PAGO PAGO TO SUVA
We sailed from Pago Pago for Fiji on the afternoon of June 18th. Just
as the anchor had been catted and the yacht was filling away on her
first tack a madly paddled canoe shot alongside and a letter was thrown
aboard. It was addressed only to the "Yotta," no individual being
specified, and ran as follows:
"_Talofa. My love to you. Please send me one bicycle._"
It was signed by one of the handmaidens of Seuka, the _taupo_ of Pago
Pago. For a simple, direct appeal this struck me as coming pretty near
the record, and it is a pleasure to relate that, six months later, it
met with a deserved reward. There are several ways to reach it, but no
smoother road to the South Sea maiden's heart than the "bicycle path."
As we stood in past the _Adams_ a crowd of our native friends on the
dock began singing the plaintive half Samoan, half English farewell
song, "_Tuta-pai, mai feleni_"--("Good-bye, my Friend") and the oft
repeated refrain, "O Ai neppa will fa-get you," followed us till the
yacht passed out of hearing around the point. The kindliest, handsomest
and most amiable people in all the South Pacific, these Samoans.
It was our hope to put up a new record for the Samoa-Fiji run, as we
had done for that from the Marquesas to Tahiti, but the flukiness of
the wind, which became apparent as soon as we were clear of the
harbour, held out little promise of success. The air was abnormally
clear and the sky, unusually deep and rich in colour, hardly flecked by
a cloud. The sea, owing to the veering tendency of the wind, was light
and even. The wind was blowing fitfully from its regular quarter, E.S.E.,
when we came out in the early afternoon, but shortly began coming in
puffs from due east. Then it blew slightly more southerly for a half
hour, before hauling up to E.N.E., and so all afternoon, as a tide creeps
foot by foot up a beach, it kept chopping around to the north. By dark it
had worked on to N.N.W., and was blowing, not steadily, but in jerky
puffs of ominous import.
The sunset that evening was a sinister thing of red and black. The
sun, glowing like a huge coal, dropped down behind the southwest end
of Tutuila just as the veering wind drove up a bank of sooty clouds
from the lee of the island and began blowing it to pieces. The clouds
tore up into inky strips, darkly opaque, like the bars of a grate, and
between the bars, sullenly, murkily, hotly red, the unobscured sky
glowed like the inside of a furnace. For the space of a minute, or two,
or three, this held, with its magnified reflection upon the indolently
heaving sea showing in alternate welts of glimmering purple and _sang
du boeuf_; then a new flight of cloud hove up from the lee of the
island and, as a closed door quenches the light of a furnace, hid the
fire of the west behind its impenetrable pall. The mate characterized
it politely to the ladies as an "angry sunset," and then went forward and
alluded to it in mixed but forceful metaphor as "bloody murder swingin'
on the hinges o' hell."
An insufferably hot and stuffy night gave way to an equally unpleasant
day. The sea was oily smooth, the sky overcast with a dull, translucent
film of cloud, and the sun, heavily ringed, grew increasingly dimmer as
the greyness thickened overhead. The run to noon from three P. M. of
the 18th was an even hundred miles.
The wind, still from the northwest, increased steadily as the afternoon
lengthened, the yacht, under all-plain sail, driving along at close to
nine knots an hour. About four o'clock, while still making fast time,
she struck a large floating log--apparently a bread-fruit trunk--which
gouged a long gash on her starboard side as she sped past it. The blow
was a glancing one and nothing but the paint was damaged, though the
consequences might have been really serious had the point of impact
been twenty feet farther forward.
The sun went out behind a horizon of dull, black mud, and through
the greasy dusk that was settling over the sea the wind came pouring
out of the west with constantly accelerating force. Overhead, the
clouds--mostly detached blotches of cumulo-nimbus--surged about in
seeming aimlessness, those of the lower air scurrying away before
the northwest wind that drove the yacht along, while, a couple of
thousand feet or so higher, a counter current of great force from
the southwest was ripping to pieces the vaporous masses of the upper
heavens and stringing them out in long lines like the wake of a fleet
of ferryboats. In the intermediate levels stray mavericks of cloud were
pivoting about like prairie cattle milling in a blizzard. The sea, owing
to the tendency of the wind to continue hauling westerly, was not
running heavily as yet, but a barometer at 29.70--24 points drop in 27
hours--and the ominous aspect of the heavens gave fair warning that it
was not the explosive broadside of a passing squall that was to be
encountered this time, but the sustained bombardment of a real storm.
We were still a couple of months away from the so-called hurricane
season, but hurricanes--like nuggets in the prospector's proverb--are
where you find them, and it was on record that they had occurred
in the southwest Pacific every month of the year. At any rate, the
time for preparation for weather of some kind was plainly at hand,
beginning with an immediate and expeditious shortening of canvas. No
halfway measures to tide over a few hours' blow were resorted to.
The maintopmast staysail was taken in and the lower sail reduced
to double-reefed foresail, triple-reefed mainsail and reefed and
unbonneted forestay-sail. Extra lashings were thrown on boats,
water-butts, spars and other movables, and the skylights were closed
and battened with planks to protect from waves that might break
inboard.
Things were snugged up just in time, for at eight o'clock, to the
accompaniment of a tenth more drop in the barometer, the storm
broke fiercely in a heavy squall of rain; the next thirty-six hours were
crowded full of education in the ways of a South Pacific gale. The
after leach of the foresail carried away at nine o'clock and for some
minutes the flogging canvas played a lively game of crack-the-whip
with the sailors who were trying to smother it. Soon the effect of the
wind began to show upon the sea, and all through the night the
increasing force of the staggering blows upon the weather bow and
the Maxim-like rattle of driven spray upon the sails told of steadily
mounting waves. Rain kept pouring in heavy squalls, the fierce
blasts serving to beat flat for brief spaces the rising swells, but only
to release them to more furious onslaughts the moment the
compressed-air buffers of the wind rolled on ahead.
At midnight the barometer was down to 28.50, after reading which the
mate came on deck complaining that some one had knocked the bottom
out of it. The yacht was behaving splendidly, and, except for the threat
in the rapid falling of the barometer, our only serious worry was on
account of the uncomfortable proximity of the extensive Curacao Reef
and Shoals. We were chopping along on a W.S.W. course, which, allowing
for a reasonable leeway, we reckoned would carry us a good ten miles
to the windward of the danger point. Nevertheless, remembering our
experience with Bellinghausen Island, a sharp watch was kept to leeward
until morning.
Daylight broke from the southeast through an infernal cloud-shoal of
copper and sulphur and tallow and olive upon a desolation of wallowing
snow-capped mountain peaks. The wind, which the previous afternoon had
been blowing with a force of less than "5" in the Beaufort Scale, had
held from the same quarter all night and was now hurtling down on us at
near "9." Seas, confounding in height, steep and sharp-crested, with
hollow green sides and black, swollen bases, came charging down from
the west in broken-ranked stampede. The yacht, under the scanty canvas
still on her, was wonderfully buoyant, rising and falling to the waves
like an empty biscuit tin, her comparatively short length giving her an
advantage in recovering from a dive into the depths in time to meet the
lift of the coming wave that would not have been shared by a larger ship.
The decks were repeatedly swept by the last yard or two of a sharp crest
that she could not quite surmount, but not once did she put her bowsprit
into green water when she had not pulled up to an angle that allowed her
to shake free from the ensuing deluge in time to meet the next wave.
The leaps from hollows to crests, and from crests back to hollows, were
positively appalling in the contrasts of the sudden transitions. Up out
of the fog of foam in the trough the yacht would stagger, and not until
she stabbed the curling crest and began teetering undecidedly on the
ridge would the wind that had been shrieking in the upper rigging have
a chance to strike the hull. Then it came all at once, a palpably solid
block of air, and no man could stand against it on the open deck. An
instant more, and it was as though the world was falling away beneath
her, and down, down, down she would go until one stirred and glanced
at his neighbour and set himself for the jar of the keel against the
bottom of the sea.
It was those age-long moments in the hollows, with half the weather sky
and all the wind cut off, with the eyes blinded and the throat choked
with spume, with the ears deafened with the thunderous volleys of the
flapping sails, and in the heart the vague and ever-haunting dread that
the next wave would be the one to break, the one against which the
yacht's seaworthiness and the helmsman's cunning would alike be of no
avail, that were the hardest to endure. The trough of the sea in a big
storm is the nearest thing to primal chaos that can be experienced in
this age of the world; only one must be in a small craft to get the full
benefit of it. Apropos of which it may be of interest to note here that
at this very time, 500 miles to the northeast, our friend McGrath, the
trader of Nukahiva, who had been cast away from the Marquesas some
weeks previously, was fighting through this same storm in a thirty-foot
open boat in a desperate effort to make the harbour of Pago Pago.
The Commodore had just come on deck at seven o'clock with the
disconcerting news that the barometer was down to 28.30 and still
falling, when the lookout threw a bombshell on his own account into
the cockpit by a half-articulate, wind-choked hail to the effect that
he had sighted land abeam to lee. No one said anything as the yacht
began to climb the next wave, but "Drifting on Curacao Reef" was
written plain on every face; the angling slant of our quickly-quenched
wake told only too plainly of the fearful leeway we were making. Each
clawing the salt dust from his eyes with one hand, clutching a shroud
or halyard with the other, and bracing mightily against the wind, we
waited for the view to open up to leeward as the schooner reached the
ridge of the soaring sea up which she struggled, to behold with untold
relief, not the imminent and unending line of great breakers on a
coral reef which we had expected, but a black triangle of rock, fully
twenty miles distant, standing sharp and clear as the Cheop's Pyramid
against the grey sky.
"Boscawen Island; barren rock, 2,000 feet high," quoted the Commodore
from the Directory; to add, with renewed excitement, "But if that's
Boscawen Island, then where in the name of--Neptune--is the Curacao
Reef and Shoals?" Then, his eyes turning to the windward horizon in a
puzzled search as the yacht topped the next wave, "We must have drifted
right across them if the chart is right!"
We watched for an hour for the phantom reef with no result. There was
little left to worry about on the score of danger, as we were well to
the lee of the points dotted out as shoal on the chart, while in our
own lee the sea stretched clear and open to Boscawen and beyond; but
the manner of the mystery of this piece of marine legerdemain was--or
would have been at a time when there was less to think about--an
absorbing problem. Certain it was that our leeway was proving greater
than our headway; also that, irrespective of the correctness of our
reckoning of the day before, the yacht could not have reached the
position she was in without drifting squarely across some portion of
either the reef or shoal as they were charted. As sailing over the reef
was impossible, and over the shoal, at least unknowingly, improbable,
we were left to the conclusion that, notwithstanding the fact that
neither is marked "P.D.," ("Position Doubtful,") both are incorrectly
located on the chart. Outside of the half-dozen archipelagoes most
navigated, chart errors in the South Pacific are by no means uncommon.
At eleven o'clock in the forenoon, with the barometer at 28.20, the
wind, blowing more furiously than ever, hauled suddenly to S.S.W. At
11.45 the forestay-sail carried away, and, with every fresh blast
threatening to strip off the remaining canvas, it did not take long to
arrive at the conclusion that we were approaching, rather than getting
away from, the centre of disturbance. Whether we had a fully developed
hurricane to contend with, or, as was quite possible, a "southwester"
of unusual violence, we could not definitely determine. The sinister
sky, the low barometer, and the action of the wind up to that time
all said "Hurricane"; the season, and the fact that the wind showed a
tendency to continue from the Fiji quarter, indicated the "Southwester."
Assuming at the time, therefore, that we were boring into a hurricane
whose centre was to the S.S.W., the Commodore made up his mind to hurry
away from that centre as expeditiously as possible. Accordingly, after
a new forestay-sail had, with considerable difficulty, been bent in the
place of the one carried away, all the rest of the canvas was taken
off the yacht and, under that sail alone, she was put on the port tack
before the wind.
All that afternoon _Lurline_ ran like a frightened deer, with the
waves, like hounds, coming up on her trail and snapping viciously at
her flanks as they rushed by. Time and again the helmsman, grinding the
wheel hard up to keep her before the wind, would glance with the tail
of his eye at a foam-splotched wall of green that blotted out the sky
astern, to hunch his shoulders and grip his spokes the tighter, waiting
with tensed muscles and set face the blow that menaced from above;
time and again, yawing desperately as the tail of a galloping sea gave
her nose a tweak, the yacht would seem on the point of broaching right
under the hollow wall of the comber next in line; time and again--to lee
on the windswept crests and to weather in the cross-gusts of the
hollows--she would roll a rail deep under and dip up a deckful of solid
water from which she could never quite clear herself before another
came sousing aboard from the other side: and through it all nothing of
serious moment happened.
Meanwhile active preparations for meeting the "worse to come" were
underway. A storm trysail was dug out from the obscurity of a musty
corner of the lazarette, spars were lashed up for a sea-anchor, bags
of oakum were soaked with oil and the life-boats provisioned and
watered. When there was nothing more to get ready some one looked at
the barometer to find--this was about four in the afternoon--that it
had risen twelve points since noon and was still displaying optimistic
tendencies.
As it was our intention to run only until the barometer began to rise,
all hands were promptly set to bending a new foresail in the place of
the one carried away the night before. When this was accomplished we
hove her to on the port tack under foresail, close-reefed, and the
forestay-sail that was already on her. After that, though the sea
continued to increase for some hours, she rode out the night with her
deck unswept by anything heavier than the driving spray.
All night the barometer mounted until, at daybreak of the 21st, 28.60
was passed, a juncture at which it was deemed safe to resolve the
unused sea-anchor into its component parts and stow the storm
trysail and oil bags against another storm. The wind blew fiercely from
the southwest all day, and not until midnight, when it began chopping
around toward the east, did the sea show any signs of falling. Then it
began smoothing rapidly, and by daybreak the yacht very comfortably
stood the addition of the close-reefed mainsail and jib.
At noon of the 22nd reefs were shaken out and all-plain sail carried
for the first time in four days. The barometer was by then up to
28.78, while the wind, blowing steadily from the southeast, enabled us
finally to get back on the Fiji course of S.W. by W. The unclouded sky
was a dome of cobalt again, and the sea, coldly green and laced with
streaks of foam, a rolling plain of furrowed jade; but in spite of fair
weather, the temperature of the air was away down to 74°, and the water
but four degrees warmer. The sea, under the influence of the veering
wind, continued to fall rapidly all afternoon. At six o'clock the lone
rock of Niuafou, the most northwesterly outpost of the Fijis, appeared
on the southern horizon, almost immediately to be swallowed up in the
gathering dusk.
By morning of the 23rd the wind was back in its regular quarter,
E.S.E., but blowing so gently that the yacht, though carrying most of
her light sails, could average no better than six or seven knots an
hour. The run to noon was 158 miles.
The lookout caught the flash of the Weilangilali Light at three o'clock
in the morning of the 24th, and by daylight we were well down the
Naniku Passage into the Fijis. The wind was light but steady, and the
scores of small, low islands to windward, cutting the swell almost
completely off, made splendid sailing. The flat horizon, unbroken save
by the blur of an occasional island, was a welcome relief from the
wave-crumpled skyline we had left behind in the open sea. The Fijian
Archipelago is a veritable nest of reefs, large and small, and islands,
both coral and volcanic, of every degree of magnitude. We picked up
island after island during the day, and at night they still continued
to push up ahead, grey banks of enchantment in the silver sea of the
moonlight.
Two of the curious rocks that we passed in the course of the day,
on account of their peculiar and distinctive outlines, are down on
the chart as Hat and Cap Island, respectively. This circumstance was
responsible for the following laconic entry in the frivolous "Ladies'
Log":
"June 24th.--Passing Hat and Cap Islands caused quite a flutter in
the bonnet of the forestay-sail."
The 180th meridian was passed early in the afternoon of the 24th, upon
which that day became immediately Saturday, the 25th. This made the
next day Sunday, which fact poor Clark, the cook, learned so tardily
that it was by only the maddest of efforts that the indispensable
"duff" was prepared in time for dinner.
The Trade-wind gave way to the cool land breeze from the big island of
Viti Levu in the early morning of the 26th. This, fresh with a welcome
earthy smell, coaxed the yacht gingerly along for several hours, only
to die out toward noon and leave her becalmed fifteen miles off Suva
entrance.
With every foot of sail spread to take advantage of the vagrant puffs
of wind that were coming occasionally from the north, the yacht had
shouldered along with the swells to within ten miles of the harbour,
when the pilot, coming off in answer to our signal, boarded us to say
that we might as well lower our sails and prepare to spend the night
where we were. Promising, in case the wind was blowing, to come off in
the morning and take us in, he bade us an officious good-bye, clambered
down into his boat and set his crew of convict rowers pulling back
to the land. Five minutes later the breeze freshened and the yacht,
slipping swiftly through the smooth water, passed the pilot's boat and
left it half a mile astern before we luffed up and waited for that
thoroughly discomfited functionary to come alongside and climb aboard.
An hour and a half later we had threaded the tortuous, buoy-marked
passage through the reef and come to anchor a cable's length off the
end of Suva pier.