Author of " The Call of the Wild," "Martin Eden," etc.
I met him first in a hurricane. And though we had been through
the hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner
had gone to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him.
Without doubt I had seen him with the rest of the Kanaka crew on
board, but I had not consciously been aware of his existence, for
the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her
eight or ten Kanaka sea men, her white captain, mate, and
supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she sailed from
Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck
passengers--Paumotuans and Tahitians, men, women, and children,
each with a trade-box, to say nothing of sleeping-mats, blankets,
and clothes-bundles.
The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were
returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were
pearl-buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon, the whitest
Chinese I have ever known, one was a German, one was a Polish
Jew, and I completed the half-dozen. It had been a prosperous
season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the
eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well, and all
were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete. Of
course the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. he was only seventy
tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on
board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl
shell and copra. Even the trade-room was packed full of shell. It
was a miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no
moving about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth along
the rails. In the night-time they walked upon the sleepers, who
carpeted the deck, two deep, I'll swear. Oh, and there were pigs
and chickens on deck, and sacks of yams, while every conceivable
place was festooned with strings of drinking cocoanuts and
bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main
shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the
fore-boom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least
fifty bunches of bananas were suspended.
It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the
two or three days that would have been required if the southeast
trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh.
After the first five hours, the trade died away in a dozen
gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and the next
day--one of those glaring, glossy calms when the very thought of
opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a
headache. The second day a man died, an Easter Islander, one of
the best divers that season in the lagoon. Smallpox, that is what
it was, though how smallpox could come on board when there had
been no known cases ashore when we left Rangiroa is beyond me.
There it was, though, smallpox, a man dead, and three others down
on their backs. There was nothing to be done. We could not
segregate the sick, nor could we care for them. We were packed
like sardines. There was nothing to do but die--that is, there
was nothing to do after the night that followed the first death.
On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four
native divers sneaked away in the large whaleboat. They were
never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly
scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.
That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it
jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The
natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid
fear. The captain--Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman--became
very nervous and voluble. The German, the two Americans, and
myself bought up all the Scotch whisky and proceeded to drink.
The theory was beautiful--namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in
alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would
immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked,
though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon
was attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink
at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.
We had a week of it, and then the whisky gave out. It was just as
well, or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull
through what followed, as you will agree when I mention the
little fact that only two men did pull through. The other man was
the Heathen--at least that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call
him at the moment I first became aware of the Heathen's
existence.
But to come back. It was at the end of the week that I happened
to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companion-way.
Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite
customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even
30.05; but to see it, as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient
to chill the blood of any pearl-buyer in Oceania.
I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed
that he had watched it going down for several hours. There was
little to do, but that little he did very well, considering the
circumstances. He took off the light sails, shortened right down
to storm canvas, spread life-lines, and waited for the wind. His
mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hove to on the
port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator,
IF--and there was the rub--IF one were NOT in the direct path of
the hurricane. We were in the direct path. I could see that by
the steady increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of
the barometer. I wanted to turn and run with the wind on the port
quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave to.
We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would
not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the
pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about
the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?
Of course, the sea rose with the wind, frightfully, and I shall
never forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She
had fallen off, as vessels do when hove to, and the first sea
made a clean breach. The lifelines were only for the strong and
well, and little good were they even for these when the women and
children, the bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade-boxes,
the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching,
groaning mass.
The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne's decks flush with the
rails, and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward,
all the miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was
a human torrent. They came head-first, feet-first, sidewise,
rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and
crumpling up. Now and again one or another caught a grip on a
stanchion or a rope, but the weight of the bodies behind tore
such grips loose. I saw what was coming, sprang on top the cabin,
and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the
Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them.
The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of
chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel and swung in behind
it. But a strapping Rarotonga vahine[1]--she must have weighed
two hundred and fifty--brought up against him and got an arm
around his neck. He clutched the Kanaka steersman with his other
hand. And just at that moment the schooner flung down to
starboard. The rush of bodies and the sea that was coming along
the port runway between the cabin and the rail, turned abruptly
and poured to starboard. Away they went, vahine, Ah Choon, and
steersman; and I swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me with philosophic
resignation as he cleared the rail and went under.
[1] woman
The third sea--the biggest of the three--did not do so much
damage. By the time it arrived, nearly everybody was in the
rigging. On deck perhaps a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and
half-stunned wretches were rolling about or attempting to crawl
into safety. They went by the board, as did the wreckage of the
two remaining boats. The other pearl-buyers and myself, between
seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children into the
cabin and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures in
the end.
Wind? Out of all my experiences I could not have believed it
possible for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing
it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with
that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say TORE THEM
OFF, and I mean it. I am not asking you to believe it. I am
merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times
when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is
enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was a monstrous
thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it
increased and continued to increase. Imagine countless millions
and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at
ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of
miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible,
impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do
all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was
like. Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud,
invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond
that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself.
Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks--no, it
is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary
conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the
conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have been
better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a
description.
I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was
beaten down by that wind. More--it seemed as if the whole ocean
had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane and hurled on
through that portion of space which previously had been occupied
by the air. Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But
Captain Oudouse had on the Petite Jeanne something I had never
before seen on a South Sea schooner a sea-anchor. It was a
conical canvas bag, the mouth of which was kept open by a huge
hoop of iron. The sea-anchor was bridled something like a kite,
so that it bit into the water as a kite bites into the air--but
with a difference. The sea-anchor remained just under the surface
of the ocean, in a perpendicular position. A long line, in turn,
connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite Jeanne
rode bow-on to the wind and to what little sea there was.
The situation really would have been favorable, had we not been
in the path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas
out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of
our running gear; but still we would have come through nicely had
we not been square in front of the advancing storm-center. That
was what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed
collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was
just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The
blow we received was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of
air. The effect on one was sickening. Remember that for hours we
had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful
pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the pressure was
removed. I know that I felt as though I were about to expand, to
fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom composing
my body was repelling every other atom, and was on the verge of
rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a
moment. Destruction was upon us.
In the absence of the wind and its pressure, the sea rose. It
jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds.
Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind
was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the
seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind
to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom
of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability.
They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at
the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man
had ever seen. They were splashes, monstrous splashes, that is
all, splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more
than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts,
explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They
jostled one another, they collided. They rushed together and
collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand
waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man ever dreamed of,
that hurricane-center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was
anarchy. It was a hell-pit of sea water gone mad.
The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The Heathen told me afterward
that he did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide
open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood,
annihilated. When I came to, I was in the water, swimming
automatically, though I was about two-thirds drowned. How I got
there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite
Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my
own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But there I was, with
nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that best there was
little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much
smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through
the center. Fortunately, there were no sharks about. The
hurricane had dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded
the death ship.
It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it
must have been two hours afterward when I picked up with one of
her hatch-covers. Thick rain was driving at the time, and it was
the merest chance that flung me and the hatch-cover together. A
short length of line was trailing from the rope handle, and I
knew that I was good for a day at least, if the sharks did not
return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer, sticking
close to the cover and, with closed eyes, concentrating my whole
soul upon the task of breathing in enough air to keep me going
and, at the same time, to avoid breathing in enough water to
drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had
ceased, and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not twenty feet
away from me, on another hatch-cover, were Captain Oudouse and
the Heathen. They were fighting over the possession of the
cover--at least the Frenchman was.
"Paien noir!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him
kick the Kanaka.
Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes except his shoes,
and they were heavy brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught
the Heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin, half-stunning
him. I looked for him to retaliate, but he contented himself with
swimming about forlornly, a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling
of the sea threw him closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with his
hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also, at the moment of
delivering each kick, he called the Kanaka a black heathen.
"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white
beast!" I yelled.
The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very
thought of the effort to swim over was nauseating. So I called to
the Kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch-cover
with him. Otoo, he told me his name was (pronounced
<O'm>-t<o'm>-<o'm>); also he told me that he was a native of Bora
Bora, the most westerly of the Society Group. As I learned
afterward, he had got the hatch-cover first, and, after some
time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it with
him, and had been kicked off for his pains.
And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no
fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature
though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a
gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had
the heart of a lion, and in the years that followed I have seen
him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is
that, while he was no fighter, and while he always avoided
precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble when it
started. And it was " 'Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went into
action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It
occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion
heavyweight of the American navy. He was a big brute of a man, a
veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, rough-housing
chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel,
and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it
to be necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted four minutes,
at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of
four broken ribs, a broken fore-arm, and a dislocated
shoulder-blade. Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was
merely a man-handler, and Bill King was something like three
months in recovering from the bit of man-handling he received
that afternoon on Apia beach.
But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch-cover
between us. We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the
cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely
held on with his hands. For three days and nights, spell and
spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the ocean.
Toward the last I was delirious most of the time, and there were
times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native
tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying of
thirst, though the sea water and the sunshine gave us the
prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn. In
the end, Otoo saved MY life; for I came to, lying on the beach
twenty feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of
cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and
stuck up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off
again, and the next time I came around it was cool and starry
night and Otoo was pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.
We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse
must have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his
hatch-cover drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the
natives of the atoll for a week, when we were rescued by a French
cruiser and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had
performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas
such a ceremony binds two men closer together than
blood-brothership. The initiative had been mine, and Otoo was
rapturously delighted when I suggested it.
"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates
together for three days on the lips of Death."
"But Death stuttered," I smiled.
"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was
not vile enough to speak."
"Why do you `master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt
feelings. "We have exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you
are Charley. And between you and me, forever and forever, you
shall be Charley and I shall be Otoo. It is the way of the
custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again,
somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be
Charley to me and I Otoo to you."
"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.
"There you go!" I cried indignantly.
"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are
only my lips. But I shall think OTOO always. Whenever I think of
myself I shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name I shall
think of you. And beyond the sky and beyond the stars always and
forever you shall be Otoo to me. Is it well, master?"