In the Track of the Trades / The Account of a Fourteen Thousand Mile Yachting Cruise to the Hawaiis, Marquesas, Societies, Samoas and Fijis

by Lewis R. Freeman

So empty of threat was the evening that the crew, with the exception of the single sailor whose turn it was to stand the anchor watch, had been given shore leave. The rest of us, tired from an afternoon of the ceremonious calling exigent upon the newcomers who would break the ice of officialdom in any French colony, were lounging on the quarterdeck and in the cockpit, glad of the chance to unstiffen and be quiet.

It was a night drowsy with soporific suggestiveness. Seaward the air was pulsing to the drowsing monotone of the surf upon the reef, rising and falling at regular intervals like the heavy breathing of a tired sleeper. Landward, a league of liquid lullaby, the tiny wavelets of the bay tinkled on beach and sea-wall, and through the rondure of blue-black foliage which masked the village, lights blinked sleepily, with here and there the tracery of a palm or banana frond showing in dark outline against the warm yellow rectangle of an open doorway. The yacht, rocking gently as a cradle, set the Japanese lanterns around the awnings nodding in languorous lines, and, above and beyond, clouds and stars rubbed lazily against each other in somnolent jumble. The spirit hand of the land breeze in the rigging was sounding the "stand-by" call for the watch of Morpheus.

The arms of the Sleep God must have enfolded with especial tenderness the hulking frame of Heinrich, the husky Teuton who was standing anchor watch, for an inky splotch of cloud had grown from a speck on the northeastern horizon to a bituminous blur that blotted out everything in that quarter from the zenith down, before he raised his head from where he had pillowed it in his arms upon the forecastle ice chest and roused the ship with an explosive "Gott in Himmel!" Simultaneously with that of Heinrich there was another explosion, like the bursting of a Vial of Wrath, and forthwith the gathering squall came charging in across the Motu Iti Quarantine Station on the reef and began systematically scooping dry the bottom of the bay. Spreading like an inverted fan, it blotted out the stars to east and west, and, with the roar of a battery of quick-firers, swept down upon us in a solid wall of air and water, only a few short, nervous puffs of wind scurrying uneasily in advance.

The squall was swooping down to strike the yacht on her port quarter, realizing which, we hurriedly buoyed the line to the now useless kedge and cast it loose. So quiet was the water and air in the half-minute-long interval before the wind came that the yacht lay motionless, half-broadside to the squall's advance, just as she had been stretched to the kedge, and when it struck her inertia was so great that the lee rail was hove well under before she began swinging. The lines of Japanese lanterns snapped in a half dozen places and went streaming off to leeward like the tails of kites. The awnings bellied monstrously and began splitting under the terrific uplift of the wind; and here and there lashings gave way and left corners threshing desperately for freer play.

There were no waves at first; only sheets of water torn from the top of the sea and thrown on ahead. The air was fairly clogged with spray, and the yacht was deluged with water, fore and aft, as though she had no more freeboard than a plank. The boats, which were made fast to booms run out on either side amidships, worked like the arms of Dutch windmills, and one of them, as the yacht reached the end of her cable, was tossed bodily over its boom, to land bottom up and fill.

The yacht was driven across the arc of her cable-sweep as a frightened broncho rushes to the end of his picket rope, and with a somewhat similar result. The anchor fouled and began dragging. So swiftly were we carried down the bay that it seemed inconceivable that there was any anchor at all at the end of the cable, and it was not until later that we ascertained definitely that the chain had not parted. We were heading—or rather backing—at an angle toward the sea-wall, and in a direction which allowed the yacht something over a quarter of a mile to go before she would crash into the line of schooners moored beyond the American Consulate, the grinding and pounding among which became distinctly audible as the interval decreased.

The port anchor was our only hope, and on the getting over and letting go of this the Commodore and Heinrich began furiously working, while to me, with the assistance of a press-gang composed of the Mater, Claribel and the Chinese cook, was delegated the task of reducing the awnings, the great spreads of which were acting as sails in driving the yacht the quicker to an apparently inevitable doom. That there would be ample chance to get ashore in safety, no one had much doubt; but more indubitable still appeared the fact that we were scheduled to have a graphic illustration of the meaning of that commonest of South Sea expressions, "piling up on the beach."

The port anchor was let go and the awnings brought to a fashion of a furl at about the same time, and six white faces, peering anxiously shoreward for results, only paled the more as the foam-white belt that marked the line of the submerged sea-wall continued to grow perceptibly nearer. Stars were appearing under the lower line of the squall along the northern horizon, but the centre of the disturbance was now overhead, and the wind had increased to a force before which the coco palms along the bank were bending to the ground and snapping with sharp, explosive detonations. A piece of steel cable, used as a "hurricane guy" to hold down a corner of the Consulate in just such an emergency as the present, had parted under the strain and was swiftly flailing the galvanized iron roof of the veranda to pieces. The clang of bells resounded through the town, summoning aid for the pounding schooners along the sea-wall, and in sheltered corners ashore could be seen black knots of men gesticulating wildly in the light of lanterns.

We were now a scant fifty feet from the wall in front of the Consulate, and perhaps twice that distance from the first of the jumble of pounding schooners, the big Eimoo, the largest and fastest trader that sailed from Tahiti. The seas were streaming over her as though she was a surf-beaten rock on a stretch of iron-bound coast, but in the smother on her forward deck some of her crew could be seen surging round the capstan in a frantic effort to haul her off the deadly wall. From the ships beyond came a babel of shoutings that rose above the grind and pound of keels, and presently these keyed higher into yells of excitement and dismay as one of the schooners—luckily the last in line—broke loose and began battering to pieces against the barrier of stone.