him; then the consciousness of all that he had gone through and was
going through smote him, and he was resentful. By what right did this
ragged beachcomber, in dungaree trousers and a cotton shirt, suggest
such a thing as peace and content to him and his overwrought, exhausted
soul? The captain did not reason this; it was the unconscious process of
emotion that caused his resentment.
“Fifteen days,” he answered shortly. “Who are you?”
“My name is McCoy,” came the answer in tones that breathed tenderness
and compassion.
“I mean, are you the pilot?”
McCoy passed the benediction of his gaze over the tall, heavy-shouldered
man with the haggard, unshaven face who had joined the captain.
“I am as much a pilot as anybody,” was McCoy's answer. “We are all
pilots here, Captain, and I know every inch of these waters.”
But the captain was impatient.
“What I want is some of the authorities. I want to talk with them, and
blame quick.”
“Then I'll do just as well.”
Again that insidious suggestion of peace, and his ship a raging
furnace beneath his feet! The captain's eyebrows lifted impatiently and
nervously, and his fist clenched as if he were about to strike a blow
with it.
“Who in hell are you?” he demanded.
“I am the chief magistrate,” was the reply in a voice that was still the
softest and gentlest imaginable.
The tall, heavy-shouldered man broke out in a harsh laugh that was
partly amusement, but mostly hysterical. Both he and the captain
regarded McCoy with incredulity and amazement. That this barefooted
beachcomber should possess such high-sounding dignity was inconceivable.
His cotton shirt, unbuttoned, exposed a grizzled chest and the fact that
there was no undershirt beneath.
A worn straw hat failed to hide the ragged gray hair. Halfway down his
chest descended an untrimmed patriarchal beard. In any slop shop, two
shillings would have outfitted him complete as he stood before them.
“Any relation to the McCoy of the Bounty?” the captain asked.
“He was my great-grandfather.”
“Oh,” the captain said, then bethought himself. “My name is Davenport,
and this is my first mate, Mr. Konig.”
They shook hands.
“And now to business.” The captain spoke quickly, the urgency of a great
haste pressing his speech. “We've been on fire for over two weeks.
She's ready to break all hell loose any moment. That's why I held for
Pitcairn. I want to beach her, or scuttle her, and save the hull.”
“Then you made a mistake, Captain,” said McCoy. “You should have slacked
away for Mangareva. There's a beautiful beach there, in a lagoon where
the water is like a mill pond.”
“But we're here, ain't we?” the first mate demanded. “That's the point.
We're here, and we've got to do something.”
McCoy shook his head kindly.
“You can do nothing here. There is no beach. There isn't even
anchorage.”
“Gammon!” said the mate. “Gammon!” he repeated loudly, as the captain
signaled him to be more soft spoken. “You can't tell me that sort of
stuff. Where d'ye keep your own boats, hey--your schooner, or cutter, or
whatever you have? Hey? Answer me that.”
McCoy smiled as gently as he spoke. His smile was a caress, an embrace
that surrounded the tired mate and sought to draw him into the quietude
and rest of McCoy's tranquil soul.
“We have no schooner or cutter,” he replied. “And we carry our canoes to
the top of the cliff.”
“You've got to show me,” snorted the mate. “How d'ye get around to the
other islands, heh? Tell me that.”
“We don't get around. As governor of Pitcairn, I sometimes go. When
I was younger, I was away a great deal--sometimes on the trading
schooners, but mostly on the missionary brig. But she's gone now, and we
depend on passing vessels. Sometimes we have had as high as six calls in
one year. At other times, a year, and even longer, has gone by without
one passing ship. Yours is the first in seven months.”
“And you mean to tell me--” the mate began.
But Captain Davenport interfered.
“Enough of this. We're losing time. What is to be done, Mr. McCoy?”
The old man turned his brown eyes, sweet as a woman's, shoreward, and
both captain and mate followed his gaze around from the lonely rock of
Pitcairn to the crew clustering forward and waiting anxiously for the
announcement of a decision. McCoy did not hurry. He thought smoothly and
slowly, step by step, with the certitude of a mind that was never vexed
or outraged by life.
“The wind is light now,” he said finally. “There is a heavy current
setting to the westward.”
“That's what made us fetch to leeward,” the captain interrupted,
desiring to vindicate his seamanship.
“Yes, that is what fetched you to leeward,” McCoy went on. “Well, you
can't work up against this current today. And if you did, there is no
beach. Your ship will be a total loss.”
He paused, and captain and mate looked despair at each other.
“But I will tell you what you can do. The breeze will freshen tonight
around midnight--see those tails of clouds and that thickness to
windward, beyond the point there? That's where she'll come from, out of
the southeast, hard. It is three hundred miles to Mangareva. Square away
for it. There is a beautiful bed for your ship there.”
The mate shook his head.
“Come in to the cabin, and we'll look at the chart,” said the captain.
McCoy found a stifling, poisonous atmosphere in the pent cabin. Stray
waftures of invisible gases bit his eyes and made them sting. The deck
was hotter, almost unbearably hot to his bare feet. The sweat poured
out of his body. He looked almost with apprehension about him. This
malignant, internal heat was astounding. It was a marvel that the cabin
did not burst into flames. He had a feeling as if of being in a huge
bake oven where the heat might at any moment increase tremendously and
shrivel him up like a blade of grass.
As he lifted one foot and rubbed the hot sole against the leg of his
trousers, the mate laughed in a savage, snarling fashion.
“The anteroom of hell,” he said. “Hell herself is right down there under
your feet.”
“It's hot!” McCoy cried involuntarily, mopping his face with a bandana
handkerchief.
“Here's Mangareva,” the captain said, bending over the table and
pointing to a black speck in the midst of the white blankness of the
chart. “And here, in between, is another island. Why not run for that?”
McCoy did not look at the chart.
“That's Crescent Island,” he answered. “It is uninhabited, and it
is only two or three feet above water. Lagoon, but no entrance. No,
Mangareva is the nearest place for your purpose.”
“Mangareva it is, then,” said Captain Davenport, interrupting the mate's
growling objection. “Call the crew aft, Mr. Konig.”
The sailors obeyed, shuffling wearily along the deck and painfully
endeavoring to make haste. Exhaustion was evident in every movement. The
cook came out of his galley to hear, and the cabin boy hung about near
him.
When Captain Davenport had explained the situation and announced his
intention of running for Mangareva, an uproar broke out. Against a
background of throaty rumbling arose inarticulate cries of rage, with
here and there a distinct curse, or word, or phrase. A shrill Cockney
voice soared and dominated for a moment, crying: “Gawd! After bein' in
ell for fifteen days--an' now e wants us to sail this floatin' ell to
sea again?”
The captain could not control them, but McCoy's gentle presence seemed
to rebuke and calm them, and the muttering and cursing died away, until
the full crew, save here and there an anxious face directed at the
captain, yearned dumbly toward the green clad peaks and beetling coast
of Pitcairn.
Soft as a spring zephyr was the voice of McCoy:
“Captain, I thought I heard some of them say they were starving.”
“Ay,” was the answer, “and so we are. I've had a sea biscuit and a
spoonful of salmon in the last two days. We're on whack. You see, when
we discovered the fire, we battened down immediately to suffocate the
fire. And then we found how little food there was in the pantry. But it
was too late. We didn't dare break out the lazarette. Hungry? I'm just
as hungry as they are.”
He spoke to the men again, and again the throat rumbling and cursing
arose, their faces convulsed and animal-like with rage. The second and
third mates had joined the captain, standing behind him at the break of
the poop. Their faces were set and expressionless; they seemed bored,
more than anything else, by this mutiny of the crew. Captain Davenport
glanced questioningly at his first mate, and that person merely shrugged
his shoulders in token of his helplessness.
“You see,” the captain said to McCoy, “you can't compel sailors to leave
the safe land and go to sea on a burning vessel. She has been their
floating coffin for over two weeks now. They are worked out, and starved
out, and they've got enough of her. We'll beat up for Pitcairn.”
But the wind was light, the Pyrenees' bottom was foul, and she could not
beat up against the strong westerly current. At the end of two hours she
had lost three miles. The sailors worked eagerly, as if by main strength
they could compel the PYRENEES against the adverse elements. But
steadily, port tack and starboard tack, she sagged off to the westward.
The captain paced restlessly up and down, pausing occasionally to survey
the vagrant smoke wisps and to trace them back to the portions of the
deck from which they sprang. The carpenter was engaged constantly in
attempting to locate such places, and, when he succeeded, in calking
them tighter and tighter.
“Well, what do you think?” the captain finally asked McCoy, who was
watching the carpenter with all a child's interest and curiosity in his
eyes.
McCoy looked shoreward, where the land was disappearing in the
thickening haze.
“I think it would be better to square away for Mangareva. With that
breeze that is coming, you'll be there tomorrow evening.”
“But what if the fire breaks out? It is liable to do it any moment.”
“Have your boats ready in the falls. The same breeze will carry your
boats to Mangareva if the ship burns out from under.”
Captain Davenport debated for a moment, and then McCoy heard the
question he had not wanted to hear, but which he knew was surely coming.
“I have no chart of Mangareva. On the general chart it is only a fly
speck. I would not know where to look for the entrance into the lagoon.
Will you come along and pilot her in for me?”
McCoy's serenity was unbroken.
“Yes, Captain,” he said, with the same quiet unconcern with which
he would have accepted an invitation to dinner; “I'll go with you to
Mangareva.”
Again the crew was called aft, and the captain spoke to them from the
break of the poop.
“We've tried to work her up, but you see how we've lost ground. She's
setting off in a two-knot current. This gentleman is the Honorable
McCoy, Chief Magistrate and Governor of Pitcairn Island. He will
come along with us to Mangareva. So you see the situation is not so
dangerous. He would not make such an offer if he thought he was going
to lose his life. Besides, whatever risk there is, if he of his own free
will come on board and take it, we can do no less. What do you say for
Mangareva?”
This time there was no uproar. McCoy's presence, the surety and calm
that seemed to radiate from him, had had its effect. They conferred with
one another in low voices. There was little urging. They were virtually
unanimous, and they shoved the Cockney out as their spokesman. That
worthy was overwhelmed with consciousness of the heroism of himself and
his mates, and with flashing eyes he cried:
“By Gawd! If 'e will, we will!”
The crew mumbled its assent and started forward.
“One moment, Captain,” McCoy said, as the other was turning to give
orders to the mate. “I must go ashore first.”
Mr. Konig was thunderstruck, staring at McCoy as if he were a madman.
“Go ashore!” the captain cried. “What for? It will take you three hours
to get there in your canoe.”
McCoy measured the distance of the land away, and nodded.
“Yes, it is six now. I won't get ashore till nine. The people cannot be
assembled earlier than ten. As the breeze freshens up tonight, you
can begin to work up against it, and pick me up at daylight tomorrow
morning.”
“In the name of reason and common sense,” the captain burst forth, “what
do you want to assemble the people for? Don't you realize that my ship
is burning beneath me?”
McCoy was as placid as a summer sea, and the other's anger produced not
the slightest ripple upon it.
“Yes, Captain,” he cooed in his dove-like voice. “I do realize that your
ship is burning. That is why I am going with you to Mangareva. But I
must get permission to go with you. It is our custom. It is an important
matter when the governor leaves the island. The people's interests
are at stake, and so they have the right to vote their permission or
refusal. But they will give it, I know that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Then if you know they will give it, why bother with getting it? Think
of the delay--a whole night.”
“It is our custom,” was the imperturbable reply. “Also, I am the
governor, and I must make arrangements for the conduct of the island
during my absence.”
“But it is only a twenty-four hour run to Mangareva,” the captain
objected. “Suppose it took you six times that long to return to
windward; that would bring you back by the end of a week.”
McCoy smiled his large, benevolent smile.
“Very few vessels come to Pitcairn, and when they do, they are usually
from San Francisco or from around the Horn. I shall be fortunate if I
get back in six months. I may be away a year, and I may have to go to
San Francisco in order to find a vessel that will bring me back. My
father once left Pitcairn to be gone three months, and two years passed
before he could get back. Then, too, you are short of food. If you have
to take to the boats, and the weather comes up bad, you may be days in
reaching land. I can bring off two canoe loads of food in the morning.
Dried bananas will be best. As the breeze freshens, you beat up against
it. The nearer you are, the bigger loads I can bring off. Goodby.”
He held out his hand. The captain shook it, and was reluctant to let go.
He seemed to cling to it as a drowning sailor clings to a life buoy.
“How do I know you will come back in the morning?” he asked.
“Yes, that's it!” cried the mate. “How do we know but what he's skinning
out to save his own hide?”
McCoy did not speak. He looked at them sweetly and benignantly, and
it seemed to them that they received a message from his tremendous
certitude of soul.
The captain released his hand, and, with a last sweeping glance that
embraced the crew in its benediction, McCoy went over the rail and
descended into his canoe.
The wind freshened, and the Pyrenees, despite the foulness of her
bottom, won half a dozen miles away from the westerly current. At
daylight, with Pitcairn three miles to windward, Captain Davenport made
out two canoes coming off to him. Again McCoy clambered up the side and
dropped over the rail to the hot deck. He was followed by many packages
of dried bananas, each package wrapped in dry leaves.
“Now, Captain,” he said, “swing the yards and drive for dear life. You
see, I am no navigator,” he explained a few minutes later, as he
stood by the captain aft, the latter with gaze wandering from aloft to
overside as he estimated the Pyrenees' speed. “You must fetch her to
Mangareva. When you have picked up the land, then I will pilot her in.
What do you think she is making?”
“Eleven,” Captain Davenport answered, with a final glance at the water
rushing past.
“Eleven. Let me see, if she keeps up that gait, we'll sight Mangareva
between eight and nine o'clock tomorrow morning. I'll have her on the
beach by ten or by eleven at latest. And then your troubles will be all
over.”
It almost seemed to the captain that the blissful moment had already
arrived, such was the persuasive convincingness of McCoy.
Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his
burning ship for over two weeks, and he was beginning to feel that he
had had enough.
A heavier flaw of wind struck the back of his neck and whistled by his
ears. He measured the weight of it, and looked quickly overside.
“The wind is making all the time,” he announced. “The old girl's
doing nearer twelve than eleven right now. If this keeps up, we'll be
shortening down tonight.”
All day the Pyrenees, carrying her load of living fire, tore across the
foaming sea. By nightfall, royals and topgallantsails were in, and she
flew on into the darkness, with great, crested seas roaring after her.
The auspicious wind had had its effect, and fore and aft a visible
brightening was apparent. In the second dog-watch some careless soul
started a song, and by eight bells the whole crew was singing.
Captain Davenport had his blankets brought up and spread on top the
house.
“I've forgotten what sleep is,” he explained to McCoy. “I'm all in. But
give me a call at any time you think necessary.”
At three in the morning he was aroused by a gentle tugging at his arm.
He sat up quickly, bracing himself against the skylight, stupid yet from
his heavy sleep. The wind was thrumming its war song in the rigging, and
a wild sea was buffeting the PYRENEES. Amidships she was wallowing first
one rail under and then the other, flooding the waist more often than
not. McCoy was shouting something he could not hear. He reached out,
clutched the other by the shoulder, and drew him close so that his own
ear was close to the other's lips.
“It's three o'clock,” came McCoy's voice, still retaining its dovelike
quality, but curiously muffled, as if from a long way off. “We've
run two hundred and fifty. Crescent Island is only thirty miles away,
somewhere there dead ahead. There's no lights on it. If we keep running,
we'll pile up, and lose ourselves as well as the ship.”
“What d' ye think--heave to?”
“Yes; heave to till daylight. It will only put us back four hours.”
So the Pyrenees, with her cargo of fire, was hove to, bitting the teeth
of the gale and fighting and smashing the pounding seas. She was a
shell, filled with a conflagration, and on the outside of the shell,
clinging precariously, the little motes of men, by pull and haul, helped
her in the battle.
“It is most unusual, this gale,” McCoy told the captain, in the lee of
the cabin. “By rights there should be no gale at this time of the year.
But everything about the weather has been unusual. There has been a
stoppage of the trades, and now it's howling right out of the trade
quarter.” He waved his hand into the darkness, as if his vision could
dimly penetrate for hundreds of miles. “It is off to the westward. There
is something big making off there somewhere--a hurricane or something.
We're lucky to be so far to the eastward. But this is only a little
blow,” he added. “It can't last. I can tell you that much.”
By daylight the gale had eased down to normal. But daylight revealed
a new danger. It had come on thick. The sea was covered by a fog, or,
rather, by a pearly mist that was fog-like in density, in so far as it
obstructed vision, but that was no more than a film on the sea, for the
sun shot it through and filled it with a glowing radiance.
The deck of the Pyrenees was making more smoke than on the preceding
day, and the cheerfulness of officers and crew had vanished. In the lee
of the galley the cabin boy could be heard whimpering. It was his first
voyage, and the fear of death was at his heart. The captain wandered
about like a lost soul, nervously chewing his mustache, scowling, unable
to make up his mind what to do.
“What do you think?” he asked, pausing by the side of McCoy, who was
making a breakfast off fried bananas and a mug of water.
McCoy finished the last banana, drained the mug, and looked slowly
around. In his eyes was a smile of tenderness as he said:
“Well, Captain, we might as well drive as burn. Your decks are not going
to hold out forever. They are hotter this morning. You haven't a pair of
shoes I can wear? It is getting uncomfortable for my bare feet.”
The Pyrenees shipped two heavy seas as she was swung off and put once
more before it, and the first mate expressed a desire to have all that
water down in the hold, if only it could be introduced without taking
off the hatches. McCoy ducked his head into the binnacle and watched the
course set.
“I'd hold her up some more, Captain,” he said. “She's been making drift
when hove to.”
“I've set it to a point higher already,” was the answer. “Isn't that
enough?”
“I'd make it two points, Captain. This bit of a blow kicked that
westerly current ahead faster than you imagine.”
Captain Davenport compromised on a point and a half, and then went
aloft, accompanied by McCoy and the first mate, to keep a lookout for
land. Sail had been made, so that the Pyrenees was doing ten knots. The
following sea was dying down rapidly. There was no break in the pearly
fog, and by ten o'clock Captain Davenport was growing nervous. All hands
were at their stations, ready, at the first warning of land ahead, to
spring like fiends to the task of bringing the Pyrenees up on the wind.
That land ahead, a surf-washed outer reef, would be perilously close
when it revealed itself in such a fog.
Another hour passed. The three watchers aloft stared intently into the
pearly radiance. “What if we miss Mangareva?” Captain Davenport asked
abruptly.
McCoy, without shifting his gaze, answered softly:
“Why, let her drive, captain. That is all we can do. All the Paumotus
are before us. We can drive for a thousand miles through reefs and
atolls. We are bound to fetch up somewhere.”
“Then drive it is.” Captain Davenport evidenced his intention of
descending to the deck. “We've missed Mangareva. God knows where
the next land is. I wish I'd held her up that other half-point,” he
confessed a moment later. “This cursed current plays the devil with a
navigator.”
“The old navigators called the Paumotus the Dangerous Archipelago,”
McCoy said, when they had regained the poop. “This very current was
partly responsible for that name.”
“I was talking with a sailor chap in Sydney, once,” said Mr. Konig.
“He'd been trading in the Paumotus. He told me insurance was eighteen
per cent. Is that right?”
McCoy smiled and nodded.
“Except that they don't insure,” he explained. “The owners write off
twenty per cent of the cost of their schooners each year.”
“My God!” Captain Davenport groaned. “That makes the life of a schooner
only five years!” He shook his head sadly, murmuring, “Bad waters! Bad
waters!”
Again they went into the cabin to consult the big general chart; but the
poisonous vapors drove them coughing and gasping on deck.
“Here is Moerenhout Island,” Captain Davenport pointed it out on the
chart, which he had spread on the house. “It can't be more than a
hundred miles to leeward.”
“A hundred and ten.” McCoy shook his head doubtfully. “It might be done,
but it is very difficult. I might beach her, and then again I might put
her on the reef. A bad place, a very bad place.”
“We'll take the chance,” was Captain Davenport's decision, as he set
about working out the course.
Sail was shortened early in the afternoon, to avoid running past in
the night; and in the second dog-watch the crew manifested its regained
cheerfulness. Land was so very near, and their troubles would be over in
the morning.
But morning broke clear, with a blazing tropic sun. The southeast trade
had swung around to the eastward, and was driving the PYRENEES through
the water at an eight-knot clip. Captain Davenport worked up his dead
reckoning, allowing generously for drift, and announced Moerenhout
Island to be not more than ten miles off. The Pyrenees sailed the
ten miles; she sailed ten miles more; and the lookouts at the three
mastheads saw naught but the naked, sun-washed sea.
“But the land is there, I tell you,” Captain Davenport shouted to them
from the poop.
McCoy smiled soothingly, but the captain glared about him like a madman,
fetched his sextant, and took a chronometer sight.
“I knew I was right,” he almost shouted, when he had worked up the
observation. “Twenty-one, fifty-five, south; one-thirty-six, two, west.
There you are. We're eight miles to windward yet. What did you make it
out, Mr. Konig?”
The first mate glanced at his own figures, and said in a low voice:
“Twenty-one, fifty-five all right; but my longitude's one-thirty-six,
forty-eight. That puts us considerably to leeward--”
But Captain Davenport ignored his figures with so contemptuous a silence
as to make Mr. Konig grit his teeth and curse savagely under his breath.
“Keep her off,” the captain ordered the man at the wheel. “Three
points--steady there, as she goes!”