By this time we had made easting sufficient to place us well to the windward of our destination in any probable shift of wind. Sheets were slacked off, therefore, and freed from the griping luff under which she had chafed almost incessantly for the last fortnight, Lurline slipped away on a course of due south at a gait which ran up close to 190 miles on the log for the day ending at noon of the 9th. At this time, with 240 miles—part of it down a narrow island channel beset with swift currents and variable winds—remaining to be covered before we would begin to open up the bay of Taiohaie, Nukahiva, all practicable canvas was crowded on in an endeavour to make port the following day. Eight and nine knots we made all afternoon; good speed considering the force of the wind, yet hardly what might have been desired under the circumstances. But the breeze was stiffening as twilight came on, and realizing that failure to make anchorage before another evening would mean a night of standing off-and-on in a scant sea-way and uncertain winds, the Commodore, for the first time since entering those capricious latitudes, allowed the light sails to be carried into the darkness.
Sailing like a witch in the freshening breeze, Lurline reeled off a shade under twenty miles in the second dog watch, and 10.6, 10.8, 11.3 and 11.8 were successively run up on the log as the hours of the first watch slipped away. The night was balmy soft, the breeze a stream of warm milk, and in the air was discernible that faint, indefinable odour of something which heralds the presence of land to nostrils grown sensitive from inhaling for weeks the untainted atmosphere of the open sea. The heavens, save for a few hurriedly marching squads of the ever-shifting cirro-cumulus, were clear and unobscured, and the easy-running swells were as gentle as the night itself.
The yacht continued to reel off the miles like a liner during the early hours of the middle watch, but toward morning the appearance of several menacing turrets of cloud up to windward was the signal for the hurried taking in of the light sails and an easing off of the sheets. For a while it appeared that all of the three rapidly advancing squalls were going to pass astern of us, and so, in fact, two of them did. The third one took an unexpected spin at the last moment and came charging up after the yacht like a mad bull. There was just time hastily to furl the jib and station men at the fore and mainsail halyards before it broke upon the yacht with the explosive roar of a bursting bomb, and the timely letting go of those halyards as she hove down before the terrific force of the wind undoubtedly saved some canvas if nothing more.
The mainsail was checked half way in its run and the very considerable portion of it that fell overside went hopping and skipping along on the water like a great wounded bird as the yacht smoked away before the squall. For ten minutes, perhaps, we ran thus, half smothered in air and water; then the rain began falling, the wind fell lighter, and the squall, so far as we were concerned, had spent itself. Five minutes later the main boom had been hauled inboard, the sail hoisted, and Lurline was gliding off down to south'ard no whit worse for her rough raking. The main topmast staysail was run up when the morning watch was called, and dawn found her doing a comfortable nine knots an hour with the situation well in hand.
As the sun rose the somewhat vague land smell which we had noted during the night increased to a delicate but unmistakable odour of flowers, a perfume which we later learned is due to the presence in the air of the blown pollen of the cassi, a low bush-like plant which carpets the islands of the Marquesas and blooms perennially. So pungent and far-reaching is this odour that it has become a common saying with trading captains who sail these latitudes that you can smell the Marquesas farther than you can see them, a statement which is certainly literally true anywhere to the leeward of the group.
Shortly after eight o'clock the shattered peaks of the island of Uahuka were sighted dead ahead, and at nine the course was altered to S.W. by W. After an hour or so the dim outline of Nukahiva began taking shape in the dissolving mist, and when the scarped and buttressed summit of Cape Maartens came edging out from behind the abrupt heads to north'ard, we had something definite to go by, and promptly trimmed in sheets and headed up to clear a forbidding point of black basalt which our Directions told us jutted out into the sea to cut off the surges from the inner loop of the bay of Taio-haie.
Along the rugged coast we slipped, now close in to a sinister dirk-like point which reached out to divide and scatter the onrushing seas, and again standing across the opening of a bay or inlet which receded to a snowy beach backed by a lucent lagoon and a chasm full of unfathomable verdure. Beyond the furrowed brow of Cape Maartens a narrow bay, well protected and smooth as a mirror, ran inland beyond eye-scope, piercing the island like a sliver of silver. From where it disappeared in a dense mass of palms and pandanus a high-walled valley wound back among the serried ribs of the mountains, apparently to end abruptly against a lofty cliff, the sheer side of the towering backbone range of the island.
Here and there up the valley patches of dancing light, shining through the sombre green of the riot of trees and creepers, told of a swiftly-running stream, and down the face of the great cliff, literally leaping from the clouds to the earth in a single bound, was a waterfall. Lucent, glittering green it must have been up where it began its dizzy plunge in the heart of the murky mass of drifting nimbus which veiled its source, but white—snow-white—it gleamed where it appeared under the dark cloud line to fall in a brocade of shimmering satin into the misty depth below. We did not learn about it until the next day; but this fall was Typee Fall, the stream was Typee River, and the valley was Typee Valley, the scene of that most idyllic of all South Sea idylls, Herman Melville's "Typee."
We never attained nearer than five miles to the great fall during our stay in the Marquesas, and accurate figures regarding its height were not obtainable. Findlay's Directory gives it at 2,165 feet, which is probably too much; but the fact remains that it is one of the highest waterfalls in the world, and without a rival on any island whatever.