Marooned on Mataora
The sun was low when the Faaite steamed out through the pass and headed for the Cook group, six hundred miles west and south. Dark clouds hung over Raiatea—Rangi Atea of Maori tradition, the Land of the Bright Heavens—but the level sunlight still illuminated the hillsides of Tahaa, the lovely sister island, protected by the same great oval reef. Far off to the north, the peak of Bora Bora towered abruptly from the sea.
It was not yet the season of the Trades, and the northeast breeze which followed us brought a sweltering heat, intolerable anywhere but on deck. Worthington was sitting beside me—a lean man, darkly-tanned, with very bright blue eyes. His feet were bare; he wore a singlet, trousers of white drill, and a Manihiki hat—beautifully plaited of bleached pandanus leaf—a hat not to be bought with money. The dinner gong sounded.
"I'm not going down," he remarked; "too hot below. I had something to eat at Uturoa. How about you?"
I shook my head—it needed more than a normal appetite to drive one to the dining saloon. Banks of squall cloud, shading from gray to an unwholesome violet, were gathering along the horizon, and the air was so heavy that one inhaled it with an effort.
"This is the worst month of the hurricane season," Worthington went on; "it was just such an evening as this, last year, that the waterspout nearly got us—the night we sighted Mataora. I was five months up there, you know—marooned when Johnson lost the old Hatutu.
"I was pretty well done up last year, and when I heard that the Hatutu was at Avarua I decided to take a vacation and go for a six weeks' cruise with Johnson. Ordinarily he would have been laid up in Papeete until after the equinox, but the company had sent for him to make a special trip to Penrhyn. We had a wretched passage north—a succession of squalls and broiling calms. The schooner was in bad shape, anyway: rotten sails, rigging falling to pieces, and six inches of grass on her bottom. On a hot day she had a bouquet all her own—the sun distilled from her a blend of cockroaches and mildewed copra that didn't smell like a rose garden. On the thirtieth day the skipper told me we were two hundred miles from Penrhyn and so close to Mataora that we might sight the palm tops. I'd heard a lot about the place (it has an English name on the chart)—how isolated it was, what a pleasant crowd the natives were, and how it was the best place in the Pacific to see old-fashioned island life.
"We had been working to windward against a light, northerly breeze, but the wind began to drop at noon, and by three o'clock it was glassy calm. There was a wicked-looking mass of clouds moving toward us from the west, but the glass was high and Johnson said we were in for nothing worse than a squall. As the clouds drew near I could see that they had a sort of purplish-black heart, broad at the top, pointed at the bottom, and dropping gradually toward the water. There was something queer about it; the mate was pointing, and Johnson's Kanakas were all standing up. Suddenly I heard a rushing sound, like a heavy squall passing through the bush; the point of the funnel had touched the sea three or four hundred yards away from us—a waterspout! There wasn't a breath of air, and the Hatutu had no engine. It was moving straight for us, so slowly that I could watch every detail of its formation. The boys slid our boat overboard; the mate sang out something about all hands being ready to leave the schooner.
"I've heard of waterspouts ever since I was a youngster, but I never expected to see one as close as we did that day. As the point of cloud dropped toward the sea it was ragged and ill defined; but when it touched the water and the noise began I saw its shape change and its outlines grow hard. It was now a thin column, four or five feet in diameter, rising a couple of hundred feet before it swelled in the form of a flat cone, to join the clouds above. Curiously enough, it was not perpendicular, but had a decided sagging curve. Nearer and nearer it came, until I could make out the great swirling hole at its base, and see the vitreous look of this column of solid water, revolving at amazing speed. It hadn't the misty edges of a waterfall. The outside was sharply defined as the walls of a tumbler. I wondered what would happen when it struck the Hatutu. The mate was shouting again, but just then the skipper pushed a rifle into my hands. 'Damned if I leave the old hooker,' he swore. 'Shoot into the thing—maybe we can break it up.' And, believe me or not, we did break it up.
"It didn't come down with a crash, as one might have expected. When we had pumped about twenty shots into it, and it was not more than fifty yards away, it began to dwindle. The column of water became smaller and drew itself out to nothing; the rushing noise ceased; the hole in the sea disappeared in a lazy eddy; the dark funnel rose and blended with the clouds above.