Over his petit verre, the captain said to me, confidentially, “Moi, I was almos’ become a bon catholique again.”
Chocolat, who must have thought he had borne his part bravely in the crisis, frisked wildly about the wheel, risking his own brown hide at every leap, to testify his joy at his safety.
McHenry and Kopcke, with the heartening rum in their stomachs, resumed their palaver.
“That spout didn’t come within fifty feet of us,” said McHenry. “I’ve seen one in which a bird was bein’ carried up, whirlin’ round and round, and not able to fly away. It was comin’ toward us like lightnin’ when I jumped into the shrouds with a big tin tub, an’ banged it like bloody hell. It scared the spout away, an’ it busted far enough from us not to hurt us. Bill an’ Tommy Eustace can swear to that.”
“Diable!” Kopcke broke in. “Mapuhi and his daughter were in a cutter coming from Takepoto when they were attacked by a trombe. It did not strike them but the force of it overturned their cutter, four miles from shore, and knocked the girl insensible, so that Mapuhi had to swim to shore with her.”
They are fearsome spectacles at their best, these phenomena of the sea, comparable only in awe-inspiring qualities to the dread composants of St. Elmo’s Fire, those apparitions of flame which appear on mastheads and booms on tempestuous nights, as if the spirits of hell had come to welcome the sailor to Davy Jones’s locker. Waterspouts I had seen many times. They were common in these waters,—more frequent, perhaps, than anywhere else,—and to the native they were the most alarming manifestation of nature. Many a canoe had been sunk by them. There were legends of destruction by them, and of how the gods and devils used them as weapons to destroy the war fleets of the enemies of the legend-telling tribes.
When I went to sleep at ten o’clock that night, we were ranging up and down between Takepoto and Takaroa, steering no course but that of prudence, and waiting for the dawn.
I came on deck again at four. The moon was two thirds down the steep slope of the west, a golden sphere vaster than ever before. The sea was bright and quaking, and shoals of fish were waking and parting the shining surface of the water.
Suddenly from out of the gloom of the distance there loomed as strange a vision as ever startled a wayfarer.
A huge ship, under bare poles, solemn and lonely of aspect and almost out of the water, lifted a black bulk as if bearing down upon us. Somber and ominous, void of light or life, fancy peopled it with a ghostly crew. I almost expected to read upon its quarter the name of Vanderdecken’s specter-ship, and to hear the mournful voice of the Flying Dutchman’s skipper report that he had at last reached a haven.