from his face. He chewed his mustache, his lips, and his pencil, staring
at the figures as a man might at a ghost. Suddenly, with a fierce,
muscular outburst, he crumpled the scribbled paper in his fist and
crushed it under foot. Mr. Konig grinned vindictively and turned away,
while Captain Davenport leaned against the cabin and for half an
hour spoke no word, contenting himself with gazing to leeward with an
expression of musing hopelessness on his face.
“Mr. McCoy,” he broke silence abruptly. “The chart indicates a group
of islands, but not how many, off there to the north'ard, or
nor'-nor'westward, about forty miles--the Acteon Islands. What about
them?”
“There are four, all low,” McCoy answered. “First to the southeast is
Matuerui--no people, no entrance to the lagoon. Then comes Tenarunga.
There used to be about a dozen people there, but they may be all gone
now. Anyway, there is no entrance for a ship--only a boat entrance,
with a fathom of water. Vehauga and Teua-raro are the other two. No
entrances, no people, very low. There is no bed for the Pyrenees in that
group. She would be a total wreck.”
“Listen to that!” Captain Davenport was frantic. “No people! No
entrances! What in the devil are islands good for?
“Well, then,” he barked suddenly, like an excited terrier, “the chart
gives a whole mess of islands off to the nor'west. What about them? What
one has an entrance where I can lay my ship?”
McCoy calmly considered. He did not refer to the chart. All these
islands, reefs, shoals, lagoons, entrances, and distances were marked
on the chart of his memory. He knew them as the city dweller knows his
buildings, streets, and alleys.
“Papakena and Vanavana are off there to the westward, or
west-nor'westward a hundred miles and a bit more,” he said. “One is
uninhabited, and I heard that the people on the other had gone off to
Cadmus Island. Anyway, neither lagoon has an entrance. Ahunui is another
hundred miles on to the nor'west. No entrance, no people.”
“Well, forty miles beyond them are two islands?” Captain Davenport
queried, raising his head from the chart.
McCoy shook his head.
“Paros and Manuhungi--no entrances, no people. Nengo-Nengo is forty
miles beyond them, in turn, and it has no people and no entrance. But
there is Hao Island. It is just the place. The lagoon is thirty miles
long and five miles wide. There are plenty of people. You can usually
find water. And any ship in the world can go through the entrance.”
He ceased and gazed solicitously at Captain Davenport, who, bending over
the chart with a pair of dividers in hand, had just emitted a low groan.
“Is there any lagoon with an entrance anywhere nearer than Hao Island?”
he asked.
“No, Captain; that is the nearest.”
“Well, it's three hundred and forty miles.” Captain Davenport was
speaking very slowly, with decision. “I won't risk the responsibility of
all these lives. I'll wreck her on the Acteons. And she's a good ship,
too,” he added regretfully, after altering the course, this time making
more allowance than ever for the westerly current.
An hour later the sky was overcast. The southeast trade still held, but
the ocean was a checker board of squalls.
“We'll be there by one o'clock,” Captain Davenport announced
confidently. “By two o'clock at the outside. McCoy, you put her ashore
on the one where the people are.”
The sun did not appear again, nor, at one o'clock, was any land to be
seen. Captain Davenport looked astern at the Pyrenees' canting wake.
“Good Lord!” he cried. “An easterly current? Look at that!”
Mr. Konig was incredulous. McCoy was noncommittal, though he said that
in the Paumotus there was no reason why it should not be an easterly
current. A few minutes later a squall robbed the Pyrenees temporarily of
all her wind, and she was left rolling heavily in the trough.
“Where's that deep lead? Over with it, you there!” Captain Davenport
held the lead line and watched it sag off to the northeast. “There, look
at that! Take hold of it for yourself.”
McCoy and the mate tried it, and felt the line thrumming and vibrating
savagely to the grip of the tidal stream.
“A four-knot current,” said Mr. Konig.
“An easterly current instead of a westerly,” said Captain “Davenport,
glaring accusingly at McCoy, as if to cast the blame for it upon him.
“That is one of the reasons, Captain, for insurance being eighteen per
cent in these waters,” McCoy answered cheerfully. “You can never tell.
The currents are always changing. There was a man who wrote books, I
forget his name, in the yacht Casco. He missed Takaroa by thirty miles
and fetched Tikei, all because of the shifting currents. You are up to
windward now, and you'd better keep off a few points.”
“But how much has this current set me?” the captain demanded irately.
“How am I to know how much to keep off?”
“I don't know, Captain,” McCoy said with great gentleness.
The wind returned, and the PYRENEES, her deck smoking and shimmering in
the bright gray light, ran off dead to leeward. Then she worked back,
port tack and starboard tack, crisscrossing her track, combing the sea
for the Acteon Islands, which the masthead lookouts failed to sight.
Captain Davenport was beside himself. His rage took the form of sullen
silence, and he spent the afternoon in pacing the poop or leaning
against the weather shrouds. At nightfall, without even consulting
McCoy, he squared away and headed into the northwest. Mr. Konig,
surreptitiously consulting chart and binnacle, and McCoy, openly and
innocently consulting the binnacle, knew that they were running for Hao
Island. By midnight the squalls ceased, and the stars came out. Captain
Davenport was cheered by the promise of a clear day.
“I'll get an observation in the morning,” he told McCoy, “though what
my latitude is, is a puzzler. But I'll use the Sumner method, and settle
that. Do you know the Sumner line?”
And thereupon he explained it in detail to McCoy.
The day proved clear, the trade blew steadily out of the east, and the
Pyrenees just as steadily logged her nine knots. Both the captain and
mate worked out the position on a Sumner line, and agreed, and at noon
agreed again, and verified the morning sights by the noon sights.
“Another twenty-four hours and we'll be there,” Captain Davenport
assured McCoy. “It's a miracle the way the old girl's decks hold out.
But they can't last. They can't last. Look at them smoke, more and
more every day. Yet it was a tight deck to begin with, fresh-calked in
Frisco. I was surprised when the fire first broke out and we battened
down. Look at that!”
He broke off to gaze with dropped jaw at a spiral of smoke that coiled
and twisted in the lee of the mizzenmast twenty feet above the deck.
“Now, how did that get there?” he demanded indignantly.
Beneath it there was no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from
the wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that
height. It writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the
captain like some threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked
it away, and the captain's jaw returned to place.
“As I was saying, when we first battened down, I was surprised. It was
a tight deck, yet it leaked smoke like a sieve. And we've calked and
calked ever since. There must be tremendous pressure underneath to drive
so much smoke through.”
That afternoon the sky became overcast again, and squally, drizzly
weather set in. The wind shifted back and forth between southeast and
northeast, and at midnight the Pyrenees was caught aback by a sharp
squall from the southwest, from which point the wind continued to blow
intermittently.
“We won't make Hao until ten or eleven,” Captain Davenport complained
at seven in the morning, when the fleeting promise of the sun had been
erased by hazy cloud masses in the eastern sky. And the next moment he
was plaintively demanding, “And what are the currents doing?”
Lookouts at the mastheads could report no land, and the day passed in
drizzling calms and violent squalls. By nightfall a heavy sea began
to make from the west. The barometer had fallen to 29.50. There was no
wind, and still the ominous sea continued to increase. Soon the
Pyrenees was rolling madly in the huge waves that marched in an unending
procession from out of the darkness of the west. Sail was shortened as
fast as both watches could work, and, when the tired crew had finished,
its grumbling and complaining voices, peculiarly animal-like and
menacing, could be heard in the darkness. Once the starboard watch was
called aft to lash down and make secure, and the men openly advertised
their sullenness and unwillingness. Every slow movement was a protest
and a threat. The atmosphere was moist and sticky like mucilage, and in
the absence of wind all hands seemed to pant and gasp for air. The sweat
stood out on faces and bare arms, and Captain Davenport for one, his
face more gaunt and care-worn than ever, and his eyes troubled and
staring, was oppressed by a feeling of impending calamity.
“It's off to the westward,” McCoy said encouragingly. “At worst, we'll
be only on the edge of it.”
But Captain Davenport refused to be comforted, and by the light of a
lantern read up the chapter in his Epitome that related to the strategy
of shipmasters in cyclonic storms. From somewhere amidships the silence
was broken by a low whimpering from the cabin boy.
“Oh, shut up!” Captain Davenport yelled suddenly and with such force as
to startle every man on board and to frighten the offender into a wild
wail of terror.
“Mr. Konig,” the captain said in a voice that trembled with rage and
nerves, “will you kindly step for'ard and stop that brat's mouth with a
deck mop?”
But it was McCoy who went forward, and in a few minutes had the boy
comforted and asleep.
Shortly before daybreak the first breath of air began to move from out
the southeast, increasing swiftly to a stiff and stiffer breeze. All
hands were on deck waiting for what might be behind it. “We're all
right now, Captain,” said McCoy, standing close to his shoulder. “The
hurricane is to the west'ard, and we are south of it. This breeze is the
in-suck. It won't blow any harder. You can begin to put sail on her.”
“But what's the good? Where shall I sail? This is the second day without
observations, and we should have sighted Hao Island yesterday morning.
Which way does it bear, north, south, east, or what? Tell me that, and
I'll make sail in a jiffy.”
“I am no navigator, Captain,” McCoy said in his mild way.
“I used to think I was one,” was the retort, “before I got into these
Paumotus.”
At midday the cry of “Breakers ahead!” was heard from the lookout. The
Pyrenees was kept off, and sail after sail was loosed and sheeted home.
The Pyrenees was sliding through the water and fighting a current that
threatened to set her down upon the breakers. Officers and men were
working like mad, cook and cabin boy, Captain Davenport himself, and
McCoy all lending a hand. It was a close shave. It was a low shoal, a
bleak and perilous place over which the seas broke unceasingly, where no
man could live, and on which not even sea birds could rest. The PYRENEES
was swept within a hundred yards of it before the wind carried her
clear, and at this moment the panting crew, its work done, burst out
in a torrent of curses upon the head of McCoy--of McCoy who had come on
board, and proposed the run to Mangareva, and lured them all away from
the safety of Pitcairn Island to certain destruction in this baffling
and terrible stretch of sea. But McCoy's tranquil soul was undisturbed.
He smiled at them with simple and gracious benevolence, and, somehow,
the exalted goodness of him seemed to penetrate to their dark and somber
souls, shaming them, and from very shame stilling the curses vibrating
in their throats.
“Bad waters! Bad waters!” Captain Davenport was murmuring as his ship
forged clear; but he broke off abruptly to gaze at the shoal which
should have been dead astern, but which was already on the PYRENEES'
weather-quarter and working up rapidly to windward.
He sat down and buried his face in his hands. And the first mate saw,
and McCoy saw, and the crew saw, what he had seen. South of the shoal
an easterly current had set them down upon it; north of the shoal an
equally swift westerly current had clutched the ship and was sweeping
her away.
“I've heard of these Paumotus before,” the captain groaned, lifting
his blanched face from his hands. “Captain Moyendale told me about them
after losing his ship on them. And I laughed at him behind his back. God
forgive me, I laughed at him. What shoal is that?” he broke off, to ask
McCoy.
“I don't know, Captain.”
“Why don't you know?”
“Because I never saw it before, and because I have never heard of it. I
do know that it is not charted. These waters have never been thoroughly
surveyed.”
“Then you don't know where we are?”
“No more than you do,” McCoy said gently.
At four in the afternoon cocoanut trees were sighted, apparently growing
out of the water. A little later the low land of an atoll was raised
above the sea.
“I know where we are now, Captain.” McCoy lowered the glasses from his
eyes. “That's Resolution Island. We are forty miles beyond Hao Island,
and the wind is in our teeth.”
“Get ready to beach her then. Where's the entrance?”
“There's only a canoe passage. But now that we know where we are, we can
run for Barclay de Tolley. It is only one hundred and twenty miles
from here, due nor'-nor'west. With this breeze we can be there by nine
o'clock tomorrow morning.”
Captain Davenport consulted the chart and debated with himself.
“If we wreck her here,” McCoy added, “we'd have to make the run to
Barclay de Tolley in the boats just the same.”
The captain gave his orders, and once more the Pyrenees swung off for
another run across the inhospitable sea.
And the middle of the next afternoon saw despair and mutiny on her
smoking deck. The current had accelerated, the wind had slackened, and
the Pyrenees had sagged off to the west. The lookout sighted Barclay de
Tolley to the eastward, barely visible from the masthead, and vainly and
for hours the PYRENEES tried to beat up to it. Ever, like a mirage, the
cocoanut trees hovered on the horizon, visible only from the masthead.
From the deck they were hidden by the bulge of the world.
Again Captain Davenport consulted McCoy and the chart. Makemo lay
seventy-five miles to the southwest. Its lagoon was thirty miles long,
and its entrance was excellent. When Captain Davenport gave his orders,
the crew refused duty. They announced that they had had enough of hell
fire under their feet. There was the land. What if the ship could not
make it? They could make it in the boats. Let her burn, then. Their
lives amounted to something to them. They had served faithfully the
ship, now they were going to serve themselves.
They sprang to the boats, brushing the second and third mates out of the
way, and proceeded to swing the boats out and to prepare to lower away.
Captain Davenport and the first mate, revolvers in hand, were advancing
to the break of the poop, when McCoy, who had climbed on top of the
cabin, began to speak.
He spoke to the sailors, and at the first sound of his dovelike,
cooing voice they paused to hear. He extended to them his own ineffable
serenity and peace. His soft voice and simple thoughts flowed out
to them in a magic stream, soothing them against their wills. Long
forgotten things came back to them, and some remembered lullaby songs of
childhood and the content and rest of the mother's arm at the end of the
day. There was no more trouble, no more danger, no more irk, in all
the world. Everything was as it should be, and it was only a matter of
course that they should turn their backs upon the land and put to sea
once more with hell fire hot beneath their feet.
McCoy spoke simply; but it was not what he spoke. It was his personality
that spoke more eloquently than any word he could utter. It was an
alchemy of soul occultly subtile and profoundly deep--a mysterious
emanation of the spirit, seductive, sweetly humble, and terribly
imperious. It was illumination in the dark crypts of their souls, a
compulsion of purity and gentleness vastly greater than that which
resided in the shining, death-spitting revolvers of the officers.
The men wavered reluctantly where they stood, and those who had loosed
the turns made them fast again. Then one, and then another, and then all
of them, began to sidle awkwardly away.
McCoy's face was beaming with childlike pleasure as he descended from
the top of the cabin. There was no trouble. For that matter there had
been no trouble averted. There never had been any trouble, for there was
no place for such in the blissful world in which he lived.
“You hypnotized em,” Mr. Konig grinned at him, speaking in a low voice.
“Those boys are good,” was the answer. “Their hearts are good. They have
had a hard time, and they have worked hard, and they will work hard to
the end.”
Mr. Konig had not time to reply. His voice was ringing out orders, the
sailors were springing to obey, and the PYRENEES was paying slowly off
from the wind until her bow should point in the direction of Makemo.
The wind was very light, and after sundown almost ceased. It was
insufferably warm, and fore and aft men sought vainly to sleep. The deck
was too hot to lie upon, and poisonous vapors, oozing through the seams,
crept like evil spirits over the ship, stealing into the nostrils and
windpipes of the unwary and causing fits of sneezing and coughing.
The stars blinked lazily in the dim vault overhead; and the full moon,
rising in the east, touched with its light the myriads of wisps and
threads and spidery films of smoke that intertwined and writhed and
twisted along the deck, over the rails, and up the masts and shrouds.
“Tell me,” Captain Davenport said, rubbing his smarting eyes, “what
happened with that BOUNTY crowd after they reached Pitcairn? The account
I read said they burnt the Bounty, and that they were not discovered
until many years later. But what happened in the meantime? I've always
been curious to know. They were men with their necks in the rope. There
were some native men, too. And then there were women. That made it look
like trouble right from the jump.”
“There was trouble,” McCoy answered. “They were bad men. They quarreled
about the women right away. One of the mutineers, Williams, lost his
wife. All the women were Tahitian women. His wife fell from the cliffs
when hunting sea birds. Then he took the wife of one of the native men
away from him. All the native men were made very angry by this, and they
killed off nearly all the mutineers. Then the mutineers that escaped
killed off all the native men. The women helped. And the natives killed
each other. Everybody killed everybody. They were terrible men.
“Timiti was killed by two other natives while they were combing his hair
in friendship. The white men had sent them to do it. Then the white
men killed them. The wife of Tullaloo killed him in a cave because she
wanted a white man for husband. They were very wicked. God had hidden
His face from them. At the end of two years all the native men were
murdered, and all the white men except four. They were Young, John
Adams, McCoy, who was my great-grandfather, and Quintal. He was a very
bad man, too. Once, just because his wife did not catch enough fish for
him, he bit off her ear.”
“They were a bad lot!” Mr. Konig exclaimed.
“Yes, they were very bad,” McCoy agreed and went on serenely cooing of
the blood and lust of his iniquitous ancestry. “My great-grandfather
escaped murder in order to die by his own hand. He made a still and
manufactured alcohol from the roots of the ti-plant. Quintal was his
chum, and they got drunk together all the time. At last McCoy got
delirium tremens, tied a rock to his neck, and jumped into the sea.
“Quintal's wife, the one whose ear he bit off, also got killed by
falling from the cliffs. Then Quintal went to Young and demanded his
wife, and went to Adams and demanded his wife. Adams and Young were
afraid of Quintal. They knew he would kill them. So they killed him,
the two of them together, with a hatchet. Then Young died. And that was
about all the trouble they had.”
“I should say so,” Captain Davenport snorted. “There was nobody left to
kill.”
“You see, God had hidden His face,” McCoy said.
By morning no more than a faint air was blowing from the eastward, and,
unable to make appreciable southing by it, Captain Davenport hauled up
full-and-by on the port track. He was afraid of that terrible westerly
current which had cheated him out of so many ports of refuge. All day
the calm continued, and all night, while the sailors, on a short ration
of dried banana, were grumbling. Also, they were growing weak and
complaining of stomach pains caused by the straight banana diet. All day
the current swept the PYRENEES to the westward, while there was no wind
to bear her south. In the middle of the first dogwatch, cocoanut trees
were sighted due south, their tufted heads rising above the water and
marking the low-lying atoll beneath.
“That is Taenga Island,” McCoy said. “We need a breeze tonight, or else
we'll miss Makemo.”
“What's become of the southeast trade?” the captain demanded. “Why don't
it blow? What's the matter?”
“It is the evaporation from the big lagoons--there are so many of them,”
McCoy explained. “The evaporation upsets the whole system of trades. It
even causes the wind to back up and blow gales from the southwest. This
is the Dangerous Archipelago, Captain.”
Captain Davenport faced the old man, opened his mouth, and was about to
curse, but paused and refrained. McCoy's presence was a rebuke to
the blasphemies that stirred in his brain and trembled in his larynx.
McCoy's influence had been growing during the many days they had been
together. Captain Davenport was an autocrat of the sea, fearing no man,
never bridling his tongue, and now he found himself unable to curse in
the presence of this old man with the feminine brown eyes and the
voice of a dove. When he realized this, Captain Davenport experienced a
distinct shock. This old man was merely the seed of McCoy, of McCoy
of the BOUNTY, the mutineer fleeing from the hemp that waited him in
England, the McCoy who was a power for evil in the early days of blood
and lust and violent death on Pitcairn Island.
Captain Davenport was not religious, yet in that moment he felt a mad
impulse to cast himself at the other's feet--and to say he knew not
what. It was an emotion that so deeply stirred him, rather than
a coherent thought, and he was aware in some vague way of his own
unworthiness and smallness in the presence of this other man who
possessed the simplicity of a child and the gentleness of a woman.
Of course he could not so humble himself before the eyes of his officers
and men. And yet the anger that had prompted the blasphemy still raged
in him. He suddenly smote the cabin with his clenched hand and cried:
“Look here, old man, I won't be beaten. These Paumotus have cheated and
tricked me and made a fool of me. I refuse to be beaten. I am going
to drive this ship, and drive and drive and drive clear through the
Paumotus to China but what I find a bed for her. If every man deserts,
I'll stay by her. I'll show the Paumotus. They can't fool me. She's a
good girl, and I'll stick by her as long as there's a plank to stand on.
You hear me?”
“And I'll stay with you, Captain,” McCoy said.
During the night, light, baffling airs blew out of the south, and
the frantic captain, with his cargo of fire, watched and measured his
westward drift and went off by himself at times to curse softly so that
McCoy should not hear.
Daylight showed more palms growing out of the water to the south.
“That's the leeward point of Makemo,” McCoy said. “Katiu is only a few
miles to the west. We may make that.”
But the current, sucking between the two islands, swept them to the
northwest, and at one in the afternoon they saw the palms of Katiu rise
above the sea and sink back into the sea again.
A few minutes later, just as the captain had discovered that a new
current from the northeast had gripped the Pyrenees, the masthead
lookouts raised cocoanut palms in the northwest.