Call It Courage IT HAPPENED many years ago, before the traders and missionaries first came into the South Seas, while the Polynesians were still great in numbers and fierce of heart. But even today the people of Hikueru sing this story in their chants and tell it over the evening fires. It is the story of Mafatu, the Boy Who Was Afraid. They worshiped courage, those early Polynesians. The spirit which had urged them across the Pacific in their sailing canoes, before the dawn of recorded history, not knowing where they were going nor caring what their fate might be, still sang its song of danger in their blood. There was only courage. A man who was afraid--what place had he in their midst and the boy Mafatu – son of Tavana Nui, the Great Chief of Hikueru--always had been afraid. So the people drove him forth. Not by violence, but by indifference. Mafatu went out alone to face the thing he feared the most. And the people of Hikueru still sing his story in their chants and tell it over the evening fires. It was the sea that Mafatu feared. He had been surrounded by it ever since he was born The thunder of it filled his ears; the crash of it upon the reef, the mutter of it at sunset, the threat and fury of its storms--on every hand, wherever he turned--the sea. He could not remember when the fear of it first had taken hold of him. Perhaps it was during the great hurricane which swept Hikueru when he was a child of three. Even now, twelve years later, Mafatu could remember that terrible morning. His mother had taken him out to the barrier-reef to search for sea urchins in the reef pools. There were other canoes scattered at wide intervals along the reef.