HONOLULU TO TAIO-HAIE
With 2,000 miles of salt water stretching between its windward shores
and the western coast of North America, with twice that distance
separating it from Asia, and with more or less open water rolling
limitlessly away to the Arctic and the Antarctic, it is only natural
that Hawaii should harbour a race of sea-loving people. A hundred years
ago the Hawaiians, bred true to their Samoan progenitors, fearlessly
embarked in their sliver-like, cinnet-sewed canoes on voyages that
today would be deemed hazardous for hundred-ton schooners; and a half
century or more back they were hailed throughout the Seven Seas as the
most daring whalers that ever drove lances or hurled harpoons. So in
assuming at the beginning of this century the title of "The Yachting
Centre of the Pacific," Hawaii is not attaining to a new distinction,
but merely claiming in a modernized form a heritage of ancient days.
Honolulu, judged by the "timber and lines" of the men behind the sport
there, is the peer of any yachting centre in the world, and the Royal
Hawaiian Yacht Club is composed of as clean-cut, whole-souled a lot of
gentlemen and sportsmen as one will meet east or west, north or south,
in whatever country or under whatever burgee.
Kaleakaua, last king of the Hawaiians, was the first commodore of the
yacht club, and at the time of our visit the late Prince Cupid, the
Territory's representative in Washington and once in line of succession
to the throne, was an active member. And only in the Yacht Club, of all
Hawaiian organizations, have royalist and reactionary met on terms of
frank and open friendship. The memories of the stirring days of the
revolution are dimmed by the mists of more than a score of years, but
still clear and distinct in island society is drawn the line of
demarcation between the ever-loyal one-time adherents of Kaleakaua and
those who were active in, or in sympathy with, his overthrow. Yet with
the yachtsmen, even in the days of the by-no-means bloodless revolution,
animosities, political, social and personal, were ever left ashore, and
one saw leaders of the rival factions bending their backs and chorusing
together as they broke out the same anchor, or, shoulder to shoulder
and foot to foot, swayed up the same mainsail.
One of the stock stories they tell you at the yacht club is of an
incident which occurred back in the days immediately preceding the
revolution, a time when rumours of plots flew thick and fast and
royalist and republican passed each other in highway and byway with
distrustful sidelong glances, each with the fingers of his left hand
raised to his hat in courteous salutation and the fingers of his
right hand twitching on the butt of the stubby "forty-four" in his
hip pocket. It chanced at this time that Sanford B. Dole, prominent
from boyhood in island affairs and then at the head of the conspiracy
to overthrow the monarchy, and Clarence McFarlane, brother of the
King's Master of Ceremonies and a staunch upholder of the throne,
were sailing mates on the old _Aloha_, a trim forty-foot sloop
designed and built by Fife and brought out to the Islands on the deck
of a sailing ship by way of the Horn. On the occasion in question
_Aloha_ had just cleared the passage and sheets were being slacked
away for the run before the blustering Northeast Trade down to Maui.
A sudden lurch of the boat caused Dole to lose his hitch on the bit,
the sheet was jerked from his hand, and in lunging forward to regain
his hold his patriarchal beard--nearly two feet in length and then,
as now, his most distinguishing feature--whisked into the block and
started to wind upon the whirling sheave. Slammed to the deck and
in imminent danger of serious injury the moment his chin met the
block, Dole's most frantic efforts had hardly more than checked the
run of the sheet, when McFarlane leaped forward, jammed his limp
fingers in above the sheave, and at the expense of a badly lacerated
hand stopped its deadly rotation until Lorrin Thurston, at the wheel,
brought the yacht's head to the wind and put an end to the danger.
Two days later the revolution began which made Dole President,
Thurston Minister to Washington, and left McFarlane and the rest
of the royalists, politically, in obscurity. Yet these three still
sail together now and then, and during our stay in Honolulu we of
_Lurline_, both ashore and afloat, enjoyed their joint yachting
reminiscences on many memorable occasions.
To read over a membership list of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club from
its early days is to con a roster of the men who have made Hawaii
what it is; and not a man who has held the tiller of the Insular ship
of state and guided it through the storms that have threatened to
engulf it so often during the last three decades but has owed
something of the steadiness of his head and hand to the training of
his yachting days.
_Gentlemen of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club, I salute you! Here's to
your summer seas, and your summer winds, and your summer skies,
and the summer in your hearts. May you always have_--I was going to
say fair weather and other things to match, but I pause in time. Yours
are the natures that make fair weather out of any storm that blows.
So--_here's to a sail above you, a plank beneath you, the blue-green
Pacific about you, and the boisterous Trade wind blowing you on_.
* * * * *
Honolulu hospitality is of so wide a fame that I will not lay myself
open to the charge of trying to "gild refined gold or paint the
rainbow" by telling here of the details of our sojourn in what is so
happily called the "Pearl of the Pacific"; and yet--there was one
incident that is so characteristic of the innate courtesy and gentility
of the Hawaiian host that I may be pardoned for setting it down.
It was but a few days after our arrival in Honolulu that we were
invited to attend a _luau_ or native feast at the home of Col. Sam
Parker, a prominent planter of the Islands and a relative of the late
King Kaleakaua. The affair was to be informal, we were told, and the
feast was to be spread on the _lanai_ or open veranda. On the strength
of these assurances, and because the night was a hot and sultry one,
the Commodore and I thought that our duck yachting uniforms would
fulfil all the requirements of the occasion, and proceeded to attend
thus accoutred. Imagine our feelings, then, on finding the genial
Colonel Parker waiting to receive us in full evening dress, and
observing that every one of the hundred and fifty other guests were
likewise impeccably garbed. Two white doves in a flock of ravens
could not have been more conspicuous or out of place, and our
discomfiture was no whit lessened on being led to the head of the long
table and placed in the seats of honour beside Colonel Parker's
step-daughters, the lovely Princess Kawanakoa and the no less
beautiful Alice Campbell. Not till we were seated did I notice that our
host's place was vacant.
For ten minutes the Commodore and I munched shamedly at our _poi_ and
boiled seaweed and avoided the I-told-you-so glances of the Mater
and Claribel who, resplendent in "full racing rig," seemed palpably
endeavouring to impress the assembled company with the fact that they
had no connection whatever with the two ill-at-ease nautical-looking
gentlemen in the duck jackets. The Princess and her sister were
the souls of wit, tact and amiability, but we continued droopy and
unresponsive even under the stimuli of their spirited sallies.
There was only one thing that could happen to restore our shattered
equanimity, and that--thanks to the inspiration which had doubtless
seized upon our genial host the moment our mis-garbed figures had hove
above his horizon--was the very thing that did happen. We were just
passing from _poi_ in calabashes to mullet boiled in _ti_ leaves, when
in breezed the Colonel, with only a quickened heaving of his ample
chest indicating the lightning change he had been making, garbed in
the undress uniform of a Commodore of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club,
a position which he had held during the reign of the late King Kaleakaua.
It was a most gracious act of kindly courtesy, and I was not in the
least surprised to hear the Commodore spent most of the rest of the
evening trying to persuade all the Parkers, root and branch, to get
their things together and join us for our cruise in the South Pacific.
In my own thankfulness, I distinctly remember offering several times
to make a present of the yacht to both the Princess Kawanakoa and her
sister before I pulled myself together sufficiently to realize that it
was not mine to give.
* * * * *
The only unpleasant feature about letting go anchor in Honolulu Harbour
is having to break it out again. After our week of scheduled stop had
stretched out to two weeks, and finally to three, the realization
that our reluctance to leave was but growing with every day that the
inevitable moment was deferred brought us at length to the arbitrary
setting of a sailing hour. Toward this we inflexibly directed the
current of our resolutions, with the result that we really did get away
in the end.
On the morning of sailing we were pleasantly surprised to receive word
from the Spreckels Company--John D. Spreckels was the original owner
of _Lurline_--that it was sending its big tug, _Fearless_, to tow us
out of the passage and beyond the lee of the island to the breeze-swept
channel. A little later a note came out from Governor Carter informing
us that he was sending the Royal Hawaiian Band on the _Fearless_ to
pipe paeans of farewell.
We were not sailing until three o'clock on the afternoon of the 24th of
March, but soon after daybreak boats commenced coming off laden with
boxes and bags and parcels, remembrances from our kindly Island
friends, and toward noon the tide of flowers set in--these mostly in the
form of _leis_ or garlands to be worn about the neck. By two o'clock
the cabin was like the shipping room of a department store at the
climax of the Christmas rush, and the deck a cross between a fruitstand
and a conservatory. Nor was the forecastle unremembered. The sailors,
too, appeared to have formed attachments. As the bluff bow of the
_Fearless_ came nosing out into the stream from under the stern of the
big _Siberia_ and all hands turned to on the anchor, we were treated to
the spectacle of four brawny seamen, garlanded and festooned in
trailing _leis_ from head to heel, bending and swaying in unison and
heaving up the chain to a chantey that was nothing more or less than
an improvisation from a rollicking native _hula_.
The line from _Fearless_ was passed aboard and made fast, and as the
anchor was broken out the white-coated band, grouped picturesquely on
the forward deck of the tug, struck up the opening bars of a familiar
air, and Puilani Molina, the sweetest singer in all of the Hawaiias,
advanced to the rail, tossed a bright-hued _lei_ upon the water and
began singing that most plaintive and tenderly sweet of all the world's
songs of farewell, "Aloha-oe."
"Ha-a-heo ka-u-a-ina pa--li--."
Liquid silver, the full, clear notes floated out to us across the
unrippling water, and from reef to shore the whole bay fell silent as
she sang through the first verse. At the opening words of the chorus
a score or more of friends clustered on the hurricane deck of the tug
joined in. Instantly the air was taken up by the deep-voiced
bandsmen; then by the deckhands and grimy stokers gathered at the
door of the engine room, and then by the boatmen as they lay on
their oars in the offing, until finally it reached the shore, to come
back to us in broken snatches from the throats of the crowd that
lined the quays and landings.
"Aloha-oe, Aloha-oe,
E-ke o-na-o-na no-ho i-ka li--po,
A fond embrace--A ho-i a-e-au,
Until we meet again."
Then the screw of the _Fearless_ began revolving, her tautening hawser
swung _Lurline_ into line astern, and out through the narrow passage
in the reef we were trailed in the bubbling wake of the tug. An hour
later, with Coco Head abeam and Diamond Head bearing N.E. by N., five
miles distant, sail was hoisted, the tow-line cast off, and _Lurline_,
wing-and-wing to a light northwest breeze, curtesied gracefully to the
rising swells of the channel and took her first mincing steps in the
long dance to the Marquesas.
As we filled away, dipping our flag in a farewell salute, we saw the
band, which since leaving the harbour had been doing its bravest
to lift the sodden pall of parting with rollicking Kanaka airs and
stirring patriotic selections, again stiffen to attention, and down the
wind, despairingly, appealingly, soothingly by turns, as though wafted
by the tug's broadside of fluttering handkerchiefs, came for the last
time the strains of "Aloha-oe." There are many forms and fashions of
the sweet sorrow of parting of which the poet sings, but for a long,
long pull, with a yo-heave-ho, at the heart strings, nothing like that
which steals over you as you listen to "Aloha-oe" with the tow-line
in the water, the odor of _Ilima leis_ heavy in the nostrils, and the
skyline of fair Hawaii blurring dim through a mist of tears.
The course from Honolulu to the Marquesan island of Nukahiva is about
S.E. by E., but in order to run as little chance as possible of being
headed by the Southeast Trades after crossing the Line, it was deemed
best to lay our course a couple of points to the east of this until
the latitudes of this southern wind were reached and its prevailing
direction at that season more accurately determined. This course we
found we had managed to approximate at the end of two weeks' sailing,
but only at the expense of being constantly on the wind; then to
discover that the Trades in the South Pacific blow steadily between
E.S.E. and east for nearly all of the year. This meant that we had
put ourselves to a good deal of unnecessary trouble and made but a
moderately good run where we might have made a very speedy one by
heading directly for our destination. That from Hawaii to the Marquesas
is one of the few long traverses in the Pacific where the most direct
course is also the fastest.
The bleak rock of Lanaii loomed abeam to windward for several hours
on the night of the 24th, and morning showed the dim blur of Maui's
great crater, Haleakala, blotting out the eastern sky. At noon the
snowy peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa detached themselves from the
fleecy cloud-racks down to E.S.E., and steadily loomed higher as the
sun declined. In the first watch the wind began falling lighter,
by midnight it was only coming in fluky puffs, and at daybreak
_Lurline_ found herself in the most windlessly somnolent patch of
salt water in all the length and breadth of the Pacific, the lee of the
two great 13,000-foot volcanoes that form the backbone of the island
of Hawaii.
Probably no other place in the world presents such striking contrasts
of meteorological conditions between almost contiguous points as those
furnished by the windward and leeward sides of Hawaii. The lofty
summits of its volcanoes tower so far above the raincloud line that
practically no moisture whatever is able to pass to a large belt of
country on the southwest side of the island, and where the annual
precipitation in the vicinity of Hilo is occasionally in excess of two,
and even three hundred inches, that of the Kona or leeward coast ranges
from absolutely nothing to five or six. The rank tropical verdure of
the windward slopes is unknown in this windless and rainless belt, and
save in places where streams from the perpetual snows form thread-like
oases, this leeward region is largely desert.
The windless area behind the volcanic barrier of Hawaii may be roughly
defined as a triangle, sixty miles wide at its base, tapering off to an
apex a hundred miles or more to leeward. It was well down toward the
base of this triangle that we were trying to cross in an ill-advised
effort to avoid the alternative of sailing the longer course to the
windward of the island.
Morning of the 26th found us in a clear, mirror-like, unrippling sea,
the surface of which, in its absence of motion, might have passed for
that of a great freshwater lake. Scarcely a suggestion of a swell
underran the satiny sheen of the level sea, and for all the motion
of her decks the yacht might have been chocked up in a dry dock for
repairs. The booms, hauled in amidship, lay as though spiked to the
deck; and even the drowsy slatting of the lazy-lines and the brisk
tattoo of the reef points--twin lullabies of the so-called calms of
livelier seas--were unheard. The log, as though in emulation of a
sounding lead, hung perpendicularly from the taffrail, its brass
blades showing no less clearly in the lucent, unwinking depths
than the feathery weed that fringed the motionless rudder.
Toward noon a few faint leakings of wind came edging in around the
north shoulder of Mauna Kea, and for some time we had steerage way
enough to allow the yacht to drift along at a mile or so an hour,
the booms out now on one side and now on the other in an effort to
intercept the elusive airs. At six o'clock even these vagrant puffs
had ceased, and as twilight followed the sinking of the sun behind
a ruled-line horizon calm succeeded to calmer, until the sails were
finally taken in and we floated, lazily waiting, on the heavily
breathing bosom of the deep; for now the shadow of a swell was running
and imparting just enough motion to the yacht to set her decks rocking
drowsily to and fro in accord with the somnolent peacefulness of the
tropic night.
The afterglow kindled and faded in pale tints of amber and amethyst
and dusky olive, and almost up to the zenith a filmy mass of cirrus
cloud, torn by conflicting air currents too high to make themselves at
sea level, flamed up in the reflected light for an instant and then
broke and scattered into bits, like paper rose-leaves showered into a
shaft of red calcium. Across the still expanse of the sea east nodded
to west, north nodded to south, the sky stars blinked at the sea stars,
and the sea stars blinked crookedly back; and under all ran the
indolent ebony swells, gently rolling the yacht till she rocked like a
sleepy old beldame, drowsing and catching herself and drowsing
again.
Early in the middle watch a light breeze stole out again from
landward--this time apparently coming from the Mauna Loa slope of the
island--and by daylight we were twenty miles nearer the southerly
deadline of the windless triangle. Then the puffs began falling light
again, and for an hour or two we drifted without steerage way ten or a
dozen miles off the entrance of the beautiful little bay of Kealakekua.
With eyes straining through our glasses some of us fancied that we
discerned the outlines of a tall shaft of white shining through the
brown boles of the coconut palms, and told each other that we were
gazing on the monument that marked the spot where Captain Cook, after
innumerable hair-breadth escapes in every important island group of the
Pacific, fell under the clubs of the warlike Hawaiians, fighting no
less desperately to save the lives of his comrades than for his own.
One would have to cruise the Pacific for a lifetime to begin to come
to an adequate appreciation of what the Great Navigator did, for the
more one sees the more stupendous seems the sum of his achievement.
From where the sub-Arctic waters wash the shores of Cook's Inlet,
Alaska, to Cooktown in the lap of the Antipodean tropics, and Mount
Cook raising its glacier-seamed sides above the bleak bluffs of New
Zealand, there is hardly an important island whose strand his tireless
foot did not press, and scarce a lump of coral rearing its head above
the restless Pacific surges that his keen eye did not sweep. Nasty
sailing, you think it, in these days of charts and steamers, when the
lifeboats are swept from the hurricane deck off Cook's Inlet on your
run to Nome; and "A frightful hole!" you say, when your "N.Y.K."
steamer anchors every night as she feels her way along down the
Great Barrier Reef; and every minute is your last, perhaps you think,
when your "A and A" steamer is hove to in a Fijian hurricane, or you're
locked in the cabin of your "A.U.S.N." packet in a spell of "southeast"
weather between Dunedin and Sydney. Distinctly bad, you think all this;
you on your 6,000-ton steamer that is equipped with every precautionary
and emergency device known to science, with a powerful beacon on
every headland and the bottom of the sea mapped out like a block of
lower Broadway. Just try and imagine, then, if you please, what these
same places must have been to Cook, who spent years among them in
crazy old wooden ships, scarcely a one of which but ended by piling up
on some rocky shore or coral beach. Columbus, Vespucci, and the rest
of the deep-water navigators, simply turned the noses of their ships
west and sailed till they got to somewhere--and then sailed back again.
Cook spent years with a man at the masthead looking for hidden reefs,
and with the sounding lead going every hour of the twenty-four.
In my own mind there are grave doubts as to whether any of us really
saw the Cook monument during that long forenoon in which we lay
becalmed off the leeward coast of Hawaii--in fact, I have since been
told that it is not visible from the sea at all; but the sight of
Kealakekua--yes, even at a distance of a dozen miles or more--is
ample excuse for this slight tribute to one to whom no man that has
ever sailed the Pacific will deny the title of "The Greatest Navigator
of History."
_Captain James Cook, sailor, diplomat and gentlemen:--Here's long and
unbroken rest for your watch below in that quiet haven where you let
go Life's anchor in the shadow of the towering Mauna Loa and within
sound of the lap of the waves of that Pacific, so many of whose tracks
you were the first to sail. Sleep sound, Master Mariner, for your work
is done; and may your dreams bring you the messages of gratitude that
arise from the hearts of those whose ways have been made easier and
safer because of the dangers you braved and the sacrifices you made.
Accept this acknowledgment of the obligation of one of those to whom
you showed the way, James Cook._
* * * * *
A fluky three to five-knot breeze drew in from the E.S.E. about
mid-day, every puff of which was taken advantage of to struggle on
out of the lee of the blanketing island. Freshening slightly after
nightfall, it carried us along at a little better than a four-mile gait
during each hour of the first watch, near the end of which it hauled
ahead and forced the yacht off to southwest until enough southing had
been run to allow her to be put about on the other tack without danger
of butting her nose into the volcanic bluffs of Hawaii.
Shortly after midnight the mate awakened the Commodore to report a
reflection on the sky off to the northeast, an announcement which
brought every one tumbling out on deck in short order. There was
the reflection, surely enough; a dull red glare on our port quarter
that shone and dulled and shone again like a blowed-on ember. The
light was on a line with the point where the opaque mass of Hawaii
blotted out the tail of the Great Bear, and because there was no sign
of fire on the water we had about arrived at the conclusion that the
glare might come from a ship or sugar mill burning on the windward
side of the island, when the reflection suddenly flared from a dull
cherry to a vivid flame-red, immediately to be quenched in tumbling
masses of smoke or steam which went shooting into the air as though
driven by the force of a mighty explosion.
"She's a steamer!" yelled the mate. "Them's her boilers a-bustin'!"
Whereupon we all fell to speculating as to what particular steamer it
might be. And it was not until six or seven minutes later when a great,
deep-toned reverberation reached us--a sound so mighty that all of the
steamers in the Pacific blowing up together would have passed unnoticed
beside it--that light finally burst in upon us and we broke out in
chorus with "Kilauea! in eruption again."
The actuality of this eruption--only a slight one as it chanced--we
verified six weeks later when our file of San Francisco papers was
received in Tahiti. In referring since to this most spectacular piece
of volcanic pyrotechnics, we have always done so in the words of
Claribel, then a recently emancipated prisoner from the grip of _mal
de mer_. In the sentiently suffusing light the sea rolled a dark pit
of ox-blood and the heavens arched a vault of purple-black studded
with pale emeralds, the stars. The half-filled sails were hangings of
amethyst silk, and the masts lances of fire grounded in patches of
living flame where the polished brass work threw back the rosy
glow of the Northeast.
"Look! look!" cried the sufferer, clapping her hands with excitement
as the twisting pillar on the eastern flank of Mauna Loa took the
momentary seeming of a colossal figure in the throes of a serpentine.
"Isn't it worth being sea-sick all the way around the world to see?
There's Madame Pelée dancing a _hula_! It's Kilauea's 'Aloha' to the
_Lurline_!"
And "Kilauea's 'Aloha' to the _Lurline_" it has always been to us since.
Light and baffling southerly breezes made progress slow for the first
two days after clearing the calm patch in the lee of Hawaii, and when
on the 29th these suddenly straightened out into a blustering easterly
blow the immediate necessity of proceeding under shortened canvas
offset the advantage of the long-desired wind. For two days the yacht
was close-hauled on a course which approximated southeast, bobbing up
and down to the seas and making only moderately good weather under
double-reefed mainsail and foresail.
Sea and wind were still heavy at noon of the 31st, but the latter
had by then come up to northeast, allowing us to sail a point or two
free on a course of S.E. by E. Under all plain lower sail we pounded
into the hard-heaving seas all afternoon and through the night of the
31st, the decks constantly smothered in volleys of spray and more than
a little green water finding its way aboard in some of the heavier
plunges, yet averaging close to eight miles an hour all the time. Day
broke on a sea of wind-tossed pampas plumes, the onslaughts of waves
beneath which were responsible for a substantial shortening of sail
when the morning watch was called. At ten o'clock, with the glass
down to 29.70 and the wind increased to half a gale, the canvas was
still further reduced, leaving the yacht doing a comfortable six knots
under double-reefed mainsail and foresail, and with the jib taken in
and the bonnet out of the foresail.
For two days, with the glass hovering about 29.60 and the wind blowing
fiercely but steadily from E.N.E., we jolted along, full-and-by, at
from five to seven knots an hour, logging 129 miles on the 2nd of
April and 159 miles on the 3rd. By this time the torn, fussy seas of
the first day of the gale had lengthened out to viciously-running
combers, with a resistless power under their swinging upheaves and
a decided sting in the blows of their hissing crests. The big third
reef was tied into the mainsail at dawn of the 4th, after a top-heavy
wall of reeling water had bumped its head on the starboard boat in an
apparent endeavour to salute the rising sun, leaving that indispensable
adjunct to our life-saving service wallowing in its slackened lashing
with a started plank. This, with a stove-in galley sky-light, made
up about the sum total of the damage inflicted by what would have
been a really troublesome storm if there had been any land about to
look out for. In the open waters of the Pacific the hardest kind
of a straight blow is of little moment to a staunch schooner, even
though--like the _Lurline_--it may have been built as much for racing
as cruising. Where the real danger lurks for any kind of a craft is
in the twisting hurricanes and the sudden and terrific squalls which
attack unexpectedly among the islands. At sea, as on land, most of the
menace is in the unforeseen, striking instances of which truth we had
ample opportunity to observe before the voyage was over.
The wind began abating in strength shortly after daybreak of the 4th,
and during the day the yacht was gradually restored to all plain sail.
We must have passed under the sun at about 6° N. late in the forenoon
of this day, for it inclined to the north when the noon sight showed
our latitude to be 5° 57'. The air and water which had been showing a
diurnal increase of temperature of about half a degree, Fahrenheit,
registered 81° and 79°, respectively. There was no suggestion of
oppressiveness in the air and a windsail was not necessary to keep the
cabin fresh and cool.
In the early morning of the 5th the wind began to fall light and
fluky, finally resolving itself into a tumultuous series of squalls,
the last of which, though it drove the yacht off to the west of south
at a terrific pace, fortunately abated before anything carried away.
When it had passed the wind settled itself contentedly into E.S.E.,
from which point it continued amiably to purr--except on three notable
occasions--through most of the four months which we spent south of the
Line. We had literally run from the Northeast to the Southeast Trades
in a single squall.
As we neared the Line the only indication of equatorial weather was
in the ever-livelier butterfly chases of the sunshine and showers.
The winds, except for increasingly fierce squalls which we began
experiencing regularly in the early watches, were fresh and steady from
E.S.E., and so far as any signs of being in the hated "horse-latitudes"
were concerned, we might have been sailing through a week-long
September afternoon off the Golden Gate. Considering the freshness of
the wind, the sea was very light indeed, and we were able to carry
most of the kites to good advantage as long as there was sufficient
daylight to permit watching the approach of the ever-imminent
squalls.
On the 7th, at three o'clock, in longitude 139° 50', we crossed the
equator, just two weeks to an hour after weighing anchor in Honolulu.
Air and water were slightly cooler than for some days--each registering
79°, Fahrenheit--and so fresh was the steady breeze from the southeast
that we stood uncovered in the sun at noonday and in the shade of the
sails felt no discomfort in a rug.
By this time we had made easting sufficient to place us well to the
windward of our destination in any probable shift of wind. Sheets were
slacked off, therefore, and freed from the griping luff under which she
had chafed almost incessantly for the last fortnight, _Lurline_ slipped
away on a course of due south at a gait which ran up close to 190
miles on the log for the day ending at noon of the 9th. At this time,
with 240 miles--part of it down a narrow island channel beset with
swift currents and variable winds--remaining to be covered before we
would begin to open up the bay of Taiohaie, Nukahiva, all practicable
canvas was crowded on in an endeavour to make port the following day.
Eight and nine knots we made all afternoon; good speed considering the
force of the wind, yet hardly what might have been desired under the
circumstances. But the breeze was stiffening as twilight came on, and
realizing that failure to make anchorage before another evening would
mean a night of standing off-and-on in a scant sea-way and uncertain
winds, the Commodore, for the first time since entering those
capricious latitudes, allowed the light sails to be carried into the
darkness.
Sailing like a witch in the freshening breeze, _Lurline_ reeled off
a shade under twenty miles in the second dog watch, and 10.6, 10.8,
11.3 and 11.8 were successively run up on the log as the hours of the
first watch slipped away. The night was balmy soft, the breeze a stream
of warm milk, and in the air was discernible that faint, indefinable
odour of something which heralds the presence of land to nostrils
grown sensitive from inhaling for weeks the untainted atmosphere of
the open sea. The heavens, save for a few hurriedly marching squads of
the ever-shifting cirro-cumulus, were clear and unobscured, and the
easy-running swells were as gentle as the night itself.
The yacht continued to reel off the miles like a liner during the early
hours of the middle watch, but toward morning the appearance of several
menacing turrets of cloud up to windward was the signal for the hurried
taking in of the light sails and an easing off of the sheets. For a
while it appeared that all of the three rapidly advancing squalls were
going to pass astern of us, and so, in fact, two of them did. The third
one took an unexpected spin at the last moment and came charging up
after the yacht like a mad bull. There was just time hastily to furl
the jib and station men at the fore and mainsail halyards before it
broke upon the yacht with the explosive roar of a bursting bomb, and
the timely letting go of those halyards as she hove down before the
terrific force of the wind undoubtedly saved some canvas if nothing
more.
The mainsail was checked half way in its run and the very considerable
portion of it that fell overside went hopping and skipping along on the
water like a great wounded bird as the yacht smoked away before the
squall. For ten minutes, perhaps, we ran thus, half smothered in air
and water; then the rain began falling, the wind fell lighter, and the
squall, so far as we were concerned, had spent itself. Five minutes
later the main boom had been hauled inboard, the sail hoisted, and
_Lurline_ was gliding off down to south'ard no whit worse for her rough
raking. The main topmast staysail was run up when the morning watch was
called, and dawn found her doing a comfortable nine knots an hour with
the situation well in hand.
As the sun rose the somewhat vague land smell which we had noted during
the night increased to a delicate but unmistakable odour of flowers,
a perfume which we later learned is due to the presence in the air of
the blown pollen of the _cassi_, a low bush-like plant which carpets
the islands of the Marquesas and blooms perennially. So pungent and
far-reaching is this odour that it has become a common saying with
trading captains who sail these latitudes that you can smell the
Marquesas farther than you can see them, a statement which is certainly
literally true anywhere to the leeward of the group.
Shortly after eight o'clock the shattered peaks of the island of Uahuka
were sighted dead ahead, and at nine the course was altered to S.W. by
W. After an hour or so the dim outline of Nukahiva began taking shape
in the dissolving mist, and when the scarped and buttressed summit of
Cape Maartens came edging out from behind the abrupt heads to
north'ard, we had something definite to go by, and promptly trimmed
in sheets and headed up to clear a forbidding point of black basalt
which our Directions told us jutted out into the sea to cut off the
surges from the inner loop of the bay of Taio-haie.
Along the rugged coast we slipped, now close in to a sinister dirk-like
point which reached out to divide and scatter the onrushing seas, and
again standing across the opening of a bay or inlet which receded to a
snowy beach backed by a lucent lagoon and a chasm full of unfathomable
verdure. Beyond the furrowed brow of Cape Maartens a narrow bay, well
protected and smooth as a mirror, ran inland beyond eye-scope, piercing
the island like a sliver of silver. From where it disappeared in a
dense mass of palms and pandanus a high-walled valley wound back among
the serried ribs of the mountains, apparently to end abruptly against
a lofty cliff, the sheer side of the towering backbone range of the
island.
Here and there up the valley patches of dancing light, shining
through the sombre green of the riot of trees and creepers, told
of a swiftly-running stream, and down the face of the great cliff,
literally leaping from the clouds to the earth in a single bound, was a
waterfall. Lucent, glittering green it must have been up where it began
its dizzy plunge in the heart of the murky mass of drifting nimbus
which veiled its source, but white--snow-white--it gleamed where it
appeared under the dark cloud line to fall in a brocade of shimmering
satin into the misty depth below. We did not learn about it until the
next day; but this fall was Typee Fall, the stream was Typee River, and
the valley was Typee Valley, the scene of that most idyllic of all South
Sea idylls, Herman Melville's "Typee."
We never attained nearer than five miles to the great fall during our
stay in the Marquesas, and accurate figures regarding its height were
not obtainable. Findlay's Directory gives it at 2,165 feet, which is
probably too much; but the fact remains that it is one of the highest
waterfalls in the world, and without a rival on any island whatever.
At four in the afternoon we doubled the gaunt black point toward which
we had been steering for some hours, suddenly to find the panorama of
the beautiful bay of Taio-haie unfolding before us. Pursuant to the
instructions in the Sailing Directory, we ran up the Jack to the fore
and stood off across the entrance waiting for the pilot, without whom,
so we read, there was a heavy penalty for endeavouring to enter. Then
we went about and ran back past the little island at the end of the
point, all without awakening a sign of life along the drowsy shore
where nestled the village. After repeating this manoeuvre twice more,
the Commodore ordered the sheets slacked off and gave the man at the
wheel his bearing for the first leg of the run in.
"Perhaps the pilot has overslept on his _siesta_ today," he remarked
dryly; "and if that's the case our anchor gun may wake him up."
We went in neatly and expeditiously. "Keep the eastern outer bluff on
the starboard," read the Directions, "rounding the island off it within
a cable's length. All the eastern shores of the bay are steep-to and
free from danger, and the wind will always lead off." And that was
about all there was to it. We let go the anchor a few minutes after
five, a quarter mile off the rickety wharf, in seven fathoms. Our time
from Honolulu was just over seventeen days, the quickest passage of
which there was any record. Had we sailed a course to avoid the
windless area in the lee of Hawaii, and then headed directly for
Nukahiva it is probable that the run would have been made in the
vicinity of twelve or thirteen days.
The firing of our little signal cannon might have been the setting off
of a mine under the village, so electric was the effect. Dark forms
sprang up from nowhere and began darting hither and thither and yon,
and following the appearance of a corpulent figure in pajamas at the
door of what seemed to be the official residence, the tri-colour of
France went jerking up to its flag-pole. Down the front street shortly
came lumbering a ponderous figure in a brass-bound helmet and white
uniform, followed by a trailing sword and a half dozen natives carrying
oars on their shoulders. Two other white men, also white-clad and
sun-helmeted, joined the procession as it passed what appeared to be a
trading store, and the three proceeded together down to the wharf and
put off in a big whaleboat.
Driven by the erratic but powerful strokes of the big natives, the boat
was quickly alongside the yacht, and the official-looking gentleman
came puffing up the ladder which had been hastily lowered for him. He
was Brigadier Bouillard, the Harbour Master, Warden of the Prison and
Chief of Police, he announced between gasps in broken English, and the
other gentlemen following him over the rail were, respectively, Mr.
Cramer, a German trader, and Mr. McGrath, a Canadian trader. Of the
latter, one of the most interesting characters we met in the course of
our whole cruise, we were destined to see much during our stay in
Nukahiva.
"By the way," Monsieur le Capitaine, "where's your pilot?" asked the
Commodore after the large official had examined our papers and admitted
the yacht to practique. "Hasn't he overslept this afternoon?"
"Zee pilate! _Mon Dieu_, he ees no"--And at this point, with wild
rollings of the eyes and swift gestures of uncertain import, the
Brigadier relapsed into French so voluble and excited as to prove quite
unintelligible to our untrained ears.
"The Brigadier," explained the blond Cramer in his exact Teutonic
English, as the excited Frenchman paused for breath, "is trying to
tell you, in effect, that the last pilot but one was killed and eaten
by relatives of a trading schooner's crew who were drowned when that
boat was piled up on the beach because the pilot had taken too much
absinthe and mistook a firefly on the bowsprit for the light on the
wharf. A similar fate also overtook his successor, apparently for no
other reason than that the office had become an unpopular one with the
natives. Since then," he added, "the government has been unable to find
any one willing to accept the position under any inducements."
"Hardly to be wondered at," mused the Commodore. "But, I say, can any
of you gentlemen tell me if this--er--antipathy of the Marquesan
natives toward pilots extends to skippers who bring in their own ships?
It's a little late for working out of the harbour before dark but the
wind's fair most of the way and, anyhow, I'd rather be drowned than
eaten."
The natives had always respected visiting yachts, they asseverated
earnestly, and--as we learned later--truthfully. The Commodore took
courage on hearing this and decided to chance it for a day or two.
It was not until our arrival in Tahiti, a fortnight later, that we
learned that perhaps the forbearance of the natives in the matter of
visiting yachts may have been partly due to the fact that, previously
to _Lurline's_ coming, only three craft of that class had ever been to
the Marquesas.
In the "Ladies Log" of this date I find the following entry:
"We sailed in ourselves and fired off our signal gun to wake up the
pilot. Found out shortly that nothing of less calibre than Gabriel's
Trumpet would have been equal to that task."