The First Coconut

By Kenneth Fakamuria

ONCE on the island of Futuna there lived a man and his wife and their 10 children. They lived in a little village near the coast.

One day the father told his children to go fishing on the reef so they set off. When they reached the reef they started fishing but suddenly it began to pour with rain so they gave up and went home, all except for one girl, who was frightened of the rain and ran inside a cave to take shelter.

As she was sitting there in the cave listening to the waves breaking and splashing, she suddenly felt that there was someone with her in the cave. Who could it be? She looked around but she could see no one.

Then she leapt to her feet ready to run, and as she looked around again she saw a monstrous sea-snake, grotesquely striped with black and white, with an ugly skin and a body as thick as the trunk of a coconut tree.

At first she could not believe her eyes but after a moment of hesitation, she came to herself and was terrified. Yet what could she do? She could not escape from the horrible creature which approached and slithered round her.

At last she gave herself up for lost, expecting every moment to be swallowed. Instead she heard a strange noise, and looking up, she saw that this frightening creature was speaking with its mouth wide open like a door, but with a high voice like the voice of a young man. As she listened this creature told her that they should get married. You can imagine how upset she felt but there was nothing she could do, so she nodded her head and said nothing.

THE two of them got married and lived together for some years. One strange thing about the snake was that in the evenings it changed and took the form of a young man but during the day it was a snake again.

This made the wife more fond of her strange husband and they lived together happily until they had a son.

One day the wife decided it would be a good idea for her to go back and visit her friends and relations in her own village so she went and told them to prepare to receive her and her husband. The people of the village, men, women and children, set to work and cleaned up the village until not the slightest piece of rubbish could be seen lying about.

The next morning the three of them set out, the wife and son walking in front while the snake dragged itself heavily along behind them. As they approached the village, they could hear the noise of the drums throb bing, getting louder and louder and louder. A strange sense of doom and foreboding came to the snake and he knew what was going to happen. He said to his wife, “If the village people kill me and cut me into pieces, take my head and plant it.” His wife kept his words to herself and pondered on them as they walked along.

At last they arrived and there was a tense silence as the villagers gazed at the strange trio, the beautiful woman and her little child and the huge monstrous sea-snake coiled at their feet. They were confused and disturbed by what they saw for they had not expected to see the snake. They determined to kill it. They set upon it and cut it to pieces. Before they could throw away the head though, the wife came and took it and planted it near her house. On the fifth day she saw a small shoot sticking cut of the ground.

Every day she visited this shoot until it grew into a tall coconut palm and bore fruit. When these fell down she took them and used their milk for pudding.

One day she gave a piece of pudding to her little son and he took it to eat when he went to play with the other boys. When they saw the pudding, they all wanted to taste it but, finding it so sweet, they ate it so greedily that they bit the little boy’s hand. Crying bitterly, he ran back to his mother, and she in anger, climbed to the top of the coconut tree, picked the nuts and threw them to all the other islands. That is why today, you will find coconuts growing not only on Futuna but on all the islands of the New Hebrides.