THE FIRST LANDFALL
“It will not be so monotonous at sea,” I promised my fellow-voyagers on
the _Snark_. “The sea is filled with life. It is so populous that every
day something new is happening. Almost as soon as we pass through the
Golden Gate and head south we’ll pick up with the flying fish. We’ll be
having them fried for breakfast. We’ll be catching bonita and dolphin,
and spearing porpoises from the bowsprit. And then there are the
sharks—sharks without end.”
We passed through the Golden Gate and headed south. We dropped the
mountains of California beneath the horizon, and daily the surf grew
warmer. But there were no flying fish, no bonita and dolphin. The ocean
was bereft of life. Never had I sailed on so forsaken a sea. Always,
before, in the same latitudes, had I encountered flying fish.
“Never mind,” I said. “Wait till we get off the coast of Southern
California. Then we’ll pick up the flying fish.”
We came abreast of Southern California, abreast of the Peninsula of
Lower California, abreast of the coast of Mexico; and there were no
flying fish. Nor was there anything else. No life moved. As the days
went by the absence of life became almost uncanny.
“Never mind,” I said. “When we do pick up with the flying fish we’ll
pick up with everything else. The flying fish is the staff of life for
all the other breeds. Everything will come in a bunch when we find the
flying fish.”
When I should have headed the _Snark_ south-west for Hawaii, I still
held her south. I was going to find those flying fish. Finally the time
came when, if I wanted to go to Honolulu, I should have headed the
_Snark_ due west, instead of which I kept her south. Not until latitude
19° did we encounter the first flying fish. He was very much alone. I
saw him. Five other pairs of eager eyes scanned the sea all day, but
never saw another. So sparse were the flying fish that nearly a week
more elapsed before the last one on board saw his first flying fish. As
for the dolphin, bonita, porpoise, and all the other hordes of
life—there weren’t any.
Not even a shark broke surface with his ominous dorsal fin. Bert took a
dip daily under the bowsprit, hanging on to the stays and dragging his
body through the water. And daily he canvassed the project of letting
go and having a decent swim. I did my best to dissuade him. But with
him I had lost all standing as an authority on sea life.
“If there are sharks,” he demanded, “why don’t they show up?”
I assured him that if he really did let go and have a swim the sharks
would promptly appear. This was a bluff on my part. I didn’t believe
it. It lasted as a deterrent for two days. The third day the wind fell
calm, and it was pretty hot. The _Snark_ was moving a knot an hour.
Bert dropped down under the bowsprit and let go. And now behold the
perversity of things. We had sailed across two thousand miles and more
of ocean and had met with no sharks. Within five minutes after Bert
finished his swim, the fin of a shark was cutting the surface in
circles around the _Snark_.
There was something wrong about that shark. It bothered me. It had no
right to be there in that deserted ocean. The more I thought about it,
the more incomprehensible it became. But two hours later we sighted
land and the mystery was cleared up. He had come to us from the land,
and not from the uninhabited deep. He had presaged the landfall. He was
the messenger of the land.
Twenty-seven days out from San Francisco we arrived at the island of
Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. In the early morning we drifted around
Diamond Head into full view of Honolulu; and then the ocean burst
suddenly into life. Flying fish cleaved the air in glittering
squadrons. In five minutes we saw more of them than during the whole
voyage. Other fish, large ones, of various sorts, leaped into the air.
There was life everywhere, on sea and shore. We could see the masts and
funnels of the shipping in the harbour, the hotels and bathers along
the beach at Waikiki, the smoke rising from the dwelling-houses high up
on the volcanic slopes of the Punch Bowl and Tantalus. The custom-house
tug was racing toward us and a big school of porpoises got under our
bow and began cutting the most ridiculous capers. The port doctor’s
launch came charging out at us, and a big sea turtle broke the surface
with his back and took a look at us. Never was there such a burgeoning
of life. Strange faces were on our decks, strange voices were speaking,
and copies of that very morning’s newspaper, with cable reports from
all the world, were thrust before our eyes. Incidentally, we read that
the _Snark_ and all hands had been lost at sea, and that she had been a
very unseaworthy craft anyway. And while we read this information a
wireless message was being received by the congressional party on the
summit of Haleakala announcing the safe arrival of the _Snark_.
It was the _Snark’s_ first landfall—and such a landfall! For
twenty-seven days we had been on the deserted deep, and it was pretty
hard to realize that there was so much life in the world. We were made
dizzy by it. We could not take it all in at once. We were like awakened
Rip Van Winkles, and it seemed to us that we were dreaming. On one side
the azure sea lapped across the horizon into the azure sky; on the
other side the sea lifted itself into great breakers of emerald that
fell in a snowy smother upon a white coral beach. Beyond the beach,
green plantations of sugar-cane undulated gently upward to steeper
slopes, which, in turn, became jagged volcanic crests, drenched with
tropic showers and capped by stupendous masses of trade-wind clouds. At
any rate, it was a most beautiful dream. The _Snark_ turned and headed
directly in toward the emerald surf, till it lifted and thundered on
either hand; and on either hand, scarce a biscuit-toss away, the reef
showed its long teeth, pale green and menacing.
Abruptly the land itself, in a riot of olive-greens of a thousand hues,
reached out its arms and folded the _Snark_ in. There was no perilous
passage through the reef, no emerald surf and azure sea—nothing but a
warm soft land, a motionless lagoon, and tiny beaches on which swam
dark-skinned tropic children. The sea had disappeared. The _Snark’s_
anchor rumbled the chain through the hawse-pipe, and we lay without
movement on a “lineless, level floor.” It was all so beautiful and
strange that we could not accept it as real. On the chart this place
was called Pearl Harbour, but we called it Dream Harbour.
A launch came off to us; in it were members of the Hawaiian Yacht Club,
come to greet us and make us welcome, with true Hawaiian hospitality,
to all they had. They were ordinary men, flesh and blood and all the
rest; but they did not tend to break our dreaming. Our last memories of
men were of United States marshals and of panicky little merchants with
rusty dollars for souls, who, in a reeking atmosphere of soot and
coal-dust, laid grimy hands upon the _Snark_ and held her back from her
world adventure. But these men who came to meet us were clean men. A
healthy tan was on their cheeks, and their eyes were not dazzled and
bespectacled from gazing overmuch at glittering dollar-heaps. No, they
merely verified the dream. They clinched it with their unsmirched
souls.
So we went ashore with them across a level flashing sea to the
wonderful green land. We landed on a tiny wharf, and the dream became
more insistent; for know that for twenty-seven days we had been rocking
across the ocean on the tiny _Snark_. Not once in all those
twenty-seven days had we known a moment’s rest, a moment’s cessation
from movement. This ceaseless movement had become ingrained. Body and
brain we had rocked and rolled so long that when we climbed out on the
tiny wharf kept on rocking and rolling. This, naturally, we attributed
to the wharf. It was projected psychology. I spraddled along the wharf
and nearly fell into the water. I glanced at Charmian, and the way she
walked made me sad. The wharf had all the seeming of a ship’s deck. It
lifted, tilted, heaved and sank; and since there were no handrails on
it, it kept Charmian and me busy avoiding falling in. I never saw such
a preposterous little wharf. Whenever I watched it closely, it refused
to roll; but as soon as I took my attention off from it, away it went,
just like the _Snark_. Once, I caught it in the act, just as it
upended, and I looked down the length of it for two hundred feet, and
for all the world it was like the deck of a ship ducking into a huge
head-sea.
At last, however, supported by our hosts, we negotiated the wharf and
gained the land. But the land was no better. The very first thing it
did was to tilt up on one side, and far as the eye could see I watched
it tilt, clear to its jagged, volcanic backbone, and I saw the clouds
above tilt, too. This was no stable, firm-founded land, else it would
not cut such capers. It was like all the rest of our landfall, unreal.
It was a dream. At any moment, like shifting vapour, it might dissolve
away. The thought entered my head that perhaps it was my fault, that my
head was swimming or that something I had eaten had disagreed with me.
But I glanced at Charmian and her sad walk, and even as I glanced I saw
her stagger and bump into the yachtsman by whose side she walked. I
spoke to her, and she complained about the antic behaviour of the land.
We walked across a spacious, wonderful lawn and down an avenue of royal
palms, and across more wonderful lawn in the gracious shade of stately
trees. The air was filled with the songs of birds and was heavy with
rich warm fragrances—wafture from great lilies, and blazing blossoms of
hibiscus, and other strange gorgeous tropic flowers. The dream was
becoming almost impossibly beautiful to us who for so long had seen
naught but the restless, salty sea. Charmian reached out her hand and
clung to me—for support against the ineffable beauty of it, thought I.
But no. As I supported her I braced my legs, while the flowers and
lawns reeled and swung around me. It was like an earthquake, only it
quickly passed without doing any harm. It was fairly difficult to catch
the land playing these tricks. As long as I kept my mind on it, nothing
happened. But as soon as my attention was distracted, away it went, the
whole panorama, swinging and heaving and tilting at all sorts of
angles. Once, however, I turned my head suddenly and caught that
stately line of royal palms swinging in a great arc across the sky. But
it stopped, just as soon as I caught it, and became a placid dream
again.
Next we came to a house of coolness, with great sweeping veranda, where
lotus-eaters might dwell. Windows and doors were wide open to the
breeze, and the songs and fragrances blew lazily in and out. The walls
were hung with tapa-cloths. Couches with grass-woven covers invited
everywhere, and there was a grand piano, that played, I was sure,
nothing more exciting than lullabies. Servants—Japanese maids in native
costume—drifted around and about, noiselessly, like butterflies.
Everything was preternaturally cool. Here was no blazing down of a
tropic sun upon an unshrinking sea. It was too good to be true. But it
was not real. It was a dream-dwelling. I knew, for I turned suddenly
and caught the grand piano cavorting in a spacious corner of the room.
I did not say anything, for just then we were being received by a
gracious woman, a beautiful Madonna, clad in flowing white and shod
with sandals, who greeted us as though she had known us always.
We sat at table on the lotus-eating veranda, served by the butterfly
maids, and ate strange foods and partook of a nectar called poi. But
the dream threatened to dissolve. It shimmered and trembled like an
iridescent bubble about to break. I was just glancing out at the green
grass and stately trees and blossoms of hibiscus, when suddenly I felt
the table move. The table, and the Madonna across from me, and the
veranda of the lotus-eaters, the scarlet hibiscus, the greensward and
the trees—all lifted and tilted before my eyes, and heaved and sank
down into the trough of a monstrous sea. I gripped my chair
convulsively and held on. I had a feeling that I was holding on to the
dream as well as the chair. I should not have been surprised had the
sea rushed in and drowned all that fairyland and had I found myself at
the wheel of the _Snark_ just looking up casually from the study of
logarithms. But the dream persisted. I looked covertly at the Madonna
and her husband. They evidenced no perturbation. The dishes had not
moved upon the table. The hibiscus and trees and grass were still
there. Nothing had changed. I partook of more nectar, and the dream was
more real than ever.
“Will you have some iced tea?” asked the Madonna; and then her side of
the table sank down gently and I said yes to her at an angle of
forty-five degrees.
“Speaking of sharks,” said her husband, “up at Niihau there was a man—”
And at that moment the table lifted and heaved, and I gazed upward at
him at an angle of forty-five degrees.
So the luncheon went on, and I was glad that I did not have to bear the
affliction of watching Charmian walk. Suddenly, however, a mysterious
word of fear broke from the lips of the lotus-eaters. “Ah, ah,” thought
I, “now the dream goes glimmering.” I clutched the chair desperately,
resolved to drag back to the reality of the _Snark_ some tangible
vestige of this lotus land. I felt the whole dream lurching and pulling
to be gone. Just then the mysterious word of fear was repeated. It
sounded like _Reporters_. I looked and saw three of them coming across
the lawn. Oh, blessed reporters! Then the dream was indisputably real
after all. I glanced out across the shining water and saw the _Snark_
at anchor, and I remembered that I had sailed in her from San Francisco
to Hawaii, and that this was Pearl Harbour, and that even then I was
acknowledging introductions and saying, in reply to the first question,
“Yes, we had delightful weather all the way down.”