet and gar-fish,
which were quickly overpowered by the _oaf_ juice. In all I think that
we carried back to the village quite five hundredweight of fish, some
of which were very large: the weight of three of the large banded
leather-jackets I estimated at fifty pounds.

In after years, in other islands of the Pacific, when I saw the fearful
and needless havoc created by traders and natives using vile dynamite
cartridges and so destroying thousands of young fish by one explosion, I
tried hard to get them to use either the _futu_ nut or the _oap_ plant,
both of which under many names are known to the various peoples of
Eastern Polynesia.

But the use of dynamite has an attractive element of danger; it is more
sudden and destructive in its effect; it makes a noise and churns up
and agitates the water; its violent concussion breaks and smashes the
submarine coral forest into which it is thrown; and its terrific shock
kills and mutilates hundreds of fish, which, through their bladders
bursting, sink and are no