ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON I dropped in for a chat with Sea Foam and found him scribbling on a slate the notes for the morrow’s sermon.
‘You see, Ropati,’ he said in the course of our conversation, ‘I don’t mind the children playing marbles, even though they do play hookey from school, for there are always plenty of children at school anyway. The trouble is with the fathers and mothers: they gamble in their marble games. Ura, who is just now one of our church deacons, is among the worst offenders. It is sinful!
‘Only yesterday,’ the good parson went on, ‘I found my wife, Bones and Ezekiel playing marbles behind the schoolhouse, and the worst of it was that they had cheated my wife out of every one of her marbles. Now she will be pestering me for some of my own marbles that I have saved and stored away in the bottom of my camphor-wood chest with the musical lock.’
I suggested to Sea Foam that I might, perhaps, divert the people’s interest from marbles by starting some other game, checkers, for example, or top-spinning, or cat’s cradle (waivai), or perhaps kite-flying, for I had observed that none of the men had been flying kites for months. All that was needed was for someone to start a new craze. Sea Foam agreed with this and asked me to do what I could in this way to put a stop to the marble-playing.
The following Monday there was a great church festival and all the people were gathered in the churchyard. Various competitive games were in progress: spear-throwing, dancing (males only), coconut-husking, and the like. Then came a food-eating contest.
For this competition each of the villages chose their champions, with an eye to their height and girth rather than for speed in eating. Fat sea birds had been roasted in great numbers, and the three champions, well starved beforehand so as to make them particularly ravenous, started in on them, crunching them bones and all, while the spectators bet wildly on the result. It was an incredible gorging-bee; the contestants were well matched, and for a long time the outcome hung in the balance. At last two of them fell over with bloated groans and were carried off the field, leaving the winner still able to chew but not to swallow. Everyone yelled with delight and the children scrambled for the remains of the feast.
I watched the festivities for a while; many marble games were going here and there, and it occurred to me that this was a favourable opportunity for starting the new game I had promised Sea Foam. So I collected old William, Bones, George, Abraham, King-of-the-Sky, Pain-in-the-Head and a few others and led them behind the church, where I produced a pair of ivory cubes marked with strange geometric dots, and initiated them into the now all but lost art of rolling the bones. My novices were keenly interested and in a very few moments they understood perfectly all the points of the game. I said nothing to them about gambling, knowing that nothing need be said. Puka-Pukans are like the Chinese in their love for games of chance.
When I returned, half an hour later, Bones, King-of-the-Sky and the rest were squatting behind the church, each with a great heap of coconuts beside him, as much wealth of this sort as they could amass at short notice. It was odd to hear their cries as they rolled the dice: they had found immediately perfect Puka-Pukan equivalents for the American ‘Little Joe!’ ‘Come Seven! Baby needs a new pair of shoes!’ etc.
The natives at the festival on the other side of the church soon got wind of the fact that something unusual was happening. Not infrequently a head would be poked round the corner, and soon the rest of the body would follow. After looking on for a few moments, the newcomer would sneak home for a sack of his wife’s husked coconuts and presently would be shooting a profoundly studied game.
By midday the wide space of sun-bleached coral in front of the church was all but deserted. Spears had been left lying where they fell among the larger bones of sea birds, and of the great piles of coconuts used in the husking competitions nothing was left but the husks themselves. Sea Foam sat in his steamer chair beneath a huge red umbrella abandoned by all his flock. He beckoned to me as I was returning home.
‘Ropati,’ he said, blinking gravely at me, ‘what is this new game you’ve started?’
I began, apologetically, to explain, while Sea Foam listened with interest.
‘I think I’d better see it,’ he said, rising with an effort and adjusting his bandmaster cap.
A great crowd was gathered behind the church, and in the midst of it was Mrs Sea Foam rolling the bones as though she had been playing African golf for years. She had a huge pile of winnings behind her, and as we pushed our way through the crowd we heard her shout: ‘Iaau! Lautai! Hau mai te akaari!’ which may be almost precisely translated: ‘Wow! Eleven! Give me the coconuts!’
Sea Foam looked on in silence for a few minutes, but I noticed that his eyes sparkled more and more brightly as his wife added to her gains.
‘Ropati,’ he said, ‘what is it you call this game?’
Before the afternoon was over, Sea Foam had amassed a pile of seven hundred coconuts, most of which he won from old William the heathen. From that time on marbles were forgotten.
Despite his losses to Sea Foam, William soon became one of the wealthiest men on the island. Frequently he brought me four or five bags of copra which he had won in a single evening. My one pair of dice would not suffice, of course, for the crap-shooters of three villages, so dice were made from bits of a hard white coral found in the lagoon, which they ground down, shaped, polished and marked in beautiful fashion.
The old men were the privileged rollers of the bones; the younger men looked on, making side bets on their favourite players. On the outer reef there was a great slab of coral, perfectly smooth, where the old and qualified experts played in the midst of a crowd watching in hushed and breathless silence. For a time Sea Foam played constantly, but at last, having lost heavily, his conscience began to trouble him and he preached a fiery sermon against gambling. He tried to enlist Ura on his side, and the chief of police went so far as to have an ordinance passed prohibiting crap-shooting before 4 p.m. This prohibition really came as a relief to everybody, for too long had the Puka-Pukans been deprived of their day-long siestas. Now they could sleep in peace till the evening without missing any of the big games, which henceforth started at four and proceeded, by torchlight, until far into the night.
Marble-playing and crap-shooting are by no means the only games of chance indulged in on Puka-Puka, and in addition to games, properly speaking, the natives have other methods of giving vent to their sporting instincts. One of the most singular of these is their fish-gambling.
One afternoon I was sitting on my back veranda overlooking the lagoon, idly watching George, who was putting his canoe in the water. He was about to push off when old Mama, greatly excited, hobbled out, waving her arms and calling to him to wait a moment. When she reached him she said: ‘I’ll bet a hundred coconuts you don’t catch a jewfish!’
George bet two hundred he would catch three. Mama was game and raised him another hundred, and the final wager was a thousand nuts. All of this required a great deal of excited talk, during which a crowd gathered and the gambling started in earnest. The fisherman’s friends and relatives wagered that he would catch his three, while others, listening to Mama, who swore that she had a ‘hunch’, betted on her side. Soon most of the island’s portable property was in the scales, and Ura, Ears, Husks and Everything were called upon to witness the bets.
George went home to get his army overcoat, for the function was assuming a semi-public nature and it would never do for him to appear on such an occasion dressed in a grass skirt. After buttoning up his great trench-coat he pushed his canoe out into the lagoon and, in the midst of shouts of advice and encouragement from his supporters, paddled to a coral mushroom near the reef and started his memorable jewfishing.
At first he had no luck. Every known variety of fish bit except the one he wanted. But at the end of several hours he caught one jewfish. He waved it aloft, while his backers cheered exultantly.
Night came, and morning, and another night, and George fished doggedly on. On the second morning he waved another jewfish, but only one. The day became exceptionally warm and at last he was obliged to take off his overcoat. Many of the villagers expected him to give up that night. They betted on it. The excitement was intense.
For two days practically no one slept. Now and then someone would lie down under a tree for a few hours of feverish sleep, but otherwise the vigil was unbroken. Men forgot everything but the gamble.
The third morning saw the end of it. The population of the three villages had spent the night on the beach, and when dawn broke they saw George paddling dejectedly ashore. He had caught but two jewfish. Great were the rejoicings of old Mama and her faction. I have never seen George, the dandy, so crestfallen as he was on this occasion.