The wind was on the port beam, and blowing so smoothly that the yacht, unshaken by the lift or slap of waves, held to her even heel as though chocked over in the ways. Of pitch or roll or shiver there was no sign, and for all the motion but that swift, undeviating forward glide, she might have been frozen up in a fresh water lake. She simply shore her way through the water as a draper's clerk runs his unworked scissors down a length of silk.
At dinner in the cabin the unprecedented stillness was almost oppressive. The familiar creaking of the inlaying on the mainmast at the head of the table was no longer heard, nor the crash of waves and the rattle of spray to windward, nor the shrill of spinning sheaves and the rat-a-tat of the foresheet block on the deck. The only sounds were unwonted ones—the tick of the cabin clock, the rattle of pans in the galley, the not over-elegant flow of post-prandial conversation in the forecastle, and running through all, the hissing rush of the water along the sides.
The sun had set while we were at dinner, and the afterglow, in swift tropic transitions, had flamed and faded and flamed again, and was fading out for the last time as we came on deck. The sea to the west still glimmered here and there in patches of dull rose from the reflections of a few still-lighted tufts of cirrus cloud. North and south it was darkly purple, shading to a misty slatiness where water and sky merged in banks of low-hanging strati, and east to the island it lay dead and opaque, save for the spots where it was pricked into life by the images of the brightening stars. Overhead the Pleiades and Orion's Belt and Sirius, the Dog Star, were turning from pale yellow to orange, and from orange to lambent gold; to the north the Big Dipper, half submerged in the sea, was tipping up slowly to pour out its nocturnal libation to its stately vis-à-vis, the Southern Cross. And under it all, swiftly, silently, mysteriously as the Flying Dutchman, her track marked for a mile astern by a comet-like wake of vivid gold, Lurline went slipping down the lee of the long atoll at an easy, even, effortless ten knots an hour.
Presently, just as twilight was giving way to full darkness, a red light was reported crossing our bows, and we shortly made out a two-masted schooner beating in toward the entrance to the lagoon, nearly opposite to which we were then sailing. Several times across the still water came the strangely mixed jumble of French and Kanaka and English orders, mingling with the creak of booms as she was put about, and finally the voice of the skipper cursing fluently because the tide was running faster in the passage than was to his apparent taste. Then a great yellow moon got up and sat upon the farther fringe of the lagoon, and back and forth across the face of it we watched the little schooner beat in safely through the narrow passage. As she left the moon path a bonfire sprang into life somewhere upon the inner beach, and through the serried ranks of the coco palms we saw her pink sails crumple up as halyards were let go, while the sharp staccato of a chain running through a hawse pipe floating down the wind told that she had won her anchorage.
At nine o'clock it was decided to pass to the west of the island of Rangaroa, instead of to the east as had been our intention, and to this end the course was altered to W. by S. To minimize the chance of overrunning our reckoning in the treacherous currents and thereby piling up the yacht on the beach of Tikehau which lay beyond Rangaroa, foresail and jib were furled, only the mainsail and forestay-sail remaining set. Even under this greatly reduced sail seven knots an hour were averaged all night, daybreak finding us off the northwest corner of Rangaroa. Down the lee of this island—under sailing conditions only less perfect than those of the previous evening—we ran all the forenoon of the 18th, sinking its southwest corner early in the afternoon, just as we raised a peak of the combined coral and volcanic island of Makatea.
Makatea is famous as having been the rendezvous of the notorious Marquesan half-caste, Boraki, quite the most picturesque pirate who ever operated in that corner of the South Pacific. The story of the retributive justice which overtook Boraki while endeavouring to cut out and capture a missionary schooner sent to conciliate and convert him is one of the most amazing yarns ever told, and the antithetic variations of it that come from the opposite poles of "traderdom" and "missiondom" are alone worth journeying to the South Seas to listen to. I shall endeavour, later, to set down the account we heard—from the lips of one of the principal actors in the remarkable drama—on a memorable evening when the yacht lay at anchor in Suva Bay, Fiji.
As day broke on the 19th the mist-wreathed peak of Orohena, the backbone of Tahiti, took form a point or two off the port bow, and a little later the jumbled skyline of Moorea began to appear in a similar position to starboard. The sun rose gorgeously behind a flank of the larger island, the blazing southeast setting off in marvellous silhouette the matchless "Diadem," the crown jewel of all Tahiti's beauty. "The Diadem" is the name given to a row of little peaks occupying the divide between the two great volcanoes that dominate the east and west ends of the island. They are so symmetrically and evenly set that the most unimaginative cannot fail to see their resemblance to the points of a king's crown, a likeness all the more striking when each point is tipped with gold and the whole surmounted with a halo of light from the rising sun.
At seven o'clock the tall, white pillar of the Point Venus Light—so called because Captain Cook took his observations of the transit of the planet Venus from this promontory on June 3rd, 1769—could be discerned towering above the coco palms that engulfed its base, and an hour later it was abeam, with the bay of Papeete opening up beyond. This name, meaning "Basket of Water," gives a comprehensive description of Tahiti's chief harbour. The bay itself is but half land-locked by the mainland, but across what would otherwise be a comparatively open roadstead runs a partially submerged reef, which, except for the narrowest of passages, completely cuts it off from the sea. Inside is a mile of deep water and a shore so bold-to that the trading schooners tie up to the trees and load from and discharge to the bank.
At 8:30 we were off the entrance, and, as the sailing directions were plain and the marks unmistakable, the Commodore decided to go in without a pilot. The wind, which we had carried on our port quarter since daybreak, was brought up abeam as we altered our course and headed into the passage. It blew strongly and steadily, and to the nine or ten-knot gait at which it was driving us was added the four or five-knot run of a flood tide. The yacht raced through the passage, as the Port Captain shortly tried to tell us in broken English, "like ze diable try catch her," and during all of our stay in the island we were constantly called upon to deny the persistent rumour that she was equipped with power. Several who witnessed our entrance from the shore even went so far as to aver that they distinctly saw blue smoke trailing off astern, a phenomenon which never came nearer to explanation than when Gus, a big Swede of the mate's watch who was at the wheel on the occasion in question, admitted that he did "sware a leetle when she go joost lak hell" out of sheer excitement.
We anchored a couple of cable's lengths off the British Consulate, having made the 800 miles from Nukahiva in a little over three and three-quarters days, eleven hours of which were run under mainsail and forestay-sail only in the lee of Rangaroa. The best previous record was between four and five days.