The wooden ditch is just wide enough in which to sit with elbows close, and the water flows rapidly on the gentle incline. If one does not sit very straight, he will progress on one hip, and probably get to laughing beyond all hope of righting himself. With several persons seated a hundred yards apart, the water is backed up by each so that its speed is much decreased, and there is little difficulty in regulating one’s movements and whatever speed is to be had—and mind the nails! Supine, feet-foremost, arms-under-head, the maximum is obtained; sit up, and it slackens.
It was capital fun, and, safely on the ground once more at our starting point, Jack was so possessed with the sport that he telephoned to Hilo for “hacks” to convey us a mile or so up the road to a point where the flume crosses. A laughable party were we: the men, collarless, with overcoats on top of their dripping suits, the women also in wet garments under dry ulsters.
In a sweltering canefield we were directed how to build small, flat bundles of the sweet-smelling sugar stems; then still with the fear of nails, however smoothed and flattened, strong upon us, remembering tragical cellar-doors of childhood, we embarked upon our sappy green rafts.
Picture lying on your back, the hour near sunset, in a tepid stream of clear mountain water, slipping along under the bluest of blue skies with golden-shadowed clouds, breathing the sun-drenched air; then lifting slowly to glance, still moving and strangely detached, over the edge, to canefields far beneath and stretching from timber line to sea rim; picking out rocky water-courses, toy bridges and houses, and Lilliputian people going about their business on the verdant face of earth; while not far distant a gray-and-gold shower-curtain rainbow-tapestried, blows steadily to meet you in midair, tempering the vivid peacock hues of sea and sky and shore. In the void betwixt ourselves and the shimmering green earth, ragged bundles of cane, attached to invisible wires, drawn as by a spell toward the humming mill at sea-rim, looked for all the world like fleeing witches on broomsticks, with weird tattered garments straight behind. You glide in an atmosphere of fantasy, “so various, so beautiful, so new,” in which every least lovely happening is the most right and natural, no matter how unguessed before.
Over-edge and on the ground again, at exactly the proper spot to obviate feeding one’s shrinking toes into the cane grinder, one can only think of a longer ride next time—perhaps with a ten-mile-away start.
Belike our latest skipper is a better man at sea than ashore. Certain rumors lead us to this hazard. Perhaps a professional sailor is always “a sailor ashore”; and doubtless the captain has by now read my easy-going husband well enough to know that he will not be left to settle the personal bills incurred in Hilo over and above his salary.
Hilo, October 7.
Tomorrow the dream-freighted Snark, carrying only three of her initial adventurers, Jack, Martin Johnson, and myself, sails from Hilo for the Marquesas Islands lying under the Line, toward which Jack’s sea-roving spirit has yearned from boyhood, since first he devoured Melville’s tale, “Typee,” of months guarded in the cannibal valley on Nuka-Hiva. I, even, have early memories of the same incomparable record. And soon, by the favor of wind and current, we shall drop our modern patent hook in Melville’s very anchorage at Taiohae Bay, which was also that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Casco in later years; and together we shall quest inland to Typee Vai.
Besides the captain, there is a new Dutch sailor, Herrmann de Visser, delft-blue of eye, and of a fair white-and-pinkness of skin that no lifetime of sea-exposure has tarnished. The berth of the sorely regretted Tochigi, who could never outlive seasickness, is occupied by a brown manling of eighteen, Yoshimatsu Nakata, a moon-faced subject of the Mikado, who speaks, and kens not, but one single word of English, same being the much overtaxed Yes; but his blithe eagerness to cover all branches of the expected service promises well. Martin has been graduated from galley into engine-room; and Wada, a Japanese chef of parts, bored with routine of schooner schedule between San Francisco and Hilo, is in charge of our “Shipmate” range and perquisites in the tiny, below-deck galley.
We had confidently assumed, after four months’ repairing in Honolulu, that the new break in the seventy-horse-power engine could easily be mended, and that in a week or ten days at most we might resume the voyage. But alas, as fast as one weakness was dealt with another appeared, until even that long-suffering patience which Jack displays in the larger issues, was worn to a thread. At times I could see that he was restless and unhappy, though he worked doggedly at his novel.