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
fearfulstrain 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. Al l 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!"
Then he returned to his figures and worked them over. The sweat poured 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
lagoonhas 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.