Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

"On the second day the sharks began to gather in their uncanny fashion, as they always do about a vessel becalmed or in distress. I spent hours watching them—ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting with a grim and hopeful patience for some happening which would provide them with a meal. They circled about the schooner in deliberate zigzags, or lay motionless in the shadow of her side, attended always by their odd little striped pilot fish. I learned to recognize one ponderous old gray shark; he had a brace of pilot fish, one swimming on each side of his head—and he wasn't afraid of us in the least. Sometimes he lay for an hour within a yard of the vessel's side; I could see the texture of his rough skin and the almost imperceptible motion of fins and tail. I can understand now the hatred sharks inspire in men who follow the sea—it wasn't long before I decided to try to kill the big, insolent brute. We hadn't as much as a hook and line on board, but finally, with a file and the point of a rusty boat hook, I improvised a makeshift sort of spear. Armed with this, I waited by the rail until my victim came in range, and then lunged down with all my strength. The spear glanced off his tough hide; he swam away in a leisurely manner, turned, and a moment later was again beneath me. This time I struck him fair on the back, but it was like trying to kill an elephant with a penknife. I think the point of my boat hook punctured him, but he only circled off again and returned to give me another chance. In the end I gave up and left him in possession of the field.

"The nights, when the air had cooled and the stars were blazing overhead, were so beautiful that one hated to fall asleep. Reflection made sky and sea alike—dark backgrounds for the myriad lights of the constellations. Lying on deck while the others slept, I used to regret that I had not learned something of astronomy—the average native sailor knows more about the stars than I. Orion I knew; the Pleiades, which the natives, with a rather pretty fancy, call Matariki, the Little Eyes; and the Scorpion, believed in heathen times to be the great fish hook of Maui, flung into the sky by the god, when he had finished pulling up islands from the bottom of the Pacific. Each night I watched the rising of the Southern Cross, and low down in the south I saw the Magellanic clouds, streamers of star dust, like vapor impalpable and remote. In spite of my companions, sleeping quietly on deck, those nights gave me a sense of overwhelming loneliness: the languid air; the solitary ship, immobile on the face of a lifeless sea; the immense expanse of the universe, ablaze with the light of distant suns....

"When our water gave out I began to prefer the nights to the days. My demijohn, as I told you, lasted only a day and a half. After that we used the drinking nuts, and not until the last of them was gone did anyone think of investigating the water cask. There was consternation when we discovered that it contained only three or four inches of rusty water—either it leaked or the skipper was remarkably careless. Hoping all the time for a breeze or a squall of rain, we began on the half sack of ripe nuts—thin, sharp stuff for drinking, but the lot of them went in a day. Then we went on rations, dealt out from the barrel with a soup spoon. Finally the barrel was dry, and we went two days with nothing of any kind to drink. It was no joke—if you've ever had a real thirst, you'll know what I mean. The natives stood it wonderfully well; Miti did not once complain, though he remarked to me that when he got ashore he was planning to "drink too much coconut"! The victim of feefee continued his slumberous routine—I wondered if he were dreaming of rustling palms and shaded, gurgling rivulets. It was my first experience of thirst; odd what an utter animal one becomes at such a time. Waking and sleeping, my head was filled with dreams of water, brooks, rivers, lakes of cool, fresh water, in which to bury one's face and drink. I dreamed of locks and highland burns in Scotland; of the gorge of Fautaua on Tahiti, where only a few months before I had stood in the mist, listening to the roar of the Cataract.

"Well, it wasn't much fun—another day or two might have been unendurable. We had one comfort, at any rate—if you're thirsty enough, you don't worry about eating. By the time we had finished the salmon and biscuit we had ceased to bother about food. On the last night of the calm none of us slept, unless it was the sailor in his den among the copra sacks. At dawn Miti touched my shoulder and pointed to the south, where the paling stars were obscured by banks of cloud. An hour later the rain water was streaming out of the scuppers and spouting off one end of our awning into the barrel, hastily recoopered in case of leaks. When the squall passed and the sun shone down on a dark-blue leaping sea we were running before a fine breeze from the southeast.

"Now that our thirst was satisfied and we had plenty of water in reserve we discovered suddenly that we were starving. Miti prowled about below and came on deck with a package of rice, stowed away during some previous voyage. It was a valuable find, for we had nothing else to eat. There was copra, of course, which the natives will eat in a pinch, but the rancid smell of the stuff was too much for me. The wind held, and finally a day came when the skipper announced that we ought to raise Tahiti soon. About midday his nephew, who was perched in the shrouds, sang out that he had sighted land. I had a look and saw on the horizon a flat blur, like the palm tops of a distant atoll. As we drew near the land rose higher and higher out of the sea—it was Makatea, and we were more than a hundred miles north of our course. No meal I have ever eaten tasted so good as the dinner Miti's relatives gave us that night!

"We got away next morning, with a liberal stock of provisions and an additional passenger for Tahiti—a philosophic pig, who traveled lashed under one of the seats of the ship's boat. For three hours we ran before a fresh northwesterly breeze, but about nine o'clock the wind dropped and soon the sails were hanging limp in a dead calm. I began to suspect that the man with the swollen legs was a Jonah of the first order. This time, however, the calm was soon over; heavy greenish-black clouds were drifting down on us from the north; the sunlight gave place to an evil violet gloom. Miti and his two men sprang into a sudden activity; they battened down the forward hatch, put extra lashings on the boat, double-reefed the foresail, and got in everything else. Then, in the breathless calm, a downpour of rain began to lash the sea with a strange, murmuring sound. I thought of an ominous old verse:

"If the wind before the rain,

Sheet your topsails home again;

If the rain before the wind,

Then your topsail halyards mind.

"It was a disagreeable moment. Even the pig felt it, for when the sailors moved him to a place in the bow of the dory he refrained from the usual shrill protest. One detail sticks in my memory—when the skipper had taken his place at the wheel he gave a sudden order; the man with the swollen legs shuffled hastily to where the boat was lashed down and pulled out the plug from its bottom. Then came the wind.

"It swept down on us from the north-northeast, from the quarter in which hurricanes begin—and the first furious gust was a mild sample of what was to come. When Miti got her laid to, heading at a slight angle into the seas, I realized the splendid qualities of the little Potii Ravarava. No small vessel could have kept her decks dry in the sea that made up within an hour. The captain never left the wheel, and I doubt if there's a finer helmsman in the South Seas, but before noon the galley—with our entire supply of food was swept clean overboard, and time after time the lashed-down boat was filled. The pig had worked himself free except for one hind leg, tied to a bottom board with a rough strip of hibiscus bark, and as the water drained out slowly through the unplugged hole astern the agitated surface would be broken by his snout, emitting sputtering screams. He lived through it, by the way.

"All of us, I believe, thought that we were in for a hurricane. Every hour the violence of the wind increased; it was a gale from the north-northeast—the wind called by the ancient Polynesians the Terrible Maoake. It seemed to rush at us in paroxysms of fury, tearing off the entire crests of waves and hurling solid water about as though it were spray. The forward hatch leaked badly; when I think of that storm my memory is filled with a nightmare of endless pumping.