"Man, if I knew that! I believe it's the key, and I can't master it!
But we may as well sit down and be comfortable. If you would really
care to hear the story from the beginning it will take the better part
of an hour. I'll not give you all the details; but when I have finished
you will be in a position to judge for yourself whether or not I was mad
in coming here.
"Have you ever read Walker's book, _Undiscovered Treasure_? It doesn't
matter, except that you have missed a very entertaining volume. It is a
pity that old work is out of print. Nothing in it but bare facts about
all sorts of treasure supposed to have been buried here and there about
the world. You might think it would be dry, but I found it better
company than any romance I've ever read. However, that has nothing to
do with this story, except in an indirect way. I first read the book as
a boy and it started me on my travels.
"To me the facts about this Pinaki treasure are as interesting as any of
Walker's. He, of course, knew nothing about it, for it had not been
stolen when his book was published. Four men had a hand in the
business: a Spaniard named Alvarez; an Irishman named Killorain; and two
others of uncertain nationality, Luke Barrett, whom I spoke of a moment
ago, and Archer Brown. They were a thieving, murdering lot by all
accounts--adventurers of the worst sort; and in hope of plunder, I
suppose, had joined the Peruvian army during the war with Chile in
eighteen fifty-nine to sixty. Their hopes were realized beyond all
expectations. They got wind of some gold buried under the floor of a
church, and the strange thing was that the gold was there and they found
it. It was in thirty-kilo ingots, contained in seven chests, the whole
lot worth in the neighborhood of three and a half million pounds. How
they managed to get away with it I don't know; but I have investigated
the business pretty thoroughly and I have every reason to believe that
they did. They buried it again in the vicinity of Pisco, and then set
out in search of a vessel. Alvarez was the only one of the four who had
any education. They had all followed the sea at one time or another,
but he alone knew how to navigate. The others could hardly write their
own names. At Panama they signed on as members of the crew of a small
schooner, and as soon as they had put to sea knocked the captain and the
two other sailors in the head and chucked them overboard. They returned
to Pisco, loaded the gold, and started for Paumotus.
"This was in the autumn of eighteen fifty-nine. In the December
following they landed at Pinaki, where they buried the treasure. The
island was uninhabited then as now, and they crossed to Nukatavake to
learn the name of it. The natives were shy, but they persuaded one man
to approach, and when they had the information they wanted, shot him and
rowed out to their boat. If you should go to Nukatavake you will find
two old men there who still remember the incident.
"Then they went to Australia, scuttled their vessel not far from
Cooktown, and went ashore with a story of shipwreck. They had some of
the gold with them--not much in proportion to the amount of the
treasure, but enough to keep four ordinary men in comfort for the rest
of their lives. It soon went, and the four were next heard of at the
Palmer gold fields. Alvarez and Barrett were both supposed to have been
killed there in a fight with some blacks. Brown and Killorain had not
mended their ways to any extent, and both were finally jerked up for
manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. Brown died
in prison, but Killorain served out his term, and finally died in Sydney
hospital in nineteen twelve.
"Most of these facts--if they are facts--I had from Killorain himself
the night before he died. I met him in a curious way; or, better, the
meeting came as the result of a curious combination of circumstances.
You may have noticed the scar on my side?"
I had noticed it, a broad gash puckered at the edges where the flesh had
healed, tapering to a point in the middle of his back.
"It was not much of a wound," he went on, "but it gave me a deal of
trouble at the time. I got it in New Guinea in nineteen eleven, when I
was prospecting for gold in the back country. I was a long way from a
settlement, and one day a nigger took it into his head to stick me with
a spear. I suppose he wanted my gun and ammunition, for I had little
else excepting my placer outfit. I let him have one bullet from my Colt
just as he was about to dive into the bush, and for all I know he may be
lying there to this day. I have that little frizzly headed native to
thank for my knowledge of the Pinaki treasure. Sometimes I am sorry
that I killed him; but at other times I feel that shooting was
altogether too easy a death for the man really responsible for bringing
me here. I was in a bad way from the wound. Infection set in, and I
had to nurse myself somehow and get down to a place where I could have
medical attention. I managed it, but the ten days' journey was a
nightmare. I was nothing but skin and bone when I left the hospital,
and New Guinea not being a likely place for a convalescent, the doctor
recommended me to go to Australia.
"I had a small bag of dust, the result of a year and a half of
heart-breaking work in the mountains. Most of it went for the hospital
bill, and when I reached Sydney I had very little left. I was compelled
to put up at the cheapest kind of a boarding house, although the woman
who kept it was quite a decent sort. Her house was in a poor quarter of
the town and her patrons mostly longshoremen and teamsters. It was a
wretched life for her, but she had two children to support and was
making the best of a bad job. I admired her pluck and did what I could
in a small way to help her out.
"One evening I was waiting for supper in the kitchen when some one
rapped. Before I could go to the door, it opened, and an old man came
stumbling in, asking for something to eat. I thought he was drunk and
was about to hustle him back the way he came when I noticed that he was
wet through--it was a cold, rainy night--and really suffering from
exposure and lack of food. I made him remove his coat--he had nothing
on under it--but not without a great deal of trouble, and he insisted on
drying it across his knees. He was a little wizened ape of an Irishman,
about five feet three or four in height, with deep-set blue eyes, bushy
eyebrows, a heavy, discolored mustache, and a thick shock of white
hair--altogether the most frightful-looking little dwarf that ever
escaped out of a picture book. He was tatooed all over the arms and
chest--Hands Across the Sea, the Union Jack, a naked woman--several
other designs common in waterfront tatooing parlors.
"His body was as shriveled as a withered apple, but his little bloodshot
eyes blazed like bits of live coal. Except for the fire in them, he
might have been a hundred years old and, as a matter of fact, he wasn't
a great way from it. Eighty-seven, he told me, and that is about all he
did tell me. He gorged some food and was all for getting away at once.
But it had set in to rain very hard and I persuaded him to wait until
the worst of it was over. He was very suspicious at first. I believe
he expected me to call a policeman. Later he thawed a little, and became
even talkative in a surly way when I told him, with the landlady's
consent, that he might stay the night if he had no place else to go.
Wouldn't hear of it, though. He said he had a job as night watchman at
Rush-cutters' Bay. That might or might not have been true. At any
rate, I went with him to the car line--the boarding house was a good
mile from Rush-cutters' Bay--and gave him a couple of shillings, as a
loan, I said. He could return it sometime. Just before I left him he
asked for my name and address, mumbling something about doing me a bit
of good one of these days. He was insistent, so I gave it to him, but
not at all willingly. He had frightened Mrs. Sharpe, the landlady, just
by the way he looked at her, and I didn't want him coming back.
"He didn't come back. That was in May, nineteen twelve, and I heard
nothing more of him until September. I was still at the boarding house,
getting slowly better, but not yet good for anything. I kept out of
doors as much as possible, took long walks in the country and along the
waterfront looking at ships. When I came in one evening Mrs. Sharpe told
me that an attendant from the Sydney hospital had called twice during
the day. An old man named Killorain, a patient at the hospital, wanted
to see me. The name meant nothing to me and I couldn't imagine who the
man could be. The attendant called again later in the evening.
Killorain was about to die, he said, and wouldn't give them any peace
until I was brought to see him.
"It was getting on toward midnight when we reached the hospital. The
old man was in one of the public wards. I recognized him at once,
although he had shriveled away to nothing at all. It was impossible to
forget his eyes, once you had seen them. He was dying--no doubt of it,
but I could see that he wasn't going to die until he was ready.
"'Sit down close here,' he said. 'I'm glad you came. You did me a good
turn once and I haven't forgot it. Few good turns I've had in my life.
Not so many but what I can remember the lot.' The night nurse had
approached quietly and was standing on the other side of the bed. All
at once he saw her. 'Hey, you!' he said. 'Grease off out of this!
Stand over there on the other side of the room where I can watch you!'
When she had gone he rose from his pillow and looked cautiously around
the room. The beds on either side of him were empty. There was a
patient in the one across the aisle, but he was sleeping. Killorain
watched him for a moment to make sure of this. Then he motioned me with
his finger to come still closer. 'Listen!' he said. 'I've cut more
throats in my time than you might think.' Sounds a bit stagey, doesn't
it? But these were his exact words. Nothing remarkable about them, of
course. Throat-cutting is still a fairly thriving business. I waited
for him to go on. He again looked up and down the room, and then asked
me to hand him the coat which was lying across the foot of the bed. It
was the same coat he had been wearing in May, when he came to the
boarding house.
"'When they brought me here,' he said, 'they took my clothes, and I've
had some trouble getting this back.' The attendant had told me as much.
The old man had raised the very devil of a row until it was found. He
asked me to rip open the lining of the right sleeve and to give him the
paper I would find there. It was a soiled, greasy sheet of foolscap,
pasted on a piece of cloth. 'Once,' he went on, 'you gave me two
shillings for car fare to Rush-cutters' Bay. It probably wasn't any
hardship on you, but never mind about that. You said I could pay it back
if I'd a mind to. Well, I'm going to pay it back with a bit of
interest. I'm going to give you this paper, and it's as good as three
million pound notes of the Bank of England.'
"I thought, of course, that he was completely off his chump, and the
fear that I would think so was uppermost in his mind. He kept repeating
that he was old and worn out, but that his mind was clear. 'Don't you
think I'm balmy,' he said. 'I know what I'm talking about as well as I
know I'm going to die before morning.' He gave me a circumstantial
account of the whole affair. I have outlined it briefly. There were
many other interesting facts, but it is not worth while to speak of them
here. As he talked, the conviction grew upon me that he was perfectly
sane and was telling the truth. He went over the chart with me. It had
been made by Alvarez, the scholar of the party, he said. There had been
a good deal of quarreling and fighting later for the possession of it.
"Before I left him he made me promise that I would go to Pinaki. He
wouldn't rest easy in his grave, he said, unless he knew that I was
looking for the treasure. 'It's there, and it will always be there if
you're bloody fool enough to think I'm queer. It ain't likely I'd lie
to you on my deathbed.' Rest easy in his grave! There was an odd
glimpse into his mind. He wasn't worrying about his crimes, and there
were enough of them, according to his own confession. It was the
thought of the gold lying forever forgotten which worried him. He could
rest quietly if he knew before he died that some one else was fighting
and throat-cutting over it. I asked him why he hadn't gone back for it
himself. He told me that of the fifty-three years since it had been
buried he had spent forty in prison and the rest of the time he was
trying to earn or steal the money to buy a schooner. I told him that I
would come back to see him the following day. 'You needn't bother,' he
said. 'I'm finished.' And it was true. He died three hours later.
"I tried to forget the incident, but it was one of those things which
refuse to be forgotten. It was always in the back of my head. I
decided to check up Killorain's story where I could. I made inquiries
in Peru, and found that the gold had actually been stolen. The dates
and circumstances coincided with his account. A friend in the customs at
Cooktown confirmed for me the story of four shipwrecked sailors who
landed in February, eighteen sixty, from a ship called the _Bosun Bird_.
I had a small piece of property on the outskirts of Cooktown which I had
bought years ago. With the money realized from the sale of it I took
passage for Tahiti on my way to Pinaki.
"That voyage was the longest one I have ever made. By that time the
thought of those seven chests of gold, all in thirty-kilo ingots, was
with me twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four. Yes, even at night.
I slept very little, and when I did it was to dream of hunting for the
treasure; of finding it. I became suspicious of a villainous-looking
old man who was traveling third class. I thought he might be Brown or
Luke Barrett. Perhaps they were not dead, after all. At Papeete I told
no one of my purpose there, with the exception of one governmental
official. If the treasure should be found the French government would
have a claim to certain percentage on uncoined gold, and I meant to be
aboveboard in my dealings with it. This official was sworn to secrecy,
but the business leaked out eventually and created a great deal of
excitement. I was immensely annoyed, of course, for I had guarded the
secret as well as old Killorain ever had. However, I had in my pocket
all the necessary papers, drawn up accurately, witnessed, signed, and
sealed. I went on with my preparations, and finally, in February,
nineteen thirteen, I was put ashore from a small cutter, not four
hundred yards from where we are sitting.
"I started the search before the cutter was two miles on the return
voyage. For two months I slept in the open--had no time to build a
house--and ate tinned food which I had brought with me. Killorain's
chart was of but little use. It made reference to trees which had long
since rotted away or had been cut down by the natives of Nukatavake.
The marks which I found corresponded precisely with those on the chart,
but several of the most important ones were missing."
The treasure hunter rose. "Well," he said, "there's the end of the
story. You know the rest of it."
"But I don't know the rest at all!" I said. "You have left out the most
interesting part. Tell me something of your life here."
"You have seen three days of it. It has gone on for seven years in the
same way."
"You were diving just now in the lagoon. Do you think the gold may have
been buried there or that the land has fallen away?"
"My dear fellow, I'll not weary you with an account of what I think.
It's rather warm here. Shall we go back to the house?"
I was hoping for a week of calm, and when we went to bed that evening
there was reason to believe we might have it. A few hours later,
however, I was awakened by the Englishman. "There's going to be a bit
of a blow presently," he said. "Your skipper has just sent for you. He
wants to get away at once."
The stars had been blotted out. The wind was soughing in the palms, and
the waves slapping briskly on the lagoon beach. Our farewell was a
brief one.
"When shall you come to Tahiti?" I asked.
"Not until I have found what I'm looking for."
"Well," I said, "I hope that will be soon."
But if he holds fast to his resolve my belief is that it will be never.
*Conclusion*
[Illustration: Woodcut]
*CHAPTER XVIII*
*Aboard the *_*Potii Ravarava*_
I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti, confident that sooner or later
he would keep a vague rendezvous set months before. I knew that by this
time he must have penetrated far into the sea of atolls, traveling in
the leisurely manner of these latitudes, transferring from one schooner
to the next and stopping over--for weeks at a time, perhaps--in the
tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to love. Once or
twice--when a dingy Paumotu schooner, deep laden with copra and crowded
with pearl divers eager for a whirl of gayety in the island capital,
crept into the pass--I had word of him, but there was no hint of return.
It was a month of calms: long days when the lagoon, unruffled by the
faintest cat's-paw, shimmered in the blinding sunlight, while the sea
outside seemed to slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef.
Once, at midday, a three-masted schooner with all sails furled and
Diesel engines going, came in to waken the town with the hoarse clamor
of her exhaust. An hour later I met her skipper on the street.
"Your friend Hall is homeward bound," he told me. "I spoke the _Potii
Ravarava_, a bit of a thirty-ton native schooner, off Nukatavake, and he
was aboard of her--she ought to be in some time this week."
The days passed in the rapid and dreamy fashion peculiar to the South
Seas. From time to time I thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner
drifting about becalmed among the coral islands, or perhaps only a score
of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the sighted land. The _Potii
Ravarava_ was a full week overdue when the calm weather came to an end.
The heat was intense that afternoon, and toward sunset towering masses
of cloud began to pile up along the horizon to the north. The sky grew
black; there was a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off
rumble of thunder. When I strolled out along the waterfront the people
were gathering in anxious groups before their houses; I heard snatches
of talk: "Have you noticed the glass? Things have an ugly look....
Hope it doesn't mean another cyclone.... The town will catch it if the
sea begins to rise."
I had heard of the hurricane of 1906, when the sea rose and reached
clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papeete to the hills.
On Motu Uta, an islet in the bay, a white man was living with his
Paumotuan wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef
without a pause, sweeping the islet from end to end, the watchers ashore
gave the pair up for lost. But the woman was a Low-Islander, and just
before dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken refuge was
swept away, she swam six hundred yards to shore and landed through a
surf a sea otter would have hesitated to attempt. Next day they found
the drowned and battered body of her husband drifting with dead pigs and
horses and a litter of wreckage from the lower portions of the town.
Possibly Tahiti was in for another hurricane. When I glanced at my
barometer after dinner, it was falling with ominous rapidity, and at
bedtime the glass stood lower than I had seen it in the South Seas. In
the small hours of the morning a servant came to waken me. There was a
new sound in the air--the uproar of surf breaking on the inner shore of
the lagoon.
"The sea is rising," said Tara; "the waves are breaking under the
_purau_ trees, and if you do not come quickly to help me our canoe will
be washed away."
The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though scarcely a breath of
air stirred, the level of the lagoon was four feet above its normal
limit, and the sheltered water, usually so calm, was agitated by a heavy
swell. Then the rain came--drumming a thunderous monotone on my tin
roof--and after the rain the wind. At dawn, though a seventy-mile gale
was blowing out of the northeast, it was obvious that ali danger of a
hurricane was past. At midday the glass began to rise and before dark
the wind was falling away perceptibly.
More than once during the night I had thought of Hall out somewhere on
the wild and lonely sea to the east. The _Potii Ravarava_ was reputed
an able little boat--with proper offing she would probably come through
worse than this. But she had no engine, and if she had been caught in
the Paumotu--the Dangerous Archipelago, where unknown currents and a
maze of reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of weather--there was
cause for anxiety.
The storm blew itself out in two days' time, and on the evening of the
third day I was standing on the water front with a group of traders and
schooner captains. They were speaking of the _Potii Ravarava_, by this
time the object of mild misgivings, when one of the skippers gave a
sudden shout.
"There she is now!" he announced and, looking up, I saw a deeply laden
little schooner, with patched grayish sails, rounding the point of
Fareute. Presently she turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a
boat ashore--a few moments later I was welcoming Hall--very thin,
raggedly dressed, and brown as a Paumotuan. His eyes were smiling, but
they had in them a look unmistakable when once seen--the expression of a
hunger greater than most of us have known.
"Hello!" he said. "Come along to the hotel--it must be dinner time. By
Jove! I feel as though I could eat a raw shark!"
When he had eaten two dinners complete--from soup to black coffee, and
beginning with soup again--he lit a cigarette and told me the story of
his return from the Low Islands.
"It was all right," he began, "until we left Hao. The palm tops were
still in sight on the horizon when the breeze died away, and we drifted
for seven whole days in a broiling, glassy calm. It was a curious
experience, but one I would not care to repeat.
"You've seen the schooner--she's not much bigger than a sea-going canoe.
There were four of us aboard--Miti the skipper, a Paumotuan and a seaman
by instinct, though he knows nothing of latitude of longitude; two
sailors, one of whom has a horrible case of elephantiasis; and myself.
We had a tremendous load of copra for so small a boat; the hold was
crammed with it and the cabin stuffed to the ceiling. Opposite the
companionway they had left out a few bags at the top, giving a space two
feet high and just wide enough for two men to sleep side by side in case
of rain or bad weather. Our stove was merely a box of sand in which a
fire could be lighted, set in a little box of a galley tacked to the
forward deck. If we had had anything to cook, the galley might have
been useful; but Miti had given away nearly all of the ship's provisions
to his relatives on Hao. They gave him a feast while some copra was
being loaded, and when the job was finished he gave a feast in return.
The two sailors looked sour while they watched the people opening their
biscuit and salmon and bully-beef, but, after all, the prevailing winds
are fair, and normally the passage to Tahiti wouldn't take more than ten
days. Miti overdid the giving-away business, however. When we took
stock of our _kaikai_ on the first day of the calm I found he had saved
only half a tin of biscuit and a few cans of salmon. In addition to
this, we had a parting gift of a sack of drinking nuts and a couple of
dozen ripe nuts some one was sending to Tahiti for seed. I had grown
fed up on the sort of water these schooners carry--stale, and full of
wriggling young mosquitoes--and by great good fortune I had a
three-gallon demi-john, sent by Tino, of the _Winship_, which I filled
with fresh rain water at Hao.
"My demijohn lasted precisely a day and a half. All hands drank out of
it, but I did not complain of their lavishness--there was supposed to be
a barrel of water somewhere below. Those were thirsty days. We rigged
up an awning with part of an old mainsail; I spent most of my time lying
in the hot shade, reading the one book I had with me--Froissart's
_Chronicles of England, France, and Spain_. The days seemed
interminable.... The starlight paled; the sun rose to glare down hour
after hour on the face of a motionless and empty sea, and set at last on
a horizon void of clouds. Sometimes I dozed; sometimes I watched the
reflections of the bowsprit. It was painted gray, with a bright-red
tip--and, seen in the faintly heaving water, it looked like a long, gray
snake spitting fire as it writhed in graceful undulations. The sufferer
from elephantiasis turned out to be an extraordinary man; it was not
worth while to keep watches during the calm, and, as there was no work
of any importance, he retired to the stifling cubby-hole among the copra
sacks and slept--slept from dawn to darkness and from dark to dawn
again. Now and then, at long intervals, he appeared on deck; once I
went aft for a look at him, lying naked except for a _pareu_--mouth open
and swollen limbs sprawled on the uneven surface of the copra. Miti and
Teriaa showed a different side of native character. The schooner
belonged to the captain, and keeping her trim gave him the same delight
a man feels in buying pretty clothes for his mistress. The young sailor
was Miti's nephew, and the pair of them worked tirelessly in the sun,
scraping her rail and topsides in preparation for a fresh coat of paint.
It was strange, when I was deep in Froissart's sieges and battles and
stories of court life, to glance up from my book and see the vacant rim
of the horizon, the silhouette of the foremast against a hot blue sky,
and the two Kanakas endlessly at work--scrape, scrape, scrape; an
exchange of low-toned remarks; a chuckle as they heard the gentle snores
of the sleeping man below.
"Nearly every day our hopes were raised by deceitful cat's-paws,
heralded by far-off streaks of blue. Some died before they reached us;
others, after a preliminary rustle and flutter, filled our sails and set
the schooner to moving gently on her course ... only to die away and
leave the sea glassy as before.
"On the second day the sharks began to gather in their uncanny fashion,
as they always do about a vessel becalmed or in distress. I spent hours
watching them--ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting with a grim
and hopeful patience for some happening which would provide them with a
meal. They circled about the schooner in deliberate zigzags, or lay
motionless in the shadow of her side, attended always by their odd
little striped pilot fish. I learned to recognize one ponderous old
gray shark; he had a brace of pilot fish, one swimming on each side of
his head--and he wasn't afraid of us in the least. Sometimes he lay for
an hour within a yard of the vessel's side; I could see the texture of
his rough skin and the almost imperceptible motion of fins and tail. I
can understand now the hatred sharks inspire in men who follow the
sea--it wasn't long before I decided to try to kill the big, insolent
brute. We hadn't as much as a hook and line on board, but finally, with
a file and the point of a rusty boat hook, I improvised a makeshift sort
of spear. Armed with this, I waited by the rail until my victim came in
range, and then lunged down with all my strength. The spear glanced off
his tough hide; he swam away in a leisurely manner, turned, and a moment
later was again beneath me. This time I struck him fair on the back,
but it was like trying to kill an elephant with a penknife. I think the
point of my boat hook punctured him, but he only circled off again and
returned to give me another chance. In the end I gave up and left him
in possession of the field.
"The nights, when the air had cooled and the stars were blazing
overhead, were so beautiful that one hated to fall asleep. Reflection
made sky and sea alike--dark backgrounds for the myriad lights of the
constellations. Lying on deck while the others slept, I used to regret
that I had not learned something of astronomy--the average native sailor
knows more about the stars than I. Orion I knew; the Pleiades, which
the natives, with a rather pretty fancy, call Matariki, the Little Eyes;
and the Scorpion, believed in heathen times to be the great fish hook of
Maui, flung into the sky by the god, when he had finished pulling up
islands from the bottom of the Pacific. Each night I watched the rising
of the Southern Cross, and low down in the south I saw the Magellanic
clouds, streamers of star dust, like vapor impalpable and remote. In
spite of my companions, sleeping quietly on deck, those nights gave me a
sense of overwhelming loneliness: the languid air; the solitary ship,
immobile on the face of a lifeless sea; the immense expanse of the
universe, ablaze with the light of distant suns....
"When our water gave out I began to prefer the nights to the days. My
demijohn, as I told you, lasted only a day and a half. After that we
used the drinking nuts, and not until the last of them was gone did
anyone think of investigating the water cask. There was consternation
when we discovered that it contained only three or four inches of rusty
water--either it leaked or the skipper was remarkably careless. Hoping
all the time for a breeze or a squall of rain, we began on the half sack
of ripe nuts--thin, sharp stuff for drinking, but the lot of them went
in a day. Then we went on rations, dealt out from the barrel with a soup
spoon. Finally the barrel was dry, and we went two days with nothing of
any kind to drink. It was no joke--if you've ever had a real thirst,
you'll know what I mean. The natives stood it wonderfully well; Miti
did not once complain, though he remarked to me that when he got ashore
he was planning to "drink too much coconut"! The victim of _feefee_
continued his slumberous routine--I wondered if he were dreaming of
rustling palms and shaded, gurgling rivulets. It was my first
experience of thirst; odd what an utter animal one becomes at such a
time. Waking and sleeping, my head was filled with dreams of water,
brooks, rivers, lakes of cool, fresh water, in which to bury one's face
and drink. I dreamed of locks and highland burns in Scotland; of the
gorge of Fautaua on Tahiti, where only a few months before I had stood
in the mist, listening to the roar of the Cataract.
"Well, it wasn't much fun--another day or two might have been
unendurable. We had one comfort, at any rate--if you're thirsty enough,
you don't worry about eating. By the time we had finished the salmon
and biscuit we had ceased to bother about food. On the last night of
the calm none of us slept, unless it was the sailor in his den among the
copra sacks. At dawn Miti touched my shoulder and pointed to the south,
where the paling stars were obscured by banks of cloud. An hour later
the rain water was streaming out of the scuppers and spouting off one
end of our awning into the barrel, hastily recoopered in case of leaks.
When the squall passed and the sun shone down on a dark-blue leaping sea
we were running before a fine breeze from the southeast.
"Now that our thirst was satisfied and we had plenty of water in reserve
we discovered suddenly that we were starving. Miti prowled about below
and came on deck with a package of rice, stowed away during some
previous voyage. It was a valuable find, for we had nothing else to
eat. There was copra, of course, which the natives will eat in a pinch,
but the rancid smell of the stuff was too much for me. The wind held,
and finally a day came when the skipper announced that we ought to raise
Tahiti soon. About midday his nephew, who was perched in the shrouds,
sang out that he had sighted land. I had a look and saw on the horizon
a flat blur, like the palm tops of a distant atoll. As we drew near the
land rose higher and higher out of the sea--it was Makatea, and we were
more than a hundred miles north of our course. No meal I have ever eaten
tasted so good as the dinner Miti's relatives gave us that night!
"We got away next morning, with a liberal stock of provisions and an
additional passenger for Tahiti--a philosophic pig, who traveled lashed
under one of the seats of the ship's boat. For three hours we ran
before a fresh northwesterly breeze, but about nine o'clock the wind
dropped and soon the sails were hanging limp in a dead calm. I began to
suspect that the man with the swollen legs was a Jonah of the first
order. This time, however, the calm was soon over; heavy greenish-black
clouds were drifting down on us from the north; the sunlight gave place
to an evil violet gloom. Miti and his two men sprang into a sudden
activity; they battened down the forward hatch, put extra lashings on
the boat, double-reefed the foresail, and got in everything else. Then,
in the breathless calm, a downpour of rain began to lash the sea with a
strange, murmuring sound. I thought of an ominous old verse:
"If the wind before the rain,
Sheet your topsails home again;
If the rain before the wind,
Then your topsail halyards mind.
"It was a disagreeable moment. Even the pig felt it, for when the
sailors moved him to a place in the bow of the dory he refrained from
the usual shrill protest. One detail sticks in my memory--when the
skipper had taken his place at the wheel he gave a sudden order; the man
with the swollen legs shuffled hastily to where the boat was lashed down
and pulled out the plug from its bottom. Then came the wind.
"It swept down on us from the north-northeast, from the quarter in which
hurricanes begin--and the first furious gust was a mild sample of what
was to come. When Miti got her laid to, heading at a slight angle into
the seas, I realized the splendid qualities of the little _Potii
Ravarava_. No small vessel could have kept her decks dry in the sea
that made up within an hour. The captain never left the wheel, and I
doubt if there's a finer helmsman in the South Seas, but before noon the
galley--with our entire supply of food was swept clean overboard, and
time after time the lashed-down boat was filled. The pig had worked
himself free except for one hind leg, tied to a bottom board with a
rough strip of hibiscus bark, and as the water drained out slowly
through the unplugged hole astern the agitated surface would be broken
by his snout, emitting sputtering screams. He lived through it, by the
way.
"All of us, I believe, thought that we were in for a hurricane. Every
hour the violence of the wind increased; it was a gale from the
north-northeast--the wind called by the ancient Polynesians the Terrible
Maoake. It seemed to rush at us in paroxysms of fury, tearing off the
entire crests of waves and hurling solid water about as though it were
spray. The forward hatch leaked badly; when I think of that storm my
memory is filled with a nightmare of endless pumping.
"A day and a night passed, and dawn found us riding a mountainous sea,
but the wind was abating and our decks were dry. The victim of
elephantiasis had been taking spells with me at the pump. He is a man,
that fellow, in spite of his loathsome infirmity. The pump began to
suck up bubbles and froth. Miti's eyes are sharp.
"'Enough pumping,' he shouted. 'Go and sleep, you two!'
"We obeyed the order with alacrity. Sleeping on deck was out of the
question; without an instant of hesitation I crawled in among the copra
sacks beside my repulsive companion. When I awoke it was evening and we
were running, with a heavy following wind. Miti was still at the helm;
red eyed from want of sleep, but whirling the spokes dexterously as each
big sea passed beneath us and gazing ahead for the first glimpse of
Tahiti. The clouds broke just before dark, and we had a glimpse of the
high ridges of Taiarapu, dead ahead. We got sail on her at that, and
stood off to the northwest, past the Bay of Taravao and the sunken reefs
of Hitiaa. Toward morning we raised Point Venus Light, but the wind
failed in the lee of the island, and it took us all day to reach Papeete
harbor."
Hall finished his story in the dark. The last of the diners had gone
long since, and, save for ourselves, the broad veranda was empty.
"What are your plans?" I asked. "Our year in the South Seas is up.
Where are you going now?"
"I have no plans," he said, "except that I doubt if I shall ever go
north again. I may be wrong, but I believe I've had enough of
civilization to last me the rest of my life. We are happy here. Why
should we leave the islands?"