There, on the northern horizon, white as the wing of a gull, stood a sail, remote, lonely, only visible from this height—the sail of the first copra trader in these waters.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE MORNING LIGHT
When the Portsoy had turned her stern to the reef long ago, she had done more than fire the shot that smashed the canoe of Katafa. She had logged the position of Palm Tree, and her captain, in his drunken brain, had logged the fact that it was “full of copra.” He was no trader, but he drank where traders were, and in Pacific bar-rooms, in a blue haze of smoke, the fact made itself known after a time. That is how islands were discovered in the old days that are not so very old; through chance and schooner captains and the dingy pages of logs, through memories and conversations and the haze of bar-rooms, the islands unknown came into the world of the known, and not only the islands but their qualities.
For years Nauru in its desolate beauty laughed at the sun till chance betrayed it and the phosphates that lay beneath its surface, and for years the Garden of God might have remained unknown but for what its palm trees had said to the Portsoy, and the fact that copra had taken the place of sandalwood in the world of trade.
It was from Papeete that the Morning Light set out, a topsail schooner of a hundred and fifty tons with enough native labour to work the island if found. Owing to a slight error in the Portsoy’s reckoning, she nearly missed it and was about to give up the hunt, when one morning, just as the sun broke above the sealine, it showed, far to the south, just a point on the new-born blue of the sky.
For an hour and more the favourable wind held strong and the island grew apace. Then the wind failed and faded, as if in regret at the ruin it was helping on, the ruin of Nature by trade.
All day long the Morning Light held south under the play of light and variable winds, making the lagoon only at dusk and entering with the first of the stars.
Dick had put out the cooking fire; it was after supper, and they were talking of the day’s work. Over on the southern bank, at certain times of the tide the fishing was better than anywhere else in the lagoon[[3]]. The water was deep there and you could reach the place either by striking across through the woods or going round the lagoon in the dinghy. This was the longer way but they generally used it for the convenience of the boat in bringing back the fish. They had seen nothing of the Morning Light, nor had they exchanged a word about Karolin.
Night was the time for talking, as a rule, unless the business of the day had tired them out, as it had this evening.