Becalmed at Pinaki
Boat
On
ON the third day of the homeward voyage the wind died away, and in the middle of the afternoon it fell dead calm when we were less than a mile distant from the atoll of Pinaki. With the exception of a small group of Papeete traders, I don't suppose there are a dozen white men who have ever heard of the place; and those who have seen it or set foot upon it must be fewer still. It lies toward the eastern extremity of the Low Archipelago, and is one of four small atolls, all within a radius of thirty miles of one another. On charts of that segment of the eastern Pacific these four islands are barely discernible, and Pinaki, the least of them, appears but little larger than the dot of the "i" in Whitsunday, its English name.
The current carried us slowly along the northwesterly side of the island. It was intensely hot. Teriaa, nephew of Miti, the skipper, was sluicing the blistered deck, but the water steamed out of the scuppers, and in a moment the planking was as dry and as hot to the touch as before. He soon left off and took refuge in the whaleboat, which he covered with a piece of canvas. I crawled in with him, but the suffocating shade was less endurable than the full glare of the sun.Tane, the other sailor, a man of fifty, was below. He had remained there most of the time since our departure from Rutiaro, sleeping on a greasy mat, indifferent to the cockroaches—the place was alive with them by night—or the copra bugs, which were a nuisance at all hours. The stench from the little cabin, filled almost to the ceiling with unsacked copra, was terrible; and it was not much better on deck. I took shelter beside Miti, who was sitting in the meager shade of the mainsail. Presently, pointing casually toward the shore, he said: "You see him? What he do there?"
I saw the man plainly enough, now that he was pointed out to me, standing with his arms folded, leaning lightly against a tree. I was limited to a hasty glance through my binoculars, for he was looking toward us; but I saw that he was unmistakably white, although his skin seemed as dark as that of a native. He was barefoot, naked to the waist, and for a nether garment wore a pair of trousers chopped off at the knee.
I, too, wondered what a white man could be doing on an uninhabited island. Miti knew no more of the atoll than that it was or had formerly been uninhabited. It belonged, he said, to the natives of Nukatavake, which lay nine miles to the northwest. We could see this other atoll as we rode to the light swell, a splotch of blue haze a nail's breadth wide, vanishing and reappearing against the clear line of the horizon. In two hours' time the current had carried us to the lee side of the island. It ran swiftly there, but in a more northerly direction, so that we were forced out of the main stream of it, and drifted gradually into quiet water near the shore. An anchor was carried to thereef and we brought up to within thirty yards of it. With another anchor out forward, the schooner was safely berthed for the night.
I went ashore with the two sailors for a fresh supply of drinking coconuts, but I gave no help in collecting them. A fire was going on the lagoon beach, and there I found the solitary resident frying some fish before a small hut built in the native fashion. He might have been of any age between thirty-five and forty-five; was powerfully built, with a body as finely proportioned as a Polynesian's. His voice was pleasant and his manner cordial as he gave me welcome, but a pair of the coldest blue eyes I have ever seen made me doubt the sincerity of it. I felt the need of making apologies for the intrusion, adding, lamely, "I haven't seen a white man in three months, and our skipper speaks very little English."
"I was about to look you up," he said. "I can't say that I'm lonely here. I manage to get along without much companionship. But to be frank, I'm hungry for tobacco. There's none left at Nukatavake, and I've been sucking an empty pipe since last November. You haven't a fill in your pouch by any chance?"
I would have given something for his relish of the first pipeful, or the fifth, for that matter. Finally he said: "I imagine you are in for several days of Pinaki. You have noticed the sky? Not a sign of wind. I can't offer you much in the way of food; but the fishing is good, and if you care to you are welcome to stop ashore."
I accepted the invitation gladly; but as I walked back to the schooner for a few belongings and some more tobacco I questioned the propriety of my decision.My prospective host was an Englishman by his accent, although, like my friend Crichton at Tanso, he was evidently long away from home. He struck me as being a good deal of the Crichton type, although he differed greatly from him outwardly. I remembered that Crichton, too, had been pleasant and friendly, once the ice was broken between us; but the prospect of an early parting and the certitude of our never meeting again had been the basis for the friendship in so far as he was concerned. This other Englishman was not living on an uninhabited atoll because of a liking for companionship. I was debating the matter of a return to shore when Tane crawled out of the cabin to make preparations for supper, and as he was a sufferer from elephantiasis, the sight of his immense swollen limbs and his greasy, sweating body decided me. Papeete was far distant, and I would have enough of Tane before we reached the end of the journey.
Supper was ready by the time I reached the hut. It consisted of fish deliciously broiled, coconuts, and hard biscuit. Over it I gave my host an account of my stay at Rutiaro and of the unsuccessful experiment in solitude.
"Yes," he said, "they are rather too sociable, these natives. The people of Nukatavake used to bother me a good deal when I first came here. I thought nine miles of open sea would keep them away; but they often came over in sailing canoes—a dozen or two at a time when the wind favored; and they would stay until it shifted back into the southeast. I didn't encourage them. In fact, I made it quite plain that I preferred to be alone. The island is theirs, of course,and I can't prevent them from coming during the copra-making season; but they no longer come at other times. Nine months out of the year I have the place to myself. But they are damnably inquisitive. I don't like Kanakas in the aggregate, although I have one or two good friends among them."
The dying fire lit us to bed about midnight. I lay awake for a long time after my host was sleeping. We had talked for three hours, chiefly about the islands. In fact, all that he told me of himself was that he was fond of fishing.
There was not a hint of a breeze the next day, nor the next, nor the day after that. The sea was almost as calm as the lagoon, and thePotii Ravaravalay motionless at anchor as though frozen in a sheet of clear ice. Miti and the two sailors remained on board most of the time, sleeping during the heat of the day under a piece of canvas rigged over the main beam, and at night fishing over the side in dreamy contentment. If they came ashore at all it was only for a few moments, and they never crossed to the lagoon beach. During these three days I remained the Englishman's guest, and although I was out of patience with myself for my curiosity, it grew in spite of me. What under the sun was the man doing here? Evidently he had not come to an atoll, as my friend Crichton had, to do his writing and thinking undisturbed. Crichton had books, a practical interest in planting, and a cultural interest in Polynesian dialects. He would muse for hours over a word in one dialect which might or might not bear a remote resemblance to some other word in usage a thousand miles away. The study fascinated him. As he once told me, it gave his imaginationroom to work in. I have no doubt that he made up for himself stories of the early Polynesian migrations vastly better than any romances he might have read. This other Englishman had no books; not so much as a scrap of writing paper. At least I saw none in his house, which was as bare as it was clean. There was a sleeping mat in one corner; a chest and some fishing gear against the wall; picks and shovels in a corner; a few old clothes hanging from nails driven into the supports, and absolutely nothing else. How did he put in his time? Fishing was a healthy interest, but it was not enough to keep a man sane for a period of seven years. He let that bit of information slip in one conversation I had with him.
He was not a taciturn chap. After our first evening he talked quite freely about his earlier adventures. He had spent three years in northern Australia, prospecting for gold, and he gave me an intensely interesting account of the aborigines there—of their marvelous skill at following a trail, no matter over what sort of country. I had heard that these people were biologically different from the rest of humankind and that their blood would not cross with white blood. This was not the case, he said. He had known white men animal enough to take the Australian blacks for wives, and had seen the children which they had by them. From Australia he had gone to New Guinea, still prospecting for gold, although at times he sought relief from the disappointment of it by making expeditions with the natives in search of bird-of-paradise feathers. But "gold" was the word that rang through all his talk. Several times it was on the tip of my tongue to say, "But there's no gold at Pinaki." I was ableto resist the temptation, remembering his remark about the damnable inquisitiveness of the people of Nukatavake. Then, on the morning of my third day on the island, an incident occurred which made the situation clear.
Skyline
I
I rose at dawn, but my host was out before me. He had left two fish cleaned and ready for cooking on a plate outside the door. Having breakfasted, I started on a walk around the atoll, which I estimated I could accomplish in about an hour. I expected to meet the Englishman somewhere on the way, and I did find him on the opposite side of the lagoon. The shore was steep-to there. He had a steel-tipped rod in his hand and was diving off a ledge of rock, remaining below for as long as a full minute. He waved when he saw me, but kept on with his work. In about a quarter of an hour he came over to where I was standing.
"Tiresome work," he said. "I need a blow." Then, "You see, I've been doing a bit of digging here."
I had walked along the lagoon beach and had not noticed before the series of trenches higher up the land. I should think he had been digging! I inspected the ditches under his guidance. There were three at least a quarter of a mile in length each and from three to four feet deep. These ran in parallel lines and were about four paces apart. Fifteen to twenty shorter trenches cut through them at right angles.
The sun was well above the horizon. We lit our pipes and sat down in the shade. After a few moments of silence he said: "I suppose you know what I'm doing here? If you have been in Papeete you must have heard. There is no secret about it—at least not any longer."
I said that I had left Papeete shortly after my arrival. I had spent several idle afternoons on the veranda of the Bougainville Club, but in the talk which went around there I didn't remember having heard of Pinaki.
"So much the better," he said. "Yes, seven years is a long time, and I'm not keen about feeding gossip; but when I first came down here there was a clacking of tongues from one end of the group to the other. I believe I have since earned the reputation of being rather queer. I thought you must know. The fact is I'm looking for treasure. Would you care to hear the story?"
"Very much," I said, "if it won't bore you to tell it."
"On the contrary, it will be something of a relief. Seven years of digging, with nothing to show for it, must strike an outsider as a mad business. Sometimes I'm half persuaded that I am a complete fool to go on with the search. But you can't possibly know the fascination of it. It seems only yesterday that I came here. As you see for yourself, it's not much of an island. And to know that there is a treasure of more than three million pounds buried somewhere in this tiny circle of scrub and palm—"
"But do you know it?" I asked.
"I'm as sure of it as that I am smoking your tobacco. That is, I am sure it was buried here. Whether it hasbeen removed since, I can't say, of course. The natives at Nukatavake remember a white man whom they called Luta, who came here about twenty years ago and remained for something over a month. One of the four men who stole the gold and brought it to Pinaki was a man named Luke Barrett, and it may have been he who came back, although he was supposed to have been killed in Australia forty years ago. It is the uncertainty which makes this such killing work at times. But when I think of giving it up—you would have to live with the thought of treasure for seven years, and to dream at night of finding it, before you could understand." He rose suddenly. "If you don't mind a short walk, I will show you something rather interesting."
We went along the lagoon beach for several hundred yards, then crossed toward the ocean side. Near the center of the island we came upon an immense block of coral broken from the reef and carried there by some great storm of the past. Cut deeply into the face of the rock I saw a curious design:
Curious Design
I asked what it meant.
"Man, if I knew that! I believe it's the key, and I can't master it! But we may as well sit down and be comfortable. If you would really care to hear the story from the beginning it will take the better part of an hour. I'll not give you all the details; but when I have finished you will be in a position to judge for yourself whether or not I was mad in coming here.
"Have you ever read Walker's book,Undiscovered Treasure? It doesn't matter, except that you have missed a very entertaining volume. It is a pity thatold work is out of print. Nothing in it but bare facts about all sorts of treasure supposed to have been buried here and there about the world. You might think it would be dry, but I found it better company than any romance I've ever read. However, that has nothing to do with this story, except in an indirect way. I first read the book as a boy and it started me on my travels.
"To me the facts about this Pinaki treasure are as interesting as any of Walker's. He, of course, knew nothing about it, for it had not been stolen when his book was published. Four men had a hand in the business: a Spaniard named Alvarez; an Irishman named Killorain; and two others of uncertain nationality, Luke Barrett, whom I spoke of a moment ago, and Archer Brown. They were a thieving, murdering lot by all accounts—adventurers of the worst sort; and in hope of plunder, I suppose, had joined the Peruvian army during the war with Chile in eighteen fifty-nine to sixty. Their hopes were realized beyond all expectations. They got wind of some gold buried under the floor of a church, and the strange thing was that the gold was there and they found it. It was in thirty-kilo ingots, contained in seven chests, the whole lot worth in the neighborhood of three and a half million pounds. How they managed to get away with it I don't know; but I have investigated the business pretty thoroughly and I have every reason to believe that they did. They buried it again in the vicinity of Pisco, and then set out in search of a vessel. Alvarez was the only one of the four who had any education. They had all followed the sea at one time or another, but he alone knew how to navigate. Theothers could hardly write their own names. At Panama they signed on as members of the crew of a small schooner, and as soon as they had put to sea knocked the captain and the two other sailors in the head and chucked them overboard. They returned to Pisco, loaded the gold, and started for Paumotus.
"This was in the autumn of eighteen fifty-nine. In the December following they landed at Pinaki, where they buried the treasure. The island was uninhabited then as now, and they crossed to Nukatavake to learn the name of it. The natives were shy, but they persuaded one man to approach, and when they had the information they wanted, shot him and rowed out to their boat. If you should go to Nukatavake you will find two old men there who still remember the incident.
"Then they went to Australia, scuttled their vessel not far from Cooktown, and went ashore with a story of shipwreck. They had some of the gold with them—not much in proportion to the amount of the treasure, but enough to keep four ordinary men in comfort for the rest of their lives. It soon went, and the four were next heard of at the Palmer gold fields. Alvarez and Barrett were both supposed to have been killed there in a fight with some blacks. Brown and Killorain had not mended their ways to any extent, and both were finally jerked up for manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. Brown died in prison, but Killorain served out his term, and finally died in Sydney hospital in nineteen twelve.
"Most of these facts—if they are facts—I had from Killorain himself the night before he died. I met him in a curious way; or, better, the meeting came as theresult of a curious combination of circumstances. You may have noticed the scar on my side?"
I had noticed it, a broad gash puckered at the edges where the flesh had healed, tapering to a point in the middle of his back.
"It was not much of a wound," he went on, "but it gave me a deal of trouble at the time. I got it in New Guinea in nineteen eleven, when I was prospecting for gold in the back country. I was a long way from a settlement, and one day a nigger took it into his head to stick me with a spear. I suppose he wanted my gun and ammunition, for I had little else excepting my placer outfit. I let him have one bullet from my Colt just as he was about to dive into the bush, and for all I know he may be lying there to this day. I have that little frizzly headed native to thank for my knowledge of the Pinaki treasure. Sometimes I am sorry that I killed him; but at other times I feel that shooting was altogether too easy a death for the man really responsible for bringing me here. I was in a bad way from the wound. Infection set in, and I had to nurse myself somehow and get down to a place where I could have medical attention. I managed it, but the ten days' journey was a nightmare. I was nothing but skin and bone when I left the hospital, and New Guinea not being a likely place for a convalescent, the doctor recommended me to go to Australia.
"I had a small bag of dust, the result of a year and a half of heart-breaking work in the mountains. Most of it went for the hospital bill, and when I reached Sydney I had very little left. I was compelled to put up at the cheapest kind of a boarding house, although the woman who kept it was quite a decent sort. Herhouse was in a poor quarter of the town and her patrons mostly longshoremen and teamsters. It was a wretched life for her, but she had two children to support and was making the best of a bad job. I admired her pluck and did what I could in a small way to help her out.
"One evening I was waiting for supper in the kitchen when some one rapped. Before I could go to the door, it opened, and an old man came stumbling in, asking for something to eat. I thought he was drunk and was about to hustle him back the way he came when I noticed that he was wet through—it was a cold, rainy night—and really suffering from exposure and lack of food. I made him remove his coat—he had nothing on under it—but not without a great deal of trouble, and he insisted on drying it across his knees. He was a little wizened ape of an Irishman, about five feet three or four in height, with deep-set blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, a heavy, discolored mustache, and a thick shock of white hair—altogether the most frightful-looking little dwarf that ever escaped out of a picture book. He was tatooed all over the arms and chest—Hands Across the Sea, the Union Jack, a naked woman—several other designs common in waterfront tatooing parlors.
"His body was as shriveled as a withered apple, but his little bloodshot eyes blazed like bits of live coal. Except for the fire in them, he might have been a hundred years old and, as a matter of fact, he wasn't a great way from it. Eighty-seven, he told me, and that is about all he did tell me. He gorged some food and was all for getting away at once. But it had set in to rain very hard and I persuaded him to wait untilthe worst of it was over. He was very suspicious at first. I believe he expected me to call a policeman. Later he thawed a little, and became even talkative in a surly way when I told him, with the landlady's consent, that he might stay the night if he had no place else to go. Wouldn't hear of it, though. He said he had a job as night watchman at Rush-cutters' Bay. That might or might not have been true. At any rate, I went with him to the car line—the boarding house was a good mile from Rush-cutters' Bay—and gave him a couple of shillings, as a loan, I said. He could return it sometime. Just before I left him he asked for my name and address, mumbling something about doing me a bit of good one of these days. He was insistent, so I gave it to him, but not at all willingly. He had frightened Mrs. Sharpe, the landlady, just by the way he looked at her, and I didn't want him coming back.
"He didn't come back. That was in May, nineteen twelve, and I heard nothing more of him until September. I was still at the boarding house, getting slowly better, but not yet good for anything. I kept out of doors as much as possible, took long walks in the country and along the waterfront looking at ships. When I came in one evening Mrs. Sharpe told me that an attendant from the Sydney hospital had called twice during the day. An old man named Killorain, a patient at the hospital, wanted to see me. The name meant nothing to me and I couldn't imagine who the man could be. The attendant called again later in the evening. Killorain was about to die, he said, and wouldn't give them any peace until I was brought to see him.
"It was getting on toward midnight when we reached the hospital. The old man was in one of the public wards. I recognized him at once, although he had shriveled away to nothing at all. It was impossible to forget his eyes, once you had seen them. He was dying—no doubt of it, but I could see that he wasn't going to die until he was ready.
"'Sit down close here,' he said. 'I'm glad you came. You did me a good turn once and I haven't forgot it. Few good turns I've had in my life. Not so many but what I can remember the lot.' The night nurse had approached quietly and was standing on the other side of the bed. All at once he saw her. 'Hey, you!' he said. 'Grease off out of this! Stand over there on the other side of the room where I can watch you!' When she had gone he rose from his pillow and looked cautiously around the room. The beds on either side of him were empty. There was a patient in the one across the aisle, but he was sleeping. Killorain watched him for a moment to make sure of this. Then he motioned me with his finger to come still closer. 'Listen!' he said. 'I've cut more throats in my time than you might think.' Sounds a bit stagey, doesn't it? But these were his exact words. Nothing remarkable about them, of course. Throat-cutting is still a fairly thriving business. I waited for him to go on. He again looked up and down the room, and then asked me to hand him the coat which was lying across the foot of the bed. It was the same coat he had been wearing in May, when he came to the boarding house.
"'When they brought me here,' he said, 'they took my clothes, and I've had some trouble getting this back.' The attendant had told me as much. The old manhad raised the very devil of a row until it was found. He asked me to rip open the lining of the right sleeve and to give him the paper I would find there. It was a soiled, greasy sheet of foolscap, pasted on a piece of cloth. 'Once,' he went on, 'you gave me two shillings for car fare to Rush-cutters' Bay. It probably wasn't any hardship on you, but never mind about that. You said I could pay it back if I'd a mind to. Well, I'm going to pay it back with a bit of interest. I'm going to give you this paper, and it's as good as three million pound notes of the Bank of England.'
"I thought, of course, that he was completely off his chump, and the fear that I would think so was uppermost in his mind. He kept repeating that he was old and worn out, but that his mind was clear. 'Don't you think I'm balmy,' he said. 'I know what I'm talking about as well as I know I'm going to die before morning.' He gave me a circumstantial account of the whole affair. I have outlined it briefly. There were many other interesting facts, but it is not worth while to speak of them here. As he talked, the conviction grew upon me that he was perfectly sane and was telling the truth. He went over the chart with me. It had been made by Alvarez, the scholar of the party, he said. There had been a good deal of quarreling and fighting later for the possession of it.
"Before I left him he made me promise that I would go to Pinaki. He wouldn't rest easy in his grave, he said, unless he knew that I was looking for the treasure. 'It's there, and it will always be there if you're bloody fool enough to think I'm queer. It ain't likely I'd lie to you on my deathbed.' Rest easy in his grave! There was an odd glimpse into his mind. He wasn'tworrying about his crimes, and there were enough of them, according to his own confession. It was the thought of the gold lying forever forgotten which worried him. He could rest quietly if he knew before he died that some one else was fighting and throat-cutting over it. I asked him why he hadn't gone back for it himself. He told me that of the fifty-three years since it had been buried he had spent forty in prison and the rest of the time he was trying to earn or steal the money to buy a schooner. I told him that I would come back to see him the following day. 'You needn't bother,' he said. 'I'm finished.' And it was true. He died three hours later.
"I tried to forget the incident, but it was one of those things which refuse to be forgotten. It was always in the back of my head. I decided to check up Killorain's story where I could. I made inquiries in Peru, and found that the gold had actually been stolen. The dates and circumstances coincided with his account. A friend in the customs at Cooktown confirmed for me the story of four shipwrecked sailors who landed in February, eighteen sixty, from a ship called theBosun Bird. I had a small piece of property on the outskirts of Cooktown which I had bought years ago. With the money realized from the sale of it I took passage for Tahiti on my way to Pinaki.
"That voyage was the longest one I have ever made. By that time the thought of those seven chests of gold, all in thirty-kilo ingots, was with me twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four. Yes, even at night. I slept very little, and when I did it was to dream of hunting for the treasure; of finding it. I became suspicious of a villainous-looking old man who was traveling thirdclass. I thought he might be Brown or Luke Barrett. Perhaps they were not dead, after all. At Papeete I told no one of my purpose there, with the exception of one governmental official. If the treasure should be found the French government would have a claim to certain percentage on uncoined gold, and I meant to be aboveboard in my dealings with it. This official was sworn to secrecy, but the business leaked out eventually and created a great deal of excitement. I was immensely annoyed, of course, for I had guarded the secret as well as old Killorain ever had. However, I had in my pocket all the necessary papers, drawn up accurately, witnessed, signed, and sealed. I went on with my preparations, and finally, in February, nineteen thirteen, I was put ashore from a small cutter, not four hundred yards from where we are sitting.
"I started the search before the cutter was two miles on the return voyage. For two months I slept in the open—had no time to build a house—and ate tinned food which I had brought with me. Killorain's chart was of but little use. It made reference to trees which had long since rotted away or had been cut down by the natives of Nukatavake. The marks which I found corresponded precisely with those on the chart, but several of the most important ones were missing."
The treasure hunter rose. "Well," he said, "there's the end of the story. You know the rest of it."
"But I don't know the rest at all!" I said. "You have left out the most interesting part. Tell me something of your life here."
"You have seen three days of it. It has gone on for seven years in the same way."
"You were diving just now in the lagoon. Do youthink the gold may have been buried there or that the land has fallen away?"
"My dear fellow, I'll not weary you with an account of what I think. It's rather warm here. Shall we go back to the house?"
I was hoping for a week of calm, and when we went to bed that evening there was reason to believe we might have it. A few hours later, however, I was awakened by the Englishman. "There's going to be a bit of a blow presently," he said. "Your skipper has just sent for you. He wants to get away at once."
The stars had been blotted out. The wind was soughing in the palms, and the waves slapping briskly on the lagoon beach. Our farewell was a brief one.
"When shall you come to Tahiti?" I asked.
"Not until I have found what I'm looking for."
"Well," I said, "I hope that will be soon."
But if he holds fast to his resolve my belief is that it will be never.
Conclusion
Mountains
I
I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti, confident that sooner or later he would keep a vague rendezvous set months before. I knew that by this time he must have penetrated far into the sea of atolls, traveling in the leisurely manner of these latitudes, transferring from one schooner to the next and stopping over—for weeks at a time, perhaps—in the tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to love. Once or twice—when a dingy Paumotu schooner, deep laden with copra and crowded with pearl divers eager for a whirl of gayety in the island capital, crept into the pass—I had word of him, but there was no hint of return.
It was a month of calms: long days when the lagoon, unruffled by the faintest cat's-paw, shimmered in the blinding sunlight, while the sea outside seemed to slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef. Once, at midday, a three-masted schooner with all sails furled and Diesel engines going, came in to waken the town with the hoarse clamor of her exhaust. An hour later I met her skipper on the street.
"Your friend Hall is homeward bound," he told me. "I spoke thePotii Ravarava, a bit of a thirty-tonnative schooner, off Nukatavake, and he was aboard of her—she ought to be in some time this week."
The days passed in the rapid and dreamy fashion peculiar to the South Seas. From time to time I thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner drifting about becalmed among the coral islands, or perhaps only a score of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the sighted land. ThePotii Ravaravawas a full week overdue when the calm weather came to an end. The heat was intense that afternoon, and toward sunset towering masses of cloud began to pile up along the horizon to the north. The sky grew black; there was a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off rumble of thunder. When I strolled out along the waterfront the people were gathering in anxious groups before their houses; I heard snatches of talk: "Have you noticed the glass? Things have an ugly look.... Hope it doesn't mean another cyclone.... The town will catch it if the sea begins to rise."
I had heard of the hurricane of 1906, when the sea rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papeete to the hills. On Motu Uta, an islet in the bay, a white man was living with his Paumotuan wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef without a pause, sweeping the islet from end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost. But the woman was a Low-Islander, and just before dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken refuge was swept away, she swam six hundred yards to shore and landed through a surf a sea otter would have hesitated to attempt. Next day they found the drowned and battered body of her husband driftingwith dead pigs and horses and a litter of wreckage from the lower portions of the town.
Possibly Tahiti was in for another hurricane. When I glanced at my barometer after dinner, it was falling with ominous rapidity, and at bedtime the glass stood lower than I had seen it in the South Seas. In the small hours of the morning a servant came to waken me. There was a new sound in the air—the uproar of surf breaking on the inner shore of the lagoon.
"The sea is rising," said Tara; "the waves are breaking under thepurautrees, and if you do not come quickly to help me our canoe will be washed away."
The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though scarcely a breath of air stirred, the level of the lagoon was four feet above its normal limit, and the sheltered water, usually so calm, was agitated by a heavy swell. Then the rain came—drumming a thunderous monotone on my tin roof—and after the rain the wind. At dawn, though a seventy-mile gale was blowing out of the northeast, it was obvious that all danger of a hurricane was past. At midday the glass began to rise and before dark the wind was falling away perceptibly.
More than once during the night I had thought of Hall out somewhere on the wild and lonely sea to the east. ThePotii Ravaravawas reputed an able little boat—with proper offing she would probably come through worse than this. But she had no engine, and if she had been caught in the Paumotu—the Dangerous Archipelago, where unknown currents and a maze of reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of weather—there was cause for anxiety.
The storm blew itself out in two days' time, and on the evening of the third day I was standing on thewater front with a group of traders and schooner captains. They were speaking of thePotii Ravarava, by this time the object of mild misgivings, when one of the skippers gave a sudden shout.
"There she is now!" he announced and, looking up, I saw a deeply laden little schooner, with patched grayish sails, rounding the point of Fareute. Presently she turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a boat ashore—a few moments later I was welcoming Hall—very thin, raggedly dressed, and brown as a Paumotuan. His eyes were smiling, but they had in them a look unmistakable when once seen—the expression of a hunger greater than most of us have known.
"Hello!" he said. "Come along to the hotel—it must be dinner time. By Jove! I feel as though I could eat a raw shark!"
When he had eaten two dinners complete—from soup to black coffee, and beginning with soup again—he lit a cigarette and told me the story of his return from the Low Islands.
"It was all right," he began, "until we left Hao. The palm tops were still in sight on the horizon when the breeze died away, and we drifted for seven whole days in a broiling, glassy calm. It was a curious experience, but one I would not care to repeat.
"You've seen the schooner—she's not much bigger than a sea-going canoe. There were four of us aboard—Miti the skipper, a Paumotuan and a seaman by instinct, though he knows nothing of latitude or longitude; two sailors, one of whom has a horrible case of elephantiasis; and myself. We had a tremendous load of copra for so small a boat; the hold was crammed with it and the cabin stuffed to the ceiling. Oppositethe companionway they had left out a few bags at the top, giving a space two feet high and just wide enough for two men to sleep side by side in case of rain or bad weather. Our stove was merely a box of sand in which a fire could be lighted, set in a little box of a galley tacked to the forward deck. If we had had anything to cook, the galley might have been useful; but Miti had given away nearly all of the ship's provisions to his relatives on Hao. They gave him a feast while some copra was being loaded, and when the job was finished he gave a feast in return. The two sailors looked sour while they watched the people opening their biscuit and salmon and bully-beef, but, after all, the prevailing winds are fair, and normally the passage to Tahiti wouldn't take more than ten days. Miti overdid the giving-away business, however. When we took stock of ourkaikaion the first day of the calm I found he had saved only half a tin of biscuit and a few cans of salmon. In addition to this, we had a parting gift of a sack of drinking nuts and a couple of dozen ripe nuts some one was sending to Tahiti for seed. I had grown fed up on the sort of water these schooners carry—stale, and full of wriggling young mosquitoes—and by great good fortune I had a three-gallon demijohn, sent by Tino, of theWinship, which I filled with fresh rain water at Hao.
"My demijohn lasted precisely a day and a half. All hands drank out of it, but I did not complain of their lavishness—there was supposed to be a barrel of water somewhere below. Those were thirsty days. We rigged up an awning with part of an old mainsail; I spent most of my time lying in the hot shade, reading the one book I had with me—Froissart'sChronicles of England, France, and Spain.The days seemed interminable.... The starlight paled; the sun rose to glare down hour after hour on the face of a motionless and empty sea, and set at last on a horizon void of clouds. Sometimes I dozed; sometimes I watched the reflections of the bowsprit. It was painted gray, with a bright-red tip—and, seen in the faintly heaving water, it looked like a long, gray snake spitting fire as it writhed in graceful undulations. The sufferer from elephantiasis turned out to be an extraordinary man; it was not worth while to keep watches during the calm, and, as there was no work of any importance, he retired to the stifling cubby-hole among the copra sacks and slept—slept from dawn to darkness and from dark to dawn again. Now and then, at long intervals, he appeared on deck; once I went aft for a look at him, lying naked except for apareu—mouth open and swollen limbs sprawled on the uneven surface of the copra. Miti and Teriaa showed a different side of native character. The schooner belonged to the captain, and keeping her trim gave him the same delight a man feels in buying pretty clothes for his mistress. The young sailor was Miti's nephew, and the pair of them worked tirelessly in the sun, scraping her rail and topsides in preparation for a fresh coat of paint. It was strange, when I was deep in Froissart's sieges and battles and stories of court life, to glance up from my book and see the vacant rim of the horizon, the silhouette of the foremast against a hot blue sky, and the two Kanakas endlessly at work—scrape, scrape, scrape; an exchange of low-toned remarks; a chuckle as they heard the gentle snores of the sleeping man below.
"Nearly every day our hopes were raised by deceitfulcat's-paws, heralded by far-off streaks of blue. Some died before they reached us; others, after a preliminary rustle and flutter, filled our sails and set the schooner to moving gently on her course ... only to die away and leave the sea glassy as before.
"On the second day the sharks began to gather in their uncanny fashion, as they always do about a vessel becalmed or in distress. I spent hours watching them—ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting with a grim and hopeful patience for some happening which would provide them with a meal. They circled about the schooner in deliberate zigzags, or lay motionless in the shadow of her side, attended always by their odd little striped pilot fish. I learned to recognize one ponderous old gray shark; he had a brace of pilot fish, one swimming on each side of his head—and he wasn't afraid of us in the least. Sometimes he lay for an hour within a yard of the vessel's side; I could see the texture of his rough skin and the almost imperceptible motion of fins and tail. I can understand now the hatred sharks inspire in men who follow the sea—it wasn't long before I decided to try to kill the big, insolent brute. We hadn't as much as a hook and line on board, but finally, with a file and the point of a rusty boat hook, I improvised a makeshift sort of spear. Armed with this, I waited by the rail until my victim came in range, and then lunged down with all my strength. The spear glanced off his tough hide; he swam away in a leisurely manner, turned, and a moment later was again beneath me. This time I struck him fair on the back, but it was like trying to kill an elephant with a penknife. I think the point of my boat hook punctured him, but he only circled off again and returnedto give me another chance. In the end I gave up and left him in possession of the field.
"The nights, when the air had cooled and the stars were blazing overhead, were so beautiful that one hated to fall asleep. Reflection made sky and sea alike—dark backgrounds for the myriad lights of the constellations. Lying on deck while the others slept, I used to regret that I had not learned something of astronomy—the average native sailor knows more about the stars than I. Orion I knew; the Pleiades, which the natives, with a rather pretty fancy, callMatariki, the Little Eyes; and the Scorpion, believed in heathen times to be the great fish hook of Maui, flung into the sky by the god, when he had finished pulling up islands from the bottom of the Pacific. Each night I watched the rising of the Southern Cross, and low down in the south I saw the Magellanic clouds, streamers of star dust, like vapor impalpable and remote. In spite of my companions, sleeping quietly on deck, those nights gave me a sense of overwhelming loneliness: the languid air; the solitary ship, immobile on the face of a lifeless sea; the immense expanse of the universe, ablaze with the light of distant suns....
"When our water gave out I began to prefer the nights to the days. My demijohn, as I told you, lasted only a day and a half. After that we used the drinking nuts, and not until the last of them was gone did anyone think of investigating the water cask. There was consternation when we discovered that it contained only three or four inches of rusty water—either it leaked or the skipper was remarkably careless. Hoping all the time for a breeze or a squall of rain, we began on the half sack of ripe nuts—thin, sharpstuff for drinking, but the lot of them went in a day. Then we went on rations, dealt out from the barrel with a soup spoon. Finally the barrel was dry, and we went two days with nothing of any kind to drink. It was no joke—if you've ever had a real thirst, you'll know what I mean. The natives stood it wonderfully well; Miti did not once complain, though he remarked to me that when he got ashore he was planning to "drink too much coconut"! The victim offeefeecontinued his slumberous routine—I wondered if he were dreaming of rustling palms and shaded, gurgling rivulets. It was my first experience of thirst; odd what an utter animal one becomes at such a time. Waking and sleeping, my head was filled with dreams of water, brooks, rivers, lakes of cool, fresh water, in which to bury one's face and drink. I dreamed of lochs and highland burns in Scotland; of the gorge of Fautaua on Tahiti, where only a few months before I had stood in the mist, listening to the roar of the cataract.
"Well, it wasn't much fun—another day or two might have been unendurable. We had one comfort, at any rate—if you're thirsty enough, you don't worry about eating. By the time we had finished the salmon and biscuit we had ceased to bother about food. On the last night of the calm none of us slept, unless it was the sailor in his den among the copra sacks. At dawn Miti touched my shoulder and pointed to the south, where the paling stars were obscured by banks of cloud. An hour later the rain water was streaming out of the scuppers and spouting off one end of our awning into the barrel, hastily recoopered in case of leaks. When the squall passed and the sun shone down on a dark-blueleaping sea we were running before a fine breeze from the southeast.
"Now that our thirst was satisfied and we had plenty of water in reserve we discovered suddenly that we were starving. Miti prowled about below and came on deck with a package of rice, stowed away during some previous voyage. It was a valuable find, for we had nothing else to eat. There was copra, of course, which the natives will eat in a pinch, but the rancid smell of the stuff was too much for me. The wind held, and finally a day came when the skipper announced that we ought to raise Tahiti soon. About midday his nephew, who was perched in the shrouds, sang out that he had sighted land. I had a look and saw on the horizon a flat blur, like the palm tops of a distant atoll. As we drew near the land rose higher and higher out of the sea—it was Makatea, and we were more than a hundred miles north of our course. No meal I have ever eaten tasted so good as the dinner Miti's relatives gave us that night!
"We got away next morning, with a liberal stock of provisions and an additional passenger for Tahiti—a philosophic pig, who traveled lashed under one of the seats of the ship's boat. For three hours we ran before a fresh northwesterly breeze, but about nine o'clock the wind dropped and soon the sails were hanging limp in a dead calm. I began to suspect that the man with the swollen legs was a Jonah of the first order. This time, however, the calm was soon over; heavy greenish-black clouds were drifting down on us from the north; the sunlight gave place to an evil violet gloom. Miti and his two men sprang into a sudden activity; they battened down the forward hatch, putextra lashings on the boat, double-reefed the foresail, and got in everything else. Then, in the breathless calm, a downpour of rain began to lash the sea with a strange, murmuring sound. I thought of an ominous old verse: