The natives got their cargo from the schooner in the bay and I received my hundred pounds. Tembinok saw us off; we booked as passengers on the Bella, for that was the name of the schooner that came in the nick of time to relieve our minds for the night attack. We eventually arrived at Honolulu.
Twelve months after I met Milburn again in Sydney and he turned out a good friend to me. He never saw the skipper of the Eldorado again, for the man left his ship and went off to South America, I think.
I heard of Milburn a little later on as going off to Paraguay on the s.s. R——, which was especially fitted out for taking a modern Mayflower crew to start a socialistic republic, soon started and soon ended, for the colony turned out as miserable a failure as when Milburn bought Apemama.
Milburn was not my friend’s real name; it seems wiser not to give that here, in this account of our experiences together in the South Seas. One name he deserved, that of a brave comrade and a gentleman.
After my adventures with Milburn I left Honolulu in a large schooner which was bound for Suva. We had only been out three days when a hurricane struck us. A Cape Horn slasher was nothing compared to the weather we experienced. I was standing on deck smoking with several of the crew; some of them were natives. A soft breeze came up and increased till the elements moaned with a steady hum, as the sails bellied out like drums and the foamy manes of white horses tossed away in the sunset; then with a thundering moan the hurricane’s breath struck us. The skipper yelled to us. “Aye, aye, sir,” we shouted back, for a half-blood and I were aloft taking sail in; suddenly the boat lay over and the rigging to leeward nearly touched the wave-crests.
Darkness slid over the ocean sky, tremendous seas came up, and the schooner backed and shivered like a frightened mammoth thing as the mountains of water jumped down on her deck. I fell forward on my face beneath the liquid mass and gripped the deck with my fingers and teeth! Crash! Crash! the boats were carried away. I heard my chum gasping and spitting sea-water beside me. The sea cleared and the wind shot up my legs—r-r-r—r-r-i-p—r-r—r-r-r-i-p! and my trousers split and nearly blew away. We scrambled to our feet and clung to the ropes. “Hold on, lads,” shouted the skipper, and we did hold on too! Scud was flying across the sky and the moon travelling like a yellow racing balloon as the wrack of mist flew under it. The phosphorescent blaze that lit the tossing foam of the travelling mountains of water around us made it all look like a ghostly scene of chaos ere creation; the winds cut the hissing wave-tops off as though invisible giant swords flashed across the ghostly ocean darkness. Then another sea came over, crash! right over the galley. The cook was washed through the door, still clutching the pots that he had been trying to keep on the galley stove. His rapid exit knocked us over as he was washed by, and we all clutched each other and bravely held on, each to the other, to save our own lives. The man at the wheel was washed from the poop and joined us; the skipper took his place. No one was lost; some miracle saved the boat and all of us; the wind howled and rushed away as quickly as it arrived.
The skipper was a good sort; he had sailed in the black-birding days with cargoes of natives to the Isles of Mystery. Now he gave us rum, and we were the happiest crew on the high seas in our new lease of life, for that is how we all felt. Only experience could paint to you the wildness of a South Sea hurricane, and what we sailors felt as we slid along the vessel’s deck holding on to each other’s legs and hair to prevent ourselves being clutched and torn away into the infinite waters.
We put into Palmyra Isle and made things ship-shape, and then left for Apia and Fiji, where I left the boat and took a steamer for New South Wales.