They, who knew only the bush, learned the salt water and developed the salt-water-man breed.
They learned the ways of the fish and the shell-fish, and they invented hooks and lines, nets and fish-traps, and all the diverse cunning ways by which swimming meat can be garnered from the shifting, unstable sea.
Such refugees stole women from the mainland, and increased and multiplied.

With herculean labour, under the burning sun, they conquered the sea.

They walled the confines of their coral reefs and sand-banks with coral-rock stolen from the mainland on dark nights.

Fine masonry, without mortar or cutting chisel, they builded to withstand the ocean surge.

Likewise stolen from the mainland, as mice steal from human habitations when humans sleep, they stole canoe-loads, and millions of canoe-loads, of fat, rich soil.
Generations and centuries passed, and, behold, in place of naked sandbanks half awash were walled citadels, perforated with launching-ways for the long canoes, protected against the mainland by the lagoons that were to them their narrow seas.