“What the hell do you expect me to do, bawl about it? Besides, if the crew hear me singin’ they’ll think there’s nothin’ to be afraid of and it keeps their guts from freezin’ inside of them.”
He sang often in the two weeks that followed as we blindly picked our way out of the iceberg region. The first time the sun shone after that was about three hundred miles southeast of New Zealand. A stiff breeze cleared the sky, and our sails bellied out tautly under it.
“We’ll sail due East, Mr. Swanson,” Father said to the mate, “and try and make Pitcairn. I haven’t been there for years and I want Joan to see it.”
I had heard the name of Pitcairn Island all my life. Every sailor looks upon it as the haven for seafarers. From their descriptions it was the one perfect spot on earth, free from worries, money, and work.
Old Stitches used to tell me about Pitcairn and its qualities of a paradise, but I thought it was the ravings of a mind that had had too much liquor and too many girls in port.
“What are we going to see on Pitcairn?” I asked my father.
“White natives. It’s the only South Sea island that has a tribe of English-speaking, light-skinned inhabitants.”
I was thrilled at the prospect of visiting Pitcairn—for white people were more of a curiosity to me than natives. As our ship nosed her way across the sea towards Pitcairn, I spent many hours listening to tales about that strange island from my father and two old sailors who had been there often.
When Kipling gave to the world his much overquoted lines, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” he probably forgot that in the most remote part of the South Seas, East and West had met and had formed a race of people, living in a high degree of civilization and in a community almost free from sin—to disprove his theory.
I looked up the island on the chart, and found it marked there with an inconsequential dot, and flaunting the austere name of “Pitcairn, 23 degrees S. latitude, 120 W. longitude.” By latitude and longitude I can locate a spot on the ocean as accurately as a landlubber can find 42nd Street and Broadway.