Date: 21/12/2022 Shift: 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM Q. No: 80

I often went to the lagoon, which has a four-fathom bank where the tababa (tiger shark) muster in hundreds for a day or two every month. Offshore at rising tide, you can watch their great striped bodies sliding and swooping with arrogant ease not six feet under your keel. They range in length from nine to fourteen feet, with an occasional giant of eighteen feet.
Thirty-five years ago the Gilbertese were beginning to use steel hooks for shark-fishing but many still claimed that the old-style twelve-inch wooden hook, trained to the right shape was the only thing for tiger shark. The shark hunter’s gaff was a glorious club with a ten-pound stone for its head. He fished from a canoe not much longer than a man, with the line made last to it. When a big shark took the hook, the craft lurched suddenly and bounced insanely up and down; or it zigzagged like a misdirected rocket, the fisherman holding on grimly. But the fury of a tiger shark’s struggles soon exhausted it and it floated limply to the surface. Then the fisherman hauled the spent brute cautiously alongside and, letting out one piercing howl of pleasure, cracked it on the nose with his club.
Usually safety first is the rule when tiger sharks are about, but the feat of one Tarawa man, Teriakai, became a matter of official record. His vital, stocky frame was the equal of a giant’s for work. Whenever there was a special job to be done, we always chose Teriakai to do it. Thus when the captain and chief engineer of a visiting steamer wanted to go out for a sail in threatening weather, we sent Teriakai along to look after them.
A northerly storm caught Teriakai and his friends and capsized their boat, spilling them into the lagoon eight miles from land, with tiger sharks all round. Teriakai immediately hacked the main sail adrift; buoyed at head and foot by its spars, it made a fine bag under water. “Stay inside this,” he said to the captain and engineer, “and the tababa won’t smell you from a distance.” Then he put down the anchor and started for shore to get help. “If I get past the tababa,” he said, “we shall perhaps be meeting again.”
He swam straight at the tiger sharks – the captain and engineer watched him – and the devils let him through. Teriakai told me afterwards, “If you stay still in the sea, or swim away in fear, the tababa will charge you. If you swim without fear towards them, they will be afraid and leave you in peace.” So he chose his shark, swam full speed towards it and lo! the line melted away before him. Teriakai missed his direction and swam into a maze of reefs off the coast. The breaking seas flung him on cruel edges, rolled him over coral-branches, but he got through, still conscious, swam a mile to the shore, walked two more to a white trader’s house and collapsed on the veranda.