"SHARKS"
"Man-eaters on land, man-eaters in the water; for God's sake steer clear of the Fijis!" was the way in which trading captains of forty years ago epitomized their warnings to those who expressed a desire to visit Taviuni or Levuka.
Though man-eating on land has become a languishing if not a lost art in this neck of the tropics, that the practice by the denizens of the deep is still carried on is attested by the number of stump-armed and stump-legged natives that one meets in all parts of the Fijis. Yet in spite of the swarms of sharks that exist there—"You can throw a stuck pig over in the bay and five minutes later walk ashore dry shod on black dorsal fins," the mate of a trader at Suva told me—they are exceedingly whimsical in their appetites and keep one at his wit's end devising baits that will tempt them.
They had told us in Samoa that Suva Bay was a sharks' nest, and graphic verification was furnished on the morning following our arrival. It had been the practice of the Commodore and myself, in all the harbours we had visited up to this point, both in the North and South Pacific, to begin the day with a morning plunge over the rail, a practice which, though not recommended by the old residents, we had never deemed sufficiently hazardous to warrant denying ourselves the refreshing pleasure of. Neither of us had been threatened by a shark, and only three or four lurking black fins had been seen around any of the yacht's anchorages. So it was with no misgivings that I, drowsy with sleep, pulled on my bathing suit the first morning in Suva and plunged over the rail in a deep-eye-opening dive. I will let the Commodore's journal tell what followed, my own recollections being somewhat confused.
"Three or four seconds after the Weather Observer dived, I saw him come sputtering up through the water, gain the starboard gangway in a succession of wild lunges, come clambering aboard and collapse, speechless with consternation, on a cockpit transom. Simultaneously, a great shaft of greenish white shot like a meteor under the stern, and an instant later a chorus of excited yells broke out on the deck of the Wanaka, the Australian mailboat which had come in during the night and anchored half a cable's length beyond us. The commotion was caused by the hooking on a line dangling from the steamer's stern of a huge 'tiger' shark, a monster so heavy that it required lines from two steam winches to land its floundering twenty feet of length upon the deck.
"The Weather Observer could never explain anything beyond the fact that, on approaching the surface, he suddenly became aware of a round, greenish blur, lighter in colour than the water, increasing in size at a prodigious rate, and forthwith, being seized with terror, got back on the yacht with the loss of as little time as possible. We have always supposed that the shark, balked in its rush for a bite of man, sought solace in bolting the hunk of salt beef on the end of the Wanaka's line, as not five seconds elapsed between one event and the other. A sailor on the poop of the Wanaka, who was about to shout a warning to us regarding the danger of bathing overside, followed the course of the shark from where it shot under the stern of the yacht to the hook which brought it to grief." The rest of our bathing in Suva Bay was done with the aid of a sailor and a water bucket.
It was in a spirit of revenge for the fright given me on this occasion that I spent a good portion of our stay in Fiji on punitive expeditions against sharks, incident to which I learned a good deal regarding the ways of the "tiger of the sea" that otherwise would not have come under my observation.
De gustibus non est disputandum is a truth of wide application, holding good no less generally in the animal kingdom than in that of man, and in neither more forcibly than in sharkdom. What is one shark's meat is quite likely to be another shark's poison, and because a certain bait is sauce for the voracious "man-eater" of Suva Bay, it does not follow that it is sauce for his epicurean cousin of Pago Pago.
Regarding the tastes of sharks of any one locality, it is usually possible to speak more definitely, but still with no degree of certainty, and even the likes and dislikes of a single known individual cannot be pinned down and charted as with square and compass. This latter fact was well borne out by the action of a grizzly old fifteen-footer—identified by the rusty stump of a harpoon planted just aft his dorsal—which I chanced to observe one day while fishing on one of the reefs that hem in Suva Bay. The natives pointed him out to me as he nosed his way about among the other sharks that were nibbling gingerly at the outside corners of tempting hunks of salt beef lowered for their delectation, and said that this was the seventh year that they had fished for him, using everything from "charmed" coconuts and shiny tomato cans to plucked gulls and live sucking-pigs, without ever coming near to landing him.
"No one has ever seen him so much as smell the bait," said one of my fuzzy-headed companions, "and from that we know that he must be tabu. Now we no longer give him notice, for we understand that he must be fed and protected by the Evil Ones."
Hardly were these words spoken before the great harpooned tail of the wily monster in question gave a vigorous swish, a smooth, mouse-coloured body shot up through the water, and two triple rows of gleaming ivory opened and closed upon—nothing more or less than a bare hook that its owner was pulling up for rebaiting after it had been dextrously stripped by the "sleight-of-mouth" performance of some member of the ruck down among the pink coral.
Yet the general trend of the gastronomic preferences of the sharks of any single bay, or island, or even group of islands, is usually understood sufficiently well for all practical purposes, and if the natives or old European residents advise against bathing in certain localities, it is best not to take the chance. In few parts of the South Pacific are sharks more plentiful than around Mbau, the old native capital of Fiji, but in spite of the fact that the natives, whether engaged in fishing or turtle-catching, or merely swimming for pleasure, expose themselves constantly in the waters infested by these monsters, loss of life from that source is rarely heard of.
It was while I was "convalescing" from the effects of the field-day with the natives of Mbau, of which I wrote in the last chapter, that I was sitting in the shade of the veranda of the Roku's bungalow, watching with no little enjoyment the antics of a big band of supremely happy youngsters who were disporting themselves in the limpid waters that lapped the sea-wall at that point. Presently a number of men came down to the wall, straightened out the coils of some heavy lines, baited up a lot of big chain-leadered hooks, and began hurling them into the sea but a few yards from where the boys were swimming.
"Wake up!" I shouted to my young friend, Tom B——, giving his hammock a vigorous shake. "Isn't it rather a risky business throwing shark-hooks in where a lot of naked boys are swimming? What if they should snag one of the youngsters?"
"Boys'r' all right," came in a muffled yawn from under B——'s palm-leaf hat. "Those chaps aren't fishing for boys; only fishing for sharks."
"Sharks!" I scoffed. "Sharks in there where those boys are swimming! Wake up, young man; you're talking in your sleep!"
Thus admonished, B—— sat up, yawned, stretched himself, cracked a coconut, took several long draughts of its cool contents, and finally explained that, as a rule, sharks along the windward shore of Vita Levu did not care much for boys, especially near those localities, like Mbau, where it was the custom to fish for them daily with succulent hunks of salt pork.
Sharks are fairly numerous in all of the ports visited by the ships which carry the mail from New Zealand and Australia to the islands of the Southwestern Pacific, and it is rarely that one of these steamers is seen at anchor without from one to half a dozen lines dangling from its stern. Watching a shark line is a tedious business, but it is strictly necessary in order that the fisherman may know when the monster is hooked. Otherwise, its frantic rushes, if allowed to go unchecked, are pretty sure to cause some part of the line, leader, or even a portion of its own anatomy to give way, resulting in its escape. The school-boy's scheme of tying the line around the big toe and going to sleep would probably work all right as far as rousing the fisherman was concerned, but the sequel might not leave him in a condition to give undivided attention to landing his prize. To this end the sailors of the mail-boats have hit on an ingenious plan. Instead of taking in their lines when the dinner gong sounds or when, for any reason, they are on duty elsewhere, they run a stout piece of marlin twine from the shark-line up to the steam whistle, leaving it for the "man-eater" himself to announce the event of his being hooked by sounding a toot.
Shark on the beach at Mbau
Fijian boys boxing
I regret to have to tell that the inventor of this clever time-saving expedient, a purser of the steamship Taviuni, came near to losing his position as the result of his first experimental trial. This came about through his faulty judgment in running the main line—instead of the comparatively light twine now employed for that connection—up to the whistle. The latter gave forth a brave toot in response to the jerk of the big "tiger" at the other end of the line, but the blast was in the nature of a swan-song. An instant later, with a parting shriek of agony, the whole of the whistling mechanism was wrenched from the funnel, and, carrying a string of hammocks and the binnacle-stand along with it, vanished overboard, spinning like a taffrail log in the wake of the flying shark. The Taviuni did most of her whistling with a fog-horn during the remainder of that voyage.
The natives seem to swim about in comparative safety in the shoal waters of Suva Bay, but the Europeans prefer to keep on the safe side by taking their dips in "bathing pens." An amusing story is told at the Fiji Club of a certain visiting naval officer who took a dive into one of the bathing enclosures at a time that it was occupied by a fourteen-foot "man-eater." The "pen" was a thirty-by-thirty railed-in space on the shore of the bay near where a small river came down, and was built with the ostensible purpose, not of keeping sharks in, but of keeping them out. The combination of a flood and an unusually high tide, however, covered the top rail to a depth of a couple of feet or more, and during the period of submergence the big shark in some manner nosed his way in, to be left a captive when the water subsided. The water of the pen was murky from the flood discharge of the river, but there was nothing in its dull translucence to awaken suspicion in the minds of the half-dozen officers of a visiting gunboat who, hot and tired from a ride into the interior, were preparing for a dip.
The officer in question—a man noted for his nervous haste in doing things—was well ahead of the others in stripping for his plunge, a circumstance that was entirely responsible for his having to bear alone the shock of the discovery that the pen was already occupied. With a snort of contempt for the slowness of his companions, he sprang from the rocks and disappeared under the cool water in a long, deep dive. An instant later the pen was a vortex of foam, in the midst of which whirled the white shoulders of the commander, and through which cut with lightning flashes the black dorsal and tail fins of the threshing shark.
Yelling like a Fijian war-dancer, the frightened swimmer reached the outer palings at the end of half a dozen desperate overhand strokes, clambered over the barrier, tumbled into the water beyond, and, wide-eyed with terror, started lunging right off toward the open sea. When he was finally recalled to shore, he declared that the pen was literally alive with sharks, and not even after the luckless "man-eater," riddled with bullets and bristling with the wooden harpoons of some Fijian fishermen, was hauled out on the beach, could he be made to believe that the score or more of its fellows among which he imagined he had plunged had not escaped. Inasmuch as a frightened shark has never been known to touch even a piece of raw beef, the impetuous officer was hardly in real danger of anything but heart failure and a slap or two from the monster's tail.
The fact that the popular observations of the ways of sharks are largely limited to their dilly-dallyings around baited hooks is responsible for the very general belief that it is necessary for them to turn on their backs before taking food into their mouths. Eating from pieces of meat suspended on a line does not represent the normal condition under which the shark feeds, and to regard as characteristic the attitude he assumes in such circumstances is as unreasonable as similarly to class the antics of a man trying to take a bite from an apple on a string at a Hallowe'en party. Even when a piece of meat is free from the hook, and the shark is satiated or suspicious, he will often roll over and let it settle down gently in his mouth, but this is not because he is physically unable to do the trick otherwise. Throw a piece of red beef between three or four hungry "tigers," and you will be pretty sure to see the quickest of them snap it out of sight with only the slightest listing of his body to one side or the other. Sharks turn slightly in feeding for exactly the same reason that people turn their head slightly in kissing—because their noses would get in the way if they didn't—but to claim that the one must turn on its back to eat is as absurd as to maintain that the other must stand on his head to kiss.
Shark skin, shark teeth, shark oil, shark meat, and several other by-products of the dead shark are articles of greater or lesser utility, but I heard an old trader in Fiji tell of where the living shark was once put to a practical use. This was when they used him as a prison guard in the old days when British convicts were transported to Australia, the monsters serving this purpose for many years at the Port Arthur settlement, ten miles south of Hobart, the present capital of Tasmania. The prisons at this point, some of which may still be seen, were situated upon a peninsula whose only connection with the mainland was by a long, narrow strip of sand called, from its configuration, the "Eaglehawk's Neck."
The convicts were allowed considerable liberty upon the peninsula, but to prevent their escape to the mainland half-starved bloodhounds were chained all the way across the narrowest portion of the "Neck." Several prisoners having avoided the "bloodhound zone" by swimming, the prison authorities adopted the gruesome but effective expedient of feeding the sharks at that point several times a day. In a few weeks the place became literally alive with the voracious "man-eaters," and from that time on the only convict who ever escaped accomplished his purpose by rolling himself up in kelp and working along, inch by inch, timing his movements to correspond with those of the other heaps of seaweed that were being rolled by the surf.
Like all other leviathans of the deep, animate and inanimate, the shark occasionally suffers from barnacles and similar marine parasites which attach themselves to his hide, and during my stay in Fiji I witnessed the phenomenon of a number of these monsters, like so many warships, going into "drydock," as it were, to have their bottoms scraped.
On one of the outer reefs of Suva Bay there is a broad, flat ledge of coral, washed at low tide by only a foot or two of water. To this place the sharks that are troubled with barnacles are wont to resort, and, after picking out a spot where their bodies are just awash, lie for hours while the gently-moving waves rock and rub them backwards and forwards against the rough coral of the reef. This "nature treatment" is said to be most efficacious, and the spectacle of a dozen or more big "man-eaters" dozing contentedly as the warm waters sway them lazily to and fro—every now and then squirming in a pleased sort of way, as a dog does when his spine is rubbed—is something calculated to awaken, for the moment, at least, a feeling almost akin to sympathy for these most universally dreaded and detested of all God's creatures.
Speaking of sympathy for sharks, it may be interesting to note that there does exist one such monster that may fairly be characterized as popular. This is the famous "Pelorus Jack," who lives in one of the great southern sounds of New Zealand, and who has not failed to come out to meet a single steamer visiting that locality in the last twenty years. He invariably joins the ship at the same point in the passage, follows in its wake during the trip about the sound, taking leave of it again at the identical spot where he picked it up. His regular habits have made him the subject of no small amount of preferential treatment, not the least remarkable of which is the greeting and taking leave of him by the passengers with such hearty old British choruses as "We All Love Jack," and "When Jack Comes Home Again." Tourists always refer to him as "Good Old Pelorus," but his "goodness" is a thing which none of them ever appears to try to cultivate at closer quarters than from behind the rail of the poop.
The story of the officer who jumped into the bathing pen while it was occupied by a shark is equalled by another, which I also heard in Suva, but which occurred at Port Darwin, Northern Australia. The bathing enclosure at the latter point was supposed to be shark and alligator-proof. A tremendous spring tide, however, had raised the water for several feet above the tops of the piles of which the enclosure was constructed, and during this period two "man-eaters" and a huge alligator were carried inside. There were no witnesses to the hostilities that followed, but the next morning early bathers found several sections of shark floating about the surface of their plunge, together with a slightly scared, but apparently uninjured, sixteen-foot alligator.
Mark Twain's story of the shark that swallowed a newspaper in the Thames and carried it to Australia in advance of the steamer—this was supposed to have happened in the days before the cable—there to be caught and opened by Cecil Rhodes, who promptly made his start in life as the result of an advance tip on the stock market that he culled from the journal, may be, like the newspaper itself, a little "far-fetched"; nevertheless those monsters have been known to perform gastronomic feats quite as remarkable as "swallowing" everything contained in a London daily. "Nobody knows what the knife will bring forth" is an old sailor's expression often heard when one of these explorative operations is about to be performed, for a shark's stomach is as full of surprises as a "grab-bag," and as uncertain as a lottery.
The most remarkable instance I recall in this connection is that of an enormous "man-eater" that the sailors of Lurline hooked the day before we sailed from Suva. Besides a very considerable assortment of other "indigestibles," they took from the stomach of this leviathan the skull, still bearing the stubs of horns several inches in length, of a full-grown steer. The grisly object had undoubtedly come from the slaughter-house dump farther up the bay, but how the act of swallowing was accomplished was more than we could figure out. The sailors even went so far as to cut away the jaws of the monster and carry them along when we sailed, and during the first week of our voyage to Honolulu they spent most of their time "off watch" in vain endeavours to force the skull between the shining rows of back-curving teeth. The jaws broke and fell to pieces at the joint without the puzzle being solved, but the consensus of opinion, in the forecastle, at least, appeared to be expressed by the yacht's negro cook when he said "dat blessed head must ha' done bin swallered when it wuz a littl' ca'f, an' then growed up inside!"
In the Samoan islands the natives have a legend about a man and a maid who eloped from Savaii, fled to Tutuila, and were there turned respectively into a shark and a turtle by the god or devil into whose hands they chanced to fall. As a proof of this story, the natives claim that if you go out and sing on a moonlight night at the end of a point near the village of Leone, Tutuila, the shark and the turtle will appear to you.
When they told this story to a young American naval officer and myself, the former said that he was quite ready to believe the transformation part of it because his outrigger canoe had "turned turtle" that very morning, while a native dealer who had sold us curios was nothing if not a "shark."
In the matter of the power of music being able to call up the loving pair, however, we were both agreed that we would like a demonstration. That night, therefore, a party of a score or more of the villagers escorted us out to the point, and started up a good lively Samoan himine. They had finished a swinging native rowing song, and were just getting under way with their beloved "Tuta-pai, mai Feleni," when the unmistakable dorsal of a "man-eater" began to cut backwards and forward across the glittering moon-path. Simultaneously a black hump began to show above the water immediately in front of us, and presently the natives called our attention to the fact that it was slowly rising, adding that the turtle was getting ready to swim over and meet the shark. It was at this juncture that my observant companion noted that the tide was rapidly falling, and after ricochetting a round of bullets from our revolvers off the back of the quondam maiden without stirring her up to the point of keeping her tryst, we went back to the village fully convinced that the story was a fabrication, the shark a coincidence, and the turtle a black rock.
"HIS WONDERS TO PERFORM"
We had heard of the Honourable "Slope" Carew—pearler, "black-birder," yachtsman and scion of a noble British family—at every port we had touched in the South Pacific, but it was not our fortune to meet him until after our arrival at Suva. There he was one of our first callers, and it chanced that he, with the Captain of H.M.S. Clio and two or three other Englishmen, was off to the yacht for dinner the night a bottle of champagne exploded prematurely in the hands of our Chinese steward and kicked him backwards down the cabin stairs.
"Makes it seem like the old days on the Aphrodite," said Carew, pausing in his stirring narrative of the way in which Bell, a renegade American naval officer, had saved the plague ship, Cora Andrews. "You heard of the Aphrodite in Tahiti, didn't you, and of how her cargo of 'Hum's Extra Spry' helped my old pal, the Reverend Horatio Loveworth, to convert Boraki and his nest of cut-throats on Makatea?"
We had indeed heard the story of the conversion of Boraki and his fellow pirates of Makatea, but never at better than third or fourth hand, and in versions so diametrically at variance that the chance to enjoy the account of one who had actually figured in that famous coup was too good to let slip. We begged Carew, therefore, to let the Cora Andrews yarn go over to another time and to give us the "champagne and missionary" story then and there.
We were dining on deck, and the story, begun over avocados, was continued after we adjourned with coffee and liqueurs to sofa-cushions or lounging chairs in the cockpit. The tropic moon was dropping plummets of gold through the rigging, and, as he talked, Carew punctuated his well-turned sentences with frequent sips from the oft-replenished glass of cracked ice and absinthe on his chair arm. Just how much of the golden floss of the streaming moonlight and the verdant thread of the trickling absinthe were twisted into the yarn he spun, probably Carew himself could not have told.
"It is a long story if I go back to the beginning, as I shall have to if you are to understand all that happened," said Carew musingly; "for from first to last the yarn revolves, not around myself or the Aphrodite or Boraki, but around a special consignment of champagne to which we always referred from the moment its true character began to be revealed as 'Hum's Extra Spry.'
"It was shortly after the pater cut me off with a beggarly five hundred pounds a year at the end of a series of escapades which had culminated with my wrecking his yacht on the coast of Morocco that I found myself in San Francisco. I had sailed my own ninety-footer at Cowes on more than one occasion, so that I was only following the line of least resistance in applying for the billet of first mate when I learned that Colonel Jack Spencer, the mining magnate, had converted a smart sealing schooner into a private yacht and was preparing to sail with a party of friends for the South Pacific. Spencer was rather taken with the idea of having a sprig of British nobility along, and from the first insisted on treating me more as a guest than an under officer. This was how I chanced to be included with the skipper in an invitation to a farewell dinner given by Spencer to a number of San Francisco friends on the eve of our departure. Here I met the members of the yachting party, and, what is of more importance to my story, had my first experience of the potentialities of 'Hum's Extra Spry.'
"Perhaps it will serve to make the strange things which came to pass afterwards more intelligible if I explain here what Spencer only became apprised of six months later through offering his New York wine agent a liberal reward for the information, namely, what put the power in the fancy-priced consignment of champagne he had ordered especially for the South Pacific cruise.
"It appeared that one of the chemists of the great Hum winery at Rheims, in experimenting with a newly-invented aerating powder, had used that mixture instead of the decolourizing solution in tapering off a twelve dozen case order of California champagne that was being hurriedly prepared for re-export to America. Now normal champagne, in the making, exerts so strong a pressure upon the glass which confines it that an average of fully twenty per cent. of the bottles used are burst before the final stage is reached, while the aerating powder which was being tried out as a substitute for carbon-dioxide gas in making sparkling Burgundies and Sauternes was calculated to develop a ten-pounds-to-the-square-inch pressure on its own account. So it happened that every unit of the order in question, having in addition to its normal stock of bubbles those generated as a result of the accidental aeration, was more like a hand grenade than a bottle of wine. Nine-tenths of the lot suffered total disintegration before it was ready to be shipped, and the remainder was only saved by being transferred to rubber-corked bottles of quarter-inch glass, all of the outsides of which were reinforced with a closely-woven mesh of gilded wire. Red enamel grape leaves were grilled into the gold foil of the cap, and the label, in addition to several lines of French attesting the purity of the contents, bore the English words 'Liquid Sunshine—Special,' in raised ivory letters.
"The two or three dozen surviving cases of this remarkable vintage were snapped up the moment they were clear of the customs by Spencer's New York agent, who rushed them on to San Francisco. All but two cases, which were kept out to serve at the Spencers' farewell dinner, were sent aboard the yacht and stowed.
"I saw at once that the old chap was worried when I arrived the evening of the dinner, and before we went in he took me aside to ask if I knew anything regarding the handling of 'high-power' wine, as he termed it. It appeared that in the afternoon, while several bottles of the new wine were in the refrigerator undergoing a preliminary cooling, some one had dropped an ice pick in amongst them and they had all gone off together. The frame of the box held, but the partitions gave way, wrecking, beyond possibility of salvage, two dozen ice cream models of the Aphrodite floating in a sea of green jelly. The Aphrodites were replaced by some ready-made anchors which the caterer chanced to have on hand, but the endeavour to hasten the chilling of more champagne by the use of a whirligig freezer only resulted in the annihilation of that useful contrivance and the loss of another bottle of wine.
"The contents of the first two bottles which the butler opened for dinner got away to the ceiling almost as fast as did the gilt-capped corks, and that worthy was about ready to give up in despair when one of the caterer's men pointed the way to a solution of the immediate problem by setting the next bottle in a punchbowl and capping it with an inverted soup plate. The latter was smashed to smithereens at the first trial, but the aluminum stew pan which replaced it at the next attempt stood the shock and deflected the cork, cap and a considerable quantity of a restless yellow liquid to the bottom of the punchbowl. This liquid, by means of a funnel, was restored to its bottle, hastily muffling which in a napkin to restrain a persistent catarrhal tendency of its nose, the flurried butler, fifteen minutes late, dashed into the dining room with the first installment of the anxiously-awaited 'Sunshine.'
"Now it is just possible that had the butler moved with his wonted glide of easy dignity nothing very much out of the ordinary would have happened; but the stiff, broken-kneed trot with which he tried to make up for lost time aroused the dormant energies of the hard-won contents of the bottle, with the result that it gathered itself together and made a fresh break for the open just as its warder was edging in for a gingerly pour at the glass of a pearly-shouldered dowager who was sitting on Spencer's right. There was no inverted aluminum stew pan to deflect the erupting 'Sunshine' this time, and, as a consequence, it expended itself with one joyous 'whouf' upon the well-kept surfaces of the stately dame's right cheek and shoulder. Some little of it, tinged with rose and pearl, caromed off to extinguish a circle of pink candles on the table, but the most of it remained behind to trickle in little rose and pearl rivulets down the lady's neck. The unfortunate victim screamed lustily several times, dabbed wildly at the parts affected with a little yellow rag which suddenly appeared from nowhere, and then ran, sobbing, from the room.
"In the meantime the butler's assistants had rounded him up another bottle of the elusive fluid, and when that functionary appeared again in the dining room he might have been planting dynamite bombs, so carefully did he pick his way about and so great was the expression of terror in his staring eyes. But he stuck gamely to his task and finally poured out the last of the 'Sunshine' that his improvised distillery was able to deliver without again interfering with the toilet of any of the guests.
"In all of this time not a soul was able to get a sip of the phantom liquid. The moment a trickle of it touched a glass it hissed like a moistened seidlitz powder, threw spray in the air and piled up a heap of bubbles which, quickly subsiding, left nothing behind but a drug-store smell and a damp circle of table cloth. The sprightly brunette in her first season whom I had taken in came nearest to getting a drink, and her experience had a dampening effect upon the enthusiasm of the others. This maid was rash and impulsive, and, partly by quickness of hand, partly by inhalation, she managed to deflect laterally a lungful of the pungent spray which was ascending perpendicularly to bespangle with dewy drops what some one had just characterized in nautical parlance as her 'natty gaff topsail pompadour.' Her behaviour for the next minute or two made the efforts of the plump dowager to staunch the flow of her complexion seem dignified in comparison. The dinner was finished up with a more manageable vintage, and next day the Aphrodite sailed without further requisition having been made upon her stores of 'Extra Spry.'
"All through the three weeks' cruise to Tahiti the restless bubbles in the thick, green bottles in the Aphrodite's starboard lockers elbowed each other as they swelled in the tropic heat, but it was not until the yacht was safely anchored in Papeete harbour that another opportunity came for any of them to get beyond control. A call had been made on the French governor in the morning, and that dignitary, according to official etiquette, was returning the visit in company with his stately wife the afternoon of the same day. Doubtless you had to go through the same thing. The trouble came while the hospitable Spencer was mixing a punch. Cold tea, maraschino, curacao, burnt sugar and a lot of other stuff had already gone in as a base, quite enough, so the mixer thought, to dilute a bottle of his 'Extra Spry' to an exhilarant innocuousness. All might have gone well had the diluting been done upon scientific principles, but Spencer, whose knowledge of hydraulics appeared very rudimentary for a man who had made a fortune in placer mining, directed the Japanese steward to poke the nose of the bottle into the punch as soon as he started the cork. That obedient functionary approached the bowl from the side opposite to the one on which the governor and his wife were seated and did exactly as directed.
"Although the time was but five in the afternoon, His Excellency was in the full evening dress prescribed for official calls—cock-hat, claw-hammer coat and two feet of shirt front crossed with a strip of red, white and blue bunting and a row and a half of medals. A hundredth of a second after the asthmatically-wheezing nose of the bottle of 'Extra Spry' went over the edge of the bowl this regalia was absorbing a good half of Spencer's partially mixed punch, while the remainder bubbled and creamed over the expensive Parisian creation of his stately wife.
"A sailor, who had taken in the incident from the forward deck, lost control of himself and broke into a loud guffaw, in which he was promptly joined by several of his mates. This set two or three of the more irreverent of the members of Spencer's party going, and when the spasm of laughter had passed it was found that Their Excellencies, in high dudgeon, had melted over the side and departed in their waiting cutter. The Jap was found at the foot of the cabin stairs with a bruise in the pit of his stomach which bade fair to confine him to the little French hospital for a fortnight. Tropical heat and the agitation of the tossing bosom of the South Pacific were conspiring to set on hair-trigger edge the latent energies of the 'Extra Spry,' and, though none suspected it, the insistent throb of the imprisoned bubbles were the pulse beats in the Hand of Fate.
"The coldness of Tahiti officialdom after this incident, a squabble with his skipper, as well as incipient internal dissensions among the members of his too-closely-confined party, all conspired to make Spencer forego the remainder of the cruise he had planned, and within the next week or so they had all left for San Francisco or Auckland, leaving the Aphrodite in my hands to be sold to the highest bidder. At the end of a month I sold her to the Amalgamated Missionary, Bible and Tract Society, which eagerly embraced the opportunity to replace at a bargain figure its schooner, Morning Star, which the last hurricane had piled up, a hopeless wreck, upon the beach of Moorea. I was retained as skipper.
"The Society had long been anxious to undertake some reclamation work in the Paumotos, and the possession of the Aphrodite—a vessel that, on account of the ease with which she handled, could venture with comparative safety where the ordinary type of South Sea schooner dared not go—made it possible to attempt to realize this ambition for the first time. After a week of busy preparation we made ready to sail for Makatea, and when the missionary schooner, Southern Cross, glided out of the narrow crack in the reef which constitutes the entrance to Papeete harbour and headed off for the north-east, there was little to differentiate her from the saucy Aphrodite which had come bowling in over an almost identical course a month or so previously. A new set of gold letters across her stern, a crown and anchor flag at the main truck, and a plain set of table covers and bedspreads included about all the changes in sight, and even a search of the lazarette and lockers would have disclosed little (except some bales of Bibles and hymn books and some cases of salmon and barrels of salt beef) which had not been there before.
Weaving the walls of a Fijian house
Interior of Fijian house, showing how it is bound
together with coco fibre
"Fewer still were the old things that had been dispensed with. The name and the house-flag had to be altered, of course, to suit the new character of the vessel, while embroidered silk peacocks and sun-flowers on the coverlets were rather beyond the simple tastes of the Reverend Horatio Loveworth who was in charge of the work in hand. But the punchbowl had been retained as a baptismal fount, the wines—including the 'Extra Spry'—for medicinal purposes, the fancy stores to be presented as a goodwill offering to King Boraki of Makatea, and a gramophone, fortified with a big stack of new bass drum and trombone records of popular hymns, as a music teacher to the expected converts. Loveworth's keen practicality had been the principal factor in his rapid rise to the most important position in the South Pacific missionary service.
"My mate was an Australian of long experience among the Islands, and the crew a well-picked lot of half-castes and Kanakas. We worked well together, and I doubt if the little schooner, even in her sealing days, was ever better handled. After two days of admirable behaviour in baffling winds and treacherous currents, she penetrated to the very heart of the stormy Paumotan Archipelago. Ahead loomed the black mass of Makatea, the half-coral, half-volcanic island of sinister reputation which was our destination, and between stretched ten miles of submerged reefs which the chart made no pretence of outlining.
"Ordering sail to be shortened and a man sent aloft, I was just preparing to begin 'feeling' our way in toward the darker blur that marked the probable entrance to the lagoon, when the mate's keen eye descried a lone sail bearing rapidly down on us from landward. My glass revealed a large out-rigger canoe which, driven by a fair wind and urged by the flashing paddles of its dozen or more occupants, was throwing the foam over its bow so swiftly was it sliding through the water. In less than half an hour it had grated against the side of the schooner and the leader of the party, a magnificently proportioned fellow dressed only in a red pareo and a necklace of sharks' teeth, disdaining the ladder that was lowered for him, leapt lightly over the rail and, saluting the Reverend Horatio with a bow and a sweep of his koui fibre hat, announced himself to be King Boraki.
"Speaking in the Marquesan dialect, he said that Makatea had learned of the great missionary's intended visit from word that had come by Rangaroa; that Makatea was transported with joy at the honour that was being done it; that preparations for a fitting reception had been in progress for a week and were now complete; and, finally, that he had come to pilot the ship of his distinguished visitor by a safe channel to the harbour and to be the first of his people to receive a Christian blessing.
"'God bless you, my brother; ask the rest of our brothers to come aboard for prayer and refreshment,' ejaculated the Reverend Horatio fervently, and no sooner was the invitation issued than fifteen more red pareos and shark tooth necklaces flashed over the rail, their wearers promptly ranging themselves in an orderly row behind their leader. An instant later, like puppets controlled by a single string, every man of them plumped down on his knees, crossed his arms on his breast and, with eyes devoutly raised at an angle that directed their gaze somewhere in the vicinity of the third row of reef points on the idly flapping mainsail, remained motionless.
"'Rehearsed, by Gawd!' muttered the mate, whose quick eye had caught Boraki's backhand signal. 'Oh, for a Maxim on the deckhouse!'
"'Oh for words to express my thanks for all that has happened and is going to happen this day!' prayed the Reverend Horatio, heeding naught but the fact that he was on the eve of the apparent fulfilment of a lifelong ambition. His prayer was brief but full of feeling, and when it was over he asked all hands to come below and have something to eat.
"Boraki brought his men to their feet with a wave of his hand, picked two of his chiefs to accompany him to the cabin with the missionary, and sent the others forward to feed and fraternize with the crew. Carried away by Loveworth's enthusiasm and confidence—the man was, and is, a born leader—the mate and I followed him and the guest of honour below.
"Who this Boraki was, beyond being the greatest rascal that ever terrorized the south-eastern Pacific, nobody knew. What he was, everybody could tell you, but those who asked usually tried to save time by telling you what he wasn't. By process of elimination you might then learn that he was a pirate, cut-throat, murderer, cannibal, robber and other things too numerous to mention; also, that each of his four hundred men in Makatea was all of these things to a greater or lesser degree, and that few of them had ever been apprehended or punished. Boraki himself was supposed to have a good deal of European blood in his veins, but of what nationality no one was sure. The traders said that his father was a missionary, and pointed to traits in his character to prove it; the missionaries said that his father was a trader, and pointed to traits in his character to prove it; Boraki was silent on the subject, but indirectly gave both parties the lie by robbing and killing—and some said eating—traders and missionaries alike.
"All that Boraki had said in his little speech when he boarded the Southern Cross was quite true, but not quite the whole truth. He did not state, for example, that the preparations for entertainment he referred to were to be in the form of endurance tests of walking on red-hot stones—the walking to be done by the visitors—and that possibly the red-hot stones might serve for another purpose by the time the supper hour came around. Nor did he state that the end of his volunteer piloting was to run the nose of the schooner into a soft sand bank in the middle of the passage, where canoe-loads of his men, coming from the lagoon ostensibly as life-savers, could take advantage of the confusion that was bound to follow the accident to enter into possession with a minimum of difficulty and risk. The schooner was to be left till the shifting of the sands at the turn of the tide would release her without injury. All of which, of course, we did not learn until later.
"This plan, good enough to have succeeded against a gunboat, had been evolved by the resourceful pirate in the expectation that the Southern Cross was coming with nothing less than a battery of rapid-fire guns and a detachment of French marines to see her through. When Boraki saw no quick-firers on the deck, no rifles or cutlasses in the cabin, and not even a revolver or knife in the belts of the officers and crew, he perceived at once that there was no use risking the loss of the schooner by running her aground. His action was characteristic.
"The swift happenings of the next hour or so, as I was witness of them only 'in spots,' I shall describe as the subsequent testimony of the participants—principally Boraki himself—showed them to have transpired.
"The distinctly mixed assemblage—Boraki, his two fellow cut-throats, Loveworth, the Australian first mate, the half-caste second mate and myself—were seated round the cabin table. The steward had finished setting out a substantial little lunch and the Reverend Horatio, having put one of his favourite records into the gramophone, was just winding it up, when Boraki, without a word even to his companions, sprang lightly to the top of the cabin stairs and shouted to his men in Marquesan—a language that was understood by every one on the boat but myself—to tie up the sailors. Regaining the cabin floor at a single bound, he swung quickly with a mineral water bottle on the heads of the first and second mates before either of those unfortunates was clear of his chair. My own head struck the cabin lamp a sharp blow as I lurched up out of my swivel seat, and I was already half dazed when Boraki's hard-swung bludgeon landed on my temple and dropped me like a log across the second mate. My last recollection was of one of the chiefs, muffled in Loveworth's long black coat-tails, trying to pinion the missionary's powerful legs, while the other brown rascal tore at the clerical stock in an effort to find an effective place to choke. I am indebted to Boraki for most of what followed.
"Giving each of our prostrate bodies a prod with his toe to assure himself that they were really as limp as they looked, Boraki perched on the corner of the table and divided his time between eating chocolate wafers and giving his henchmen gratuitous tips on the way to hold down a struggling missionary. It was an even thing for a while, Boraki avers; the prettiest kind of a fight. But when the man who had stroked Oxford for three consecutive years finally threw off his assailants and made a break for the deck and fighting room, the wily pirate felt that it was time to take a hand himself. Without descending from his comfortable cross-legged perch on the snowy table-cloth, he leaned forward as the fugitive dashed by and coolly planted his water bottle just aft Loveworth's right ear, sending the stout-hearted missionary down alongside his officers in the shambles on the floor.
"Leaving his companions to tie up the prisoners, Boraki, munching at a mixed fistful of eclairs and canned salmon, sauntered forward to see all made snug in that part of the ship. Five minutes later, his head crowned with Loveworth's waste-basket—a cast iron imitation of a top hat—and puffing contentedly at a Perfecto, he had taken his station at the wheel and with the skill of a born sailor was guiding the Southern Cross in through the maze of shoals that surrounded his island.
"The run in was a dead beat to windward, the sun was pitilessly hot, and by the time the schooner's anchor went rattling down into the rose coral floor of Makatea lagoon Boraki's kingly head, under its sixteen-pound iron crown, was buzzing like the Trade-wind in the palm fronds. His blood seemed turned to boiling water and the words of the final orders that he tried to speak rattled together in his throat like the rustle of dead banana leaves, so that he had to make his meaning clear by signs. What wonder, then, that not even a hundred-yards-square of close-packed canoes, from each of which issued shouts of acclamation, could hold him when, from the cool, dark depth of the cabin, came the ringing Marquesan equivalent of 'Rum ho!'
"Boraki crossed the cockpit in one bound, negotiated the companionway in another, and with a third hurdled the prostrate forms of the prisoners and landed between his two faithful lieutenants who, after bootlessly ransacking the schooner from stem to stern, had at last discovered the wine lockers underneath the starboard transoms in the cabin.
"Boraki was vaguely aware that each of his men was holding up a cool-looking green bottle, through the wonderful gold network of which could be seen a beautiful golden liquid that bubbled and flashed and jumped up and down and seemed quite as impatient to get out and run down his burning throat as he was to have it do so. In the lockers below stretched endless lines of similar flashing bottles, and each line, to the chief's inflamed imagination, seemed long enough to link the lagoon of Makatea to the moon with a golden chain. He wondered how long it would take him to drink them all dry.
"But why this terrible delay? Wouldn't these fools ever set the nectar free and extinguish the flames that were licking up his insides? They were letting him die while they sought for a white man's 'pull-pull' to loosen the plugs with! What need was there for a 'pull-pull' anyhow? He would show them how the thing should be done, and, suiting the action to the word, the impatient chief seized a bottle in each hand and deftly opened the two at once by knocking their heads together.
"What else he opened at the same time Boraki probably never thoroughly understood, and so he was the readier to believe Loveworth when that keen opportunist told him solemnly that it was the Gate of Hell. After that point had been impressed upon him, his alarmed query as to whether or not all the devils who had come out when the Gate opened had returned was a perfectly natural one. He said that the only thing he clearly remembered was a feeling of wonder that the heads of the beautiful bottles should knock off so easily, and that his first recollection after that was of crying out because he thought some one was raking off his face with a comb made of shark-hooks. As a matter of fact the incidents alluded to were separated by more than an hour of time, and the shark-hook comb sensation was caused by the well-meant efforts of the first and second mates to remove the cast iron hat from Boraki's head with the aid of a hammer, file and cold chisel.
"When the roughly opened bottles of 'Extra Spry' kicked downward and set off the whole mine in the lockers the henchmen were only slammed across to the opposite side of the cabin and deposited, senseless, against the china closet; but the king himself, caught bending over, received the full force of the explosion upon the chest and was shot like a rocket against the ceiling. By the impact, his iron hat, while it probably saved him from a fractured skull, was driven through flesh and cartilage squarely down upon his shoulders, fitting so closely that only a rust hole in the crown saved its wearer from a speedy smothering. Surely no other king in history, so securely crowned, ever furnished so graphic an illustration of the 'Uneasy lies the head' adage.
"Ten seconds after the explosion, out of all the horde that had swarmed over her, not a Makatean who could help himself remained aboard the Southern Cross, and in less than that many minutes not a canoe cut the waters of the lagoon and no man, woman or child was stirring in the village. Huddled in their houses, the whole population was awaiting in fear and trembling the moment when the devil ship would reopen with its invisible cannon.
"The terror of the people was increased a hundredfold when a man who, watching at the sky-light of the cabin, had been stunned by the explosion, came floundering madly ashore a half hour later and ran from house to house telling in broken speech how he had seen the white men—whom they had all beheld lying bound and lifeless on the cabin floor—rise up and begin driving spikes through King Boraki's head. Never was clay laid ready to the hand of the moulder more plastic than was the outlaw community of Makatea at this moment; nor was ever man better qualified to make the most of the situation than the Reverend Horatio Loveworth.
"Lying on the floor, as we had been, the explosion, far from doing us injury, in the stiff jolt it gave our battered frames only hastened our return to consciousness. Loveworth was the first to slip the napkins which bound his wrists. Dazed as he was, the good chap yet had the presence of mind to make the three of us who were still tied promise to refrain from murdering Boraki and his fellows before he would assist us in freeing our bonds. To hold the mates to their promises, once their hands were free to rove over the swelling mounds that marked the spots where the pirate's hard-swung water bottle had fallen, was a more difficult matter. They helped me truss up the henchmen and release the sailors, but enlisting them in actual relief work was a task so well nigh hopeless that Loveworth gave it up in despair after a few minutes of entreaty and began alone. It was the muffled gurglings and convulsive wrigglings set going by his first tug at the iron plug that finally brought the belligerents into line, they scenting in the vigorous application of 'first aid' measures a possible means of accomplishing their end without bringing about an open rupture with the missionary, to whom they were greatly devoted. Considering the zeal with which they set about their errand of mercy, and their manner of wielding the tools in the delicate operation of chipping Boraki's head out of the iron hat, there was no difficulty in locating the source of the fugitive Makatean's spike-driving story.
"One of the king's first questions after he had been informed that it was the Gate of Hell that had swung on him was, not unnaturally, as to whether or not the Gate swung very often like that, and, if it did, when the next swinging was likely to occur. When he was told that this was only a special swinging directly occasioned by his shameless treachery, and that, anyhow, the danger was one that never threatened good Christians, he was silent for a space, and then asked, with apparent irrelevance, what had become of the green bottles.
"'Gone to——' began the mate in an angry roar, the realization of an almost personal loss suddenly assailing him—'the other side of the Gate,' gently concluded the Reverend Horatio after checking the obstreperous Australian's threatened outburst of profanity with an upraised hand.
"'Then teach me and my people how to remain on this side of the Gate,' gasped Boraki hoarsely, as he sank back with a shiver among the silk sofa cushions which supported his battered frame.
"So it came to pass that when the king had rested for a while we put the Crown and Anchor banner of the Missionary Society in his hands, propped him up in the stern sheets of the starboard lifeboat with one of his faithful henchmen on either side, and sent him ashore, rowed by a volunteer crew of the least hurt of the sailors.
"'Tell your people,' shouted Loveworth as the boat gained headway under a lengthening stroke, 'that you have come back from the Gate of Hell to help me guide them out of the darkness into the light and to life everlasting. If they are ready to accept the teaching, hoist the flag in front of your council house.'
"Boraki heard and nodded vigorously with the gory cylinder that served him as a head.
"The referendum was accomplished in record time, for in less than five minutes from the moment the boat touched the beach we saw a man dart out of a side portal of Boraki's palm-leaf palace and run like mad to the foot of the lopped-off coconut tree that stood before the long turtle-backed council house. With straining eyes, we saw him clamber, monkey-like, up the lofty stump, caught the flashes of a furiously-swung hammer, and then, snapping exultantly in the whistling south-east Trade, the flag of the golden Crown and Anchor streamed out from the official flag-pole of Makatea. The people had made their choice.
"No sooner was his beloved banner out to the breeze than Loveworth, taking with him the disgusted second mate, put off for the beach in the whaleboat to catch at its flood the tide of fortune which had at last begun to set so strongly in his favour. The mate and I went below to take stock of the wreck in the cabin.
"'S'elp me Father Neptune, I'd give a month's pay to the new mission to know what it was that knocked them bloomin' pirates into the shape we woke up to find 'em in,' said the mate musingly, sinking down with a sigh of relief upon the undisturbed cushions of a port transom. 'P'raps they took liberties with a bunch o' rockets or a keg o' powder; only there ain't no fire marks nowhere. All the booze smashed up, too. Wonder who's at the bottom of it, anyhow. Eh! What? Who spoke? You, Capt'n? No. Oh, you, old Tinhorn. My word, but you gave me a turn. "God," you sez. That's what Pilot Loveworth sez, too, and p'raps it's true; but what gets me is how He done it. You wasn't laid out with a crack on the nut, old Tinhorn; tell us how it happened.'
"'Brrr—in a mysterious way—brrr,' came the droning answer, leaving us no wiser than before.
"The jolt of the mate's weary body had thrown over the half-shifted lever of the already wound-up gramophone, which had been abandoned on the transom by Loveworth when he turned to receive the first onslaught of Boraki's henchmen, and the record had commenced to spin. The sounding-box floundered like a squirrel on its wheel as the black disc, scarred and littered from the explosion, whirled beneath the needle, and it chanced that the only intelligible words that came from the horn in the first few moments were those which the astonished mate had, for an instant, taken as answers to his conjectures.
"After learning that the deed had been done in a mysterious way, all we could make out between the 'zrrrs' and 'bzzzs' which followed was that whoever had done the deed had performed wonders, to which the mate naïvely replied that he had perceived as much at the outset, but that now he was seeking enlightenment as to how the wonders had been performed.
"The needle steeple-chased for a couple of circuits after that without communicating anything relevant, following which, suddenly and without warning, it came out of the woods onto a stretch of smooth, undamaged going. Then, in the clear, flute-like tenor of 'Harry McMurtry, Columbophone Record,' came the words of Loveworth's favourite hymn—
'God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.'
"The missionary, who was kneeling on the beach invoking a blessing on the heads of the terrified wretches who had come pouring from their houses to grovel at his feet, told me afterwards that the words came floating down to him across the still waters of the lagoon like a voice from the other world.
"That was all the comment that the only English-speaking witness of the miracle wrought by 'Hum's Extra Spry' was destined ever to make, for at the beginning of the next lap the needle went into an incipient crack and split the record down the middle. The two pieces, together with the scarred fragments of a cast iron top hat, are still preserved by Loveworth in the little coral mission at Makatea."
The green bottle on Carew's chair arm had been tilted with increasing frequency as his story approached its climax, and for the last fifteen or twenty minutes, save for short spells when he had rallied to explain this or that phenomenon, he had talked with a far-away expression in his eyes, as one who visualizes and describes what he sees. He roused somewhat at the ripple of applause which greeted the end of the yarn, but he made his adieux like a man in a dream, and his gaze was blank and vacant as he lurched unsteadily down the gangway to the Clio's launch.
That was the last we ever saw of the Honourable "Slope" Carew. He sailed next day in the Clio to pilot that gunboat to an unmarked rock somewhere to the north-west which was to be blown up or charted. A year later, while in Australia, I read in a Noumea dispatch to the Sydney Morning Herald that he had shot himself on the lawn of the Cercle Militaire in a fit of melancholia following a night of absinthe drinking.
SUVA TO HONOLULU
At five o'clock in the afternoon of the 2nd of July we weighed anchor and slipped from the quietness of Suva harbour out into a roystering east wind that was playing all manner of strange pranks with the placid sea we had come in through a week previously. For steep, short seas and uncomfortable small-schooner weather, nothing quite equals one of these reef-locked stretches of the south-west Pacific with a stiff blow on. The ever-imminent bottom, constantly dragging on the waves, retards them below and lets them keep going above, producing seas something between ocean swells and lines of surf. Sailing with seas of this description coming anywhere forward of the beam is like tobogganing on an uncleared mountainside.
Hardly was the yacht clear of the harbour before we were forced to begin shortening canvas, and by eight o'clock double reefs had been tied in the mainsail and foresail and the bonnet taken out of the forestay-sail. Even then she made bad weather of it. She would make a terrific leap skyward, almost standing on her rudder in an effort to clear an advancing wave, and then crash thunderingly down and bore her nose deep into the green water of the next sea before her bows began lifting again. There was not a great deal of weight behind the seas and they did little damage; but all night long they shook the yacht as a terrier does a rat, carried away a couple of boat-loads of fresh fruit contributed by our Suva friends, and made sleeping an impossibility. By morning a falling wind and sea made it possible to shake the reefs out of the foresail and put the bonnet back into the forestay-sail, but the mainsail languished all day with the most of its length along the boom.
Early in the morning of the 4th the yacht crossed the 180th Meridian, carrying us back to West Longitude. Regarding the unusual sequence of days on this occasion the "Ladies' Log" has the following entry under date of July 3rd:
"Yesterday it was Sunday, the 3rd; today, from twelve P. M. to four A. M., it was the Fourth of July. Then we crossed the 180th Meridian, and it was again Sunday, the 3rd. Tomorrow we will have a continuation of the Fourth which we started this morning. This figures out at one and five-sixths Sundays and one and one-sixth Fourths of July, making a total of three complete and consecutive holidays on which, according to nautical custom, the cook must provide us with 'duff.'"
Levity of the "Ladies' Log" aside, the coincidence was a most remarkable one.
It was possibly the first fragment of the Fourth struggling to join forces with the unbroken one that followed which caused an hour's diversion on the morning of the latter which was quite sufficient in itself to stand for an Independence Day celebration. The wind had been light but steady from E.S.E. all day, and when darkness fell there was nothing in the smooth sea, clear sky and high barometer to point any reason for not carrying the light sails all night. An easy nine miles an hour was averaged all through the first watch, and a freshening of the breeze shortly after the sounding of midnight had ushered in the Fourth was responsible for better than ten miles being run in the hour immediately following. Shortly after one o'clock the breeze, quite without warning, suddenly fell light, and all in a minute the celebration was on. What it was we managed to agree upon the next morning, and as to why it was the coming day also brought considerable enlightenment; how it was depended largely upon one's viewpoint, and no two of us appear to have seen it quite in the same way. I, sleeping on a cabin transom when the thing happened, can merely set down my own impressions.
With the startling distinctness with which the slightest sound above makes itself heard in the quiet spaces between decks, I noted how the rustle of the seas along the sides died down as the breeze fell light, heard the banging of blocks, the flap of sails, the slatting of lines, and presently the buzz of voices in puzzled conjecture. Then a low, grinding roar, like the distant sound of a dry-snow avalanche, began filling the air, and instantly the sharp, incisive voice of the Commodore cut in, shouting an interminable string of orders. Suddenly the sound of the voices changed to gasping snarls, the boom of boots on the deck to far-away rat-a-tats, and the whole of the outside Universe seemed to resolve itself into one huge roar. Then a great, big, solid something struck the yacht and all of the staterooms lay down on their sides, the lamps swung up and lay down against the ceiling, and everything movable jumped out and lay down on the port berths and transoms. A trunk broke loose from its lashings under the cabin table and slid down to mingle with a typewriter, a phonograph, a couple of hundred of the latter's loose records, and, incidentally, myself. Shortly a starboard bookcase vomited its contents into the shambles, and a big bunch of flags-of-all-nations, unrolling as it came, leaped out to lend a festal touch to the glad occasion. And over all, through open skylight and companionway, poured floods of brine to keep down the dust.
Time and again the yacht struggled to sit up, and as often settled shudderingly back on her side. Finally, the muffled snarl of orders forced from a wind-stopped throat cut down through the roar, to be followed by a scurrying on deck—tiny and distant like the scrambling of mice over paper—and the cabin leaped suddenly halfway up and hung there quivering as though balanced on its corner. Then, as some one ran forward the slide and jammed together the doors of the companionway, came the tense voice of the Commodore, gasping above the wind:
"Tumble up lively, you there below! Come a-runnin' an' len' a hand 'fore the sticks go out o' 'er!" Then, more indistinctly as his face was turned, "Le' go, there forrard; le' go!"
A moment later the cabin gave another jump back toward the normal, this time straightening up enough to give me a chance to burrow out from under a stack of phonograph records and crawl along the side of the port transom to the stairs.
I have a distinct memory of how my head was bumped twice in gaining the deck—once against the storm doors of the companionway and once against the wind. The air, which was rushing by as though all the atmosphere of the Universe was trying to crowd itself along the deck of the yacht, felt as tangible as a solid stream of water, and so mixed was it with water, in fact, that there was no telling where the surface of the sea left off and the air commenced. The hard-driven drops stung like sleet, and the act of breathing with the face turned to windward was a sheer impossibility.
Still heeling heavily, and with mainsail dragging over her port side like the trailing wing of a wounded bird, the yacht scudded off before the wind. Withal she was making good weather of it, and even before the coming of the rain marked the passing of the centre of the squall we had the main-boom amidships and the troublesome mainsail hauled aboard. The deck was a fathom deep in flapping sails and up forward a water-butt and a salt beef barrel were having a lively game of tag, but neither of the boats had started its lashings and none of the skylights was smashed. Most of the damage was done to the storm-tossed contents of the cabin. By daybreak the deck was cleared and the yacht, under all-plain sail, headed again on her north-westerly course.
Our "Independence Day Celebration," as we afterwards had explained to us in Honolulu, was what is commonly referred to in the South Pacific as a "leeward squall." This phenomenon is met with only among volcanic islands high enough to allow the wind to draw around them and meet again in "twisters" a few miles to leeward. If the wind holds steady from one direction this ordinarily makes little trouble, but if it chances to haul two or three points ahead when a ship is passing a high island the squall which comes boring in from leeward may take her aback with disastrous results. Trading captains passing under the lee of islands of this description always go under shortened sail. Light sails of all kinds are unpopular in the South Pacific—one never sees a trading schooner with a topmast on the fore, and not all carry them on the main.
It was a "leeward squall" of unusual force that Lurline encountered on the morning of the Fourth of July, and considering the fact that, with the exception of her foretopsail, she was carrying all the sail she had, the Commodore's work in bringing her through unharmed was creditable in the extreme. From so unexpected a quarter did the squall appear that only the briefest space was allowed for preparation; yet in these two or three minutes all hands were called, the maintopmast staysail and maingafftopsail were lowered to the deck, the jib-topsail and flying jib hauled down and furled, the ship put about on the other tack, the jib furled, and men stationed at the halyards fore and aft. All of this was accomplished before the squall struck, which then left nothing to do but let go the halyards when it became apparent that the force of the wind was too great for the yacht to stand up under. With the wind coming as it was, it was impossible to prevent the mainsail's falling in the water.
By the afternoon of the Fourth we were out of sight of the last of the Fijis and again dependent on observations for our position. It was our intention to call in at Fanning Island on our way to Hawaii, to which end the yacht was kept headed north-east whenever possible, a course two points more easterly than the direct one to Honolulu. With a light south-east wind 119 miles were run up to noon of the 5th, soon after which a shift to N.N.E. forced us to go about and head nearly due east all afternoon. Toward dark it fell calm and but three miles were run between six o'clock and midnight. By the 6th the wind was back to south-east, but blowing with little force, the run to noon of that day being but forty-five miles.