“Oh, look, Tom! There’s land!” cried Frank Putney as, coming on deck one beautiful morning, he glanced across the shimmering sea and saw a low cloud-like speck upon the horizon ahead.
“Hurrah! it must be the Bahamas,” exclaimed Tom Pauling, as he saw the first bit of land they had sighted since leaving New York three days previously. “Say, isn’t it bully to see land again? And isn’t this water wonderful?”
To the two boys, the short sea trip had been a constant source of interest, for while they had both been on ocean-going steamships before and Frank had crossed the Atlantic, yet neither had ever visited the tropics. The glistening flying fish which had skittered like miniature sea-planes from under the plunging bows of the ship had filled them with delight; they had fished up bits of the floating yellow sargassum or Gulf Weed and had examined with fascination the innumerable strange crabs, fishes and other creatures that made it their home; they had watched porpoises as they played about the ship and they had even caught a brief glimpse of a sperm whale.
The wonderfully rich indigo-blue water of the Gulf Stream was a revelation to them and now that they were rapidly approaching the outlying cays of the Bahamas, with the surrounding water malachite and turquoise, emerald and sapphire with patches of dazzling purple and streaks of azure they could scarcely believe it real.
“It doesn’t look like water at all,” declared Tom, as his father joined them.
“It looks like—well, like one of those futurist paintings or as if some one had spilled a lot of the brightest blue and green paint he could find and had slapped on a lot of purple for good measure:”
Mr. Pauling laughed. “That’s accurate if not poetical,” he replied, “and you’ll find, when you go ashore, that the imaginary man with the paint pot did not stop at the water. The land is just as gaudy and incredibly bright as the sea.”
“Is that Nassau ahead?” asked Tom.
“No, that’s a small cay,” replied one of the officers who had drawn near the little group, “Egg Cay they call it. We’ll raise Rose Cay next and should sight New Providence and Nassau about two o’clock. Pretty, isn’t it?”
So intensely interested and excited were the two boys that they could scarcely wait to eat their breakfast before they again rushed on deck to find the little islet close to the ship, its cream-colored beaches and purplish-gray coral rocks clear and distinct above the marvelously tinted water edged by a thread of surf and with a few straggling palm trees nodding above the low, dull-green bush which covered the cay.