Toward noon a few faint leakings of wind came edging in around the north shoulder of Mauna Kea, and for some time we had steerage way enough to allow the yacht to drift along at a mile or so an hour, the booms out now on one side and now on the other in an effort to intercept the elusive airs. At six o'clock even these vagrant puffs had ceased, and as twilight followed the sinking of the sun behind a ruled-line horizon calm succeeded to calmer, until the sails were finally taken in and we floated, lazily waiting, on the heavily breathing bosom of the deep; for now the shadow of a swell was running and imparting just enough motion to the yacht to set her decks rocking drowsily to and fro in accord with the somnolent peacefulness of the tropic night.
The afterglow kindled and faded in pale tints of amber and amethyst and dusky olive, and almost up to the zenith a filmy mass of cirrus cloud, torn by conflicting air currents too high to make themselves at sea level, flamed up in the reflected light for an instant and then broke and scattered into bits, like paper rose-leaves showered into a shaft of red calcium. Across the still expanse of the sea east nodded to west, north nodded to south, the sky stars blinked at the sea stars, and the sea stars blinked crookedly back; and under all ran the indolent ebony swells, gently rolling the yacht till she rocked like a sleepy old beldame, drowsing and catching herself and drowsing again.
Early in the middle watch a light breeze stole out again from landward—this time apparently coming from the Mauna Loa slope of the island—and by daylight we were twenty miles nearer the southerly deadline of the windless triangle. Then the puffs began falling light again, and for an hour or two we drifted without steerage way ten or a dozen miles off the entrance of the beautiful little bay of Kealakekua. With eyes straining through our glasses some of us fancied that we discerned the outlines of a tall shaft of white shining through the brown boles of the coconut palms, and told each other that we were gazing on the monument that marked the spot where Captain Cook, after innumerable hair-breadth escapes in every important island group of the Pacific, fell under the clubs of the warlike Hawaiians, fighting no less desperately to save the lives of his comrades than for his own.
One would have to cruise the Pacific for a lifetime to begin to come to an adequate appreciation of what the Great Navigator did, for the more one sees the more stupendous seems the sum of his achievement. From where the sub-Arctic waters wash the shores of Cook's Inlet, Alaska, to Cooktown in the lap of the Antipodean tropics, and Mount Cook raising its glacier-seamed sides above the bleak bluffs of New Zealand, there is hardly an important island whose strand his tireless foot did not press, and scarce a lump of coral rearing its head above the restless Pacific surges that his keen eye did not sweep. Nasty sailing, you think it, in these days of charts and steamers, when the lifeboats are swept from the hurricane deck off Cook's Inlet on your run to Nome; and "A frightful hole!" you say, when your "N.Y.K." steamer anchors every night as she feels her way along down the Great Barrier Reef; and every minute is your last, perhaps you think, when your "A and A" steamer is hove to in a Fijian hurricane, or you're locked in the cabin of your "A.U.S.N." packet in a spell of "southeast" weather between Dunedin and Sydney. Distinctly bad, you think all this; you on your 6,000-ton steamer that is equipped with every precautionary and emergency device known to science, with a powerful beacon on every headland and the bottom of the sea mapped out like a block of lower Broadway. Just try and imagine, then, if you please, what these same places must have been to Cook, who spent years among them in crazy old wooden ships, scarcely a one of which but ended by piling up on some rocky shore or coral beach. Columbus, Vespucci, and the rest of the deep-water navigators, simply turned the noses of their ships west and sailed till they got to somewhere—and then sailed back again. Cook spent years with a man at the masthead looking for hidden reefs, and with the sounding lead going every hour of the twenty-four.
In my own mind there are grave doubts as to whether any of us really saw the Cook monument during that long forenoon in which we lay becalmed off the leeward coast of Hawaii—in fact, I have since been told that it is not visible from the sea at all; but the sight of Kealakekua—yes, even at a distance of a dozen miles or more—is ample excuse for this slight tribute to one to whom no man that has ever sailed the Pacific will deny the title of "The Greatest Navigator of History."
Captain James Cook, sailor, diplomat and gentlemen:—Here's long and unbroken rest for your watch below in that quiet haven where you let go Life's anchor in the shadow of the towering Mauna Loa and within sound of the lap of the waves of that Pacific, so many of whose tracks you were the first to sail. Sleep sound, Master Mariner, for your work is done; and may your dreams bring you the messages of gratitude that arise from the hearts of those whose ways have been made easier and safer because of the dangers you braved and the sacrifices you made. Accept this acknowledgment of the obligation of one of those to whom you showed the way, James Cook.
A fluky three to five-knot breeze drew in from the E.S.E. about mid-day, every puff of which was taken advantage of to struggle on out of the lee of the blanketing island. Freshening slightly after nightfall, it carried us along at a little better than a four-mile gait during each hour of the first watch, near the end of which it hauled ahead and forced the yacht off to southwest until enough southing had been run to allow her to be put about on the other tack without danger of butting her nose into the volcanic bluffs of Hawaii.
Shortly after midnight the mate awakened the Commodore to report a reflection on the sky off to the northeast, an announcement which brought every one tumbling out on deck in short order. There was the reflection, surely enough; a dull red glare on our port quarter that shone and dulled and shone again like a blowed-on ember. The light was on a line with the point where the opaque mass of Hawaii blotted out the tail of the Great Bear, and because there was no sign of fire on the water we had about arrived at the conclusion that the glare might come from a ship or sugar mill burning on the windward side of the island, when the reflection suddenly flared from a dull cherry to a vivid flame-red, immediately to be quenched in tumbling masses of smoke or steam which went shooting into the air as though driven by the force of a mighty explosion.
"She's a steamer!" yelled the mate. "Them's her boilers a-bustin'!" Whereupon we all fell to speculating as to what particular steamer it might be. And it was not until six or seven minutes later when a great, deep-toned reverberation reached us—a sound so mighty that all of the steamers in the Pacific blowing up together would have passed unnoticed beside it—that light finally burst in upon us and we broke out in chorus with "Kilauea! in eruption again."