Dazed and speechless with consternation, the unlucky dreamers are hustled to their feet by the not any too gentle officers and shoved out into the night, where half a minute of rain and wind and driving spindrift punch the return portions of their round-trip tickets to Paris and leave them on the Papeete water front with an incipient hurricane ahead of them and the rough-handed gendarmes behind.
The awakening is not always so violent as this, but there is no such thing as a peaceful disembarkation at the end of the return trip by the absinthe route, whoever puts up the gangway.
[CHAPTER XI]
PAPEETE TO PAGO PAGO
Situated well around on the leeward side of the island of Tahiti, with the great 8000-foot peak of Orohena cutting off all but stray gusts of the Trade wind, Papeete harbour is ordinarily as placid a bit of looped-in water as ever mirrored in its depths the silver disc of the tropic moon. Seaward the reef intercepts the surf as completely as does the volcano the wind from the opposite direction, and with the latter blowing from the southeast, where it belongs, the inner bay is safe for even the slenderest of outrigger canoes when the state of the weather outside is such as to keep the mail steamer at its dock. The trading schooners, each with a couple of frizzled mooring lines run out to convenient buraos or banyans, lie right against the tottering sea-wall, and even the dock of the San Francisco and Auckland boats is hardly more than a raised platform on the bank.
No one seems to dream that there is ever going to be other than southeast weather, and no one makes provision against anything else. Then some fine day a hurricane comes boring in from the north or west, and when it is over the survivors salve pieces of ship out of the tops of the coco palms, and perhaps some of them living a quarter of a mile inland, finding a schooner lodged in their taro patch, prop it up on an even keel and use it in place of the house of thatch which has been resolved into its component parts by the storm. In a few weeks every one but the missionaries—who, by the way, are much given to picturing hell for the natives, not as a hot place, but as an island where the lost souls are endlessly tossed by æon-long hurricanes—has forgotten all about the storm, and is as liable as ever to be caught napping when the next one comes along.
We reached Tahiti somewhat too early for hurricanes, but a very good imitation one in the form of a northwest squall was brought off for our benefit, which left very little to the imagination regarding what a real blow from that direction might mean. It is only the unexpected that is a serious menace to the careful skipper, as I have mentioned before, and it is in this respect that one of these sudden twisters, coming with a fierceness beyond description from an unlikely quarter, may work irreparable harm in spite of all precautions, where a hurricane, heralded for hours, perhaps days, by a falling barometer, may, in a large measure, be prepared for or avoided.
The thing occurred one evening shortly following our arrival in Papeete, just after three days of hard work had obliterated all traces of the internal and external wear and tear incident to the 3000 miles of sailing the yacht had done since leaving Hawaii. She had received a fresh coat of white paint, decks had been scoured, hardwood newly oiled and the brass work rubbed to the highest degree of resplendency. Sails were in covers, awnings up fore-and-aft, deck cushions out of their sea jackets, and, in short, everything made ready to receive official calls. She was lying to her port anchor with twenty-five fathoms of chain out. A kedge astern held her head to the prevailing southeast wind and kept her from swinging with the tide.