One morning some six weeks after all this marrying and settling down a
brig came into the lagoon. She was a blackbirder, the _Portsoy_, owned
and captained by Colin Robertson, a Banffshire man, hence the name of
his brig. Robertson and his men landed, took off water, coconuts,
bananas, and everything else they could find worth taking. Then they
turned their attention to the population. Four men were not a great
find, but Robertson was not above trifles. He recruited them; that is
to say, he kicked them into his boat and took them on board the
_Portsoy_, leaving the three widows--grass widows now--wailing on the
shore. He had no fine feelings about the marriage tie and he reckoned
they would make out somehow. They were no use to him as labour and they
were ill-flavored; all the same, being a man of gallantry and some
humour, he dipped his flag to them as the _Portsoy_ cleared the lagoon
and breasted the tumble at the break.
Maru standing aft saw the island with the white foam fighting the coral
and the gulls threshing around the break, saw the palms cut against the
pale aquamarine of the skyline that swept up the burning blue of the
noon, heard the long rumble and boom of the surf on the following wind,
and watched and listened till the sound of the surf died to nothingness
and of the island nothing remained but the palm tops, like pinheads
above the sea dazzle.
He felt no grief, but there came to him a new and strange thing, a
silence that the shipboard sounds could not break. Since birth the
eternal boom of the waves on coral had been in his ears, night and day
and day and night--louder in storms, but always there. It was gone.
That was why, despite the sound of the bow wash and boost of the waves
and the creak of cordage and block, the brig seemed to have carried
Maru into the silence of a new world.
They worked free of the Paumotus into the region of settled winds and
accountable currents, passing atolls, and reefs that showed like the
threshing of a shark’s tail in the blue, heading north-west in a world
of wind and wave and sky, desolate of life and, for Maru, the land of
Nowhere.
So it went on from week to week, and, as far as he was concerned, so it
might have gone on for ever. He knew nothing of the world into which he
had been suddenly snatched, and land which was not a ring of coral
surrounding a lagoon was for him unthinkable.
He knew nothing of navigation, and the brass-bound wheel at which a
sailor was always standing with his hands on the spokes, now twirling
it this way, now that, had for him a fascination beyond words, the
fascination of a strange toy for a little child, and something more. It
was the first wheel he had ever seen and its movements about its axis
seemed magical, and it was never left without someone to hold it and
move it--why? The mystery of the binnacle into which the wheel-mover
was always staring, as a man stares into a rock pool after fish, was
almost as fascinating.
Maru peeped into the binnacle one day and saw the fish, like a
starfish, yet trembling and moving like a frightened thing. Then some
one kicked him away and he ran forward and hid, feeling that he had
pried into the secrets of the white men’s gods and fearing the
consequences.
But the white men’s gods were not confined to the wheel and binnacle;
down below they had a god that could warn them of the weather, for that
day at noon, and for no apparent reason, the sailors began to strip the
brig of her canvas. Then the sea rose, and two hours later the cyclone
seized them. It blew everything away and then took them into its calm
heart, where, dancing like giants in dead still air, and with the sea
for a ballroom floor, the hundred-foot-high waves broke the _Portsoy_
to pieces.
Maru alone was saved, clinging to a piece of hatch cover, half stunned,
confused, yet unafraid and feeling vaguely that the magic wheel and the
trembling fish god had somehow betrayed the white men. He knew that he
was not to die, because this strange world that had taken him from his
island had not done with him yet, and the sea, in touch with him like
this, and half washing over him at times, had no terror for him, for he
had learned to swim before he had learned to walk. Also his stomach was
full; he had been eating biscuits whilst the _Portsoy’s_ canvas was
being stripped away though the wind was strong enough almost to whip
the food from his hands.
The peaceful swell that followed the cyclone was a thing enough to have
driven an ordinary man mad with terror. Now lifted hill high on a
glassy slope, the whole wheel of the horizon came to view under the
breezing wind and blazing sun, then gently down-sliding the hatch cover
would sink to a valley bottom only to climbing again a glassy slope and
rise again hill-high into the wind and sun. Foam flecks passed on the
surface and in the green sun-dazzled crystal of the valley floors he
glimpsed strips of fucus floating face down, torn by the storm from
their rock attachments, and through the sloping wall of glass up which
the hatch cover was climbing he once glimpsed a shark, lifted and
cradled in a ridge of the great swell, strange to see as a fly in amber
or a fish in ice.
The hatch cover was sweeping with a four-knot current, moving with a
whole world of things concealed or half-seen or hinted at. A sea
current is a street, it is more, it is a moving pavement for the people
of the sea; jelly fish were being carried with Maru on the great swell
running with the current, a turtle broke the water close to him and
plunged again, and once a white roaring reef passed by only a few cable
lengths. He could see the rock exposed for a moment and the water
closing on it in a tumble of foam.