They lowered and———
Well, if the pirate had been a shade less determined about the number in the boat, there would have been a pretty little tragedy of the sea, that gusty afternoon. One more in the boat had certainly turned the scale. For the wind was continually getting up, and the wretched Duchess was rolling like a buoy, and the boat as she touched the water, with the captain and three men in her, was caught by the top of a wave, and dashed against the side of the ship. In a flash she was overturned, with a badly damaged thwart, and was washing about helplessly among the waves, with the four men clinging to her keel. The sea took her past the schooner like a rag. I had only time to run to the stern, before she was swept out of hearing, but I heard the pirate call as he disappeared in the trough of a wave, “Get out your camera, here’s the chance of your life!” Then the boat was gone, and for a moment the mate and I thought it was all over. “The sharks will have ’em if they don’t sink!” declared that officer, straining over the rail, while the Maori crew ran aimlessly about the deck, shouting with excitement.
What happened during the next half-hour has never been very clear in my memory. The wind kept rising, and the afternoon grew late and dark. The overturned boat, with the four heads visible about her keel, drifted helplessly in the trough of the seas, at the mercy of waves and sharks. (I heard, afterwards, that the men had all kicked ceaselessly to keep them away, and that they expected to be seized any moment.) The wind screamed in the rigging, and drifts of foam flew up on deck, and the Maories ran about and shouted, and got in each other’s way, and tried to heave ropes, and missed, and tried to launch a boat under the mate’s direction, and somehow did not—I cannot tell why. And right in the middle of the play, when we seemed to be making some attempt to bear down upon the drifting wreck, a grey old man who had come on with us from the Cook Islands, but had kept to his berth through illness most of the time, burst out on deck with an astonishing explosion of sea language, and told us that we were nearly on to the reef. Which, it seems, every one had forgotten!
After that, things grew so lively on the poop that I got up on the top of the deck-house to keep out of the way, and reflect upon my sins. It seemed a suitable occasion for devotional exercises. The white teeth of the reef were unpleasantly near, the water was growing shoal. “Put a leadsman in the chains this minute!” yelled the grizzled passenger (who had been at sea in his time, and knew something of what was likely to happen when you got a nasty reef on your lee side, with the wind working up). The auxiliary engine, meant for use on just such occasions, had been sick for some time. There was a very strong tide running, the wind had shifted while the ship’s company were intent on the fate of the boat, and on the whole it looked very much as if the decorations already possessed by the notorious reef were likely to be increased by another pair of best quality British made anchors—ours.
A good many things happen on sailing ships—Pacific ships especially—that one does not describe in detail, unless one happens to be writing fiction. This is not fiction, so the occurrences of the next quarter of an hour must be passed over lightly. The ancient passenger took command of the ship. We got away from the reef by an unpleasantly close shave and bore down upon the boat, which the pirate captain had impossibly contrived to right by this time, paddling it along with one oar, while the men baled constantly. We got the captain and the men and the damaged boat on board, and a few “free opinions, freely expressed”—as a certain famous lady novelist would put it—were exchanged. Then the pirate, who was quite fresh, and very lively, demanded the second boat, and said he was bound to get into that place anyhow, and wouldn’t leave till he did.
I rather think we mutinied at this juncture. I am sure I did, because I had been thinking over my sins for some time, and had come to the conclusion that there really were not many of them, and that I wanted a chance to accumulate a few more, preferably of an agreeable kind, before I faced the probability of decorating any Pacific coral reef with my unadorned and unburied skeleton. The grey-haired passenger and the mate mutinied too, upon my example, and the pirate, seeing that we were three to one, and moreover, that it was growing dusk, made a virtue of necessity, and went off for a shift of clothes, giving orders to make all sail at once. And so we left the reef in the growing dusk, and no man has to this day disturbed the virgin surface of its stormy little lagoon with profanely invading oar.
Was there a fortune lying concealed beneath those pale green waves within the foaming jaws of the reef? I never heard. But there were some among our native crew who came from the far-off island of Penrhyn, where the pearl fisheries are, and they were strong in asserting their belief that the pirate might have been well paid for his exploration. It was just that sort of reef, said the pearl-island men, that most often contained good shell, and produced the biggest pearls, the first time of looking. An old, undisturbed atoll, where no one had ever thought of looking for shell, was the place where big pearls got a chance to grow. The first comer scooped in the prizes; afterwards, the shell itself and the smaller pearls were all that any one was likely to get.
However that might be, the talk, on the rest of the way down to Niué, ran much on pearls and pearl-shell, and I learned a good deal about these gold-mines of the Pacific—always making allowance for the inevitable Pacific exaggeration. Any man who can live a year among the islands, and restrain himself, in the latter part of his stay, from lying as naturally and freely as he breathes, deserves a D.S.O.
Stripped of flowers of fiction, the romance of the pearling trade was still interesting and fascinating enough. Pearls, in the Pacific, are obtained from a large bivalve that has a good deal of value in itself, being the material from which mother-o’-pearl is made. Prices, of course, fluctuate very much, as the shell is used in so many manufactures that depend on the vagaries of fashion; but the value may run to £200 a ton or over. When it gets down to £40 or less, it is hardly worth the expense of lifting and carrying. For the most part, however, it is worth a good deal more than this, and when it is at the highest, fortunes can be, and have been, made out of small beginnings, in a very short time. The pearls are an “extra,” and not to be relied upon. There may be almost none in a big take of shell, there may be a few small ones, there may be a number of fine ones that will make the fortune of the lucky fisher. It is all a gamble, and perhaps none the less fascinating for that. Much of the best shell and the finest pearls in the Pacific, come from the Paumotus, which are French. Thursday Island, off the north of Queensland, was the great centre of the fishery, until lately, but it has been almost fished out. The Solomons were reported to have a good deal of shell, and a rush took place to that part not long ago, but the yield was much exaggerated. There are a good many atolls about the Central Pacific in general, which contain more or less shell, and are generally owned and fished by Australian syndicates. Outlying reefs and islets, where no one goes, now and then turn out to be valuable. The news of a find travels apparently on the wings of the seagulls from group to group, for no such place ever remains secret for more than a very short time, and then, if the owner’s title is not secure (a thing that may easily happen, in the case of an island that does not lie within the geographical limits of any of the annexed groups) there is sometimes trouble. Pearl-poaching is easy and profitable, if not very safe; and who is to tell ugly tales, a thousand miles from anywhere, out in the far Pacific?
(The swift-winged schooner and the racing seas: decks foam-white beneath a burning sky: salt wind on the lips, and the fairy-voiced enchantress Adventure singing ever from beyond the prow! “O dreamers in the man-stifled town,” do you hear the wide world calling?)