The inevitable end of every South Sea trading schooner
A Tahitian couple
For us on the Lurline there was nothing more to be done. Jewelry and other portable valuables had been tossed into a canvas sack, and the Mater and Claribel, swathed in life-preservers, hurriedly coached as to the proper manner of jumping ashore from the taffrail of a grounded yacht. White figures had appeared, clinging to the pillars of the Consulate veranda, ready—as we afterwards learned—to rush to our aid when the schooner struck. There was still some question as to whether it was the Eimoo we were going to bump first, or the wall; or first the former, and then, in company with her, the latter. The Commodore was just grimly opining that salvage operations would be simpler if Lurline and Eimoo struck separately, when the squall gave up its rain, the wind and sea fell sufficiently to allow the anchors to hold, and the worst was all over in a minute.
The squall had blown itself out not a moment too soon, for when the anchors finally stopped dragging one could have stood in the cockpit and skimmed a biscuit over the port quarter to the veranda of the Consulate, while flung to starboard at a similar angle it would have sailed to the deck of the Eimoo. For the present we were safe until another squall blew up, in which event, especially if it came from anywhere to the east of north, the twenty-five fathoms of chain out to each of the anchors would be enough to allow us to swing around onto the sea-wall. Plainly it was imperative that the yacht be worked into a safer position without delay.
The sky was darkening again to the north as the Commodore sent me ashore with orders not to return without the crew, or a working equivalent. The town was in an uproar, and the impracticability of rounding up a "working equivalent" of the crew was at once apparent. Two schooners and a sloop were loose and pounding to pieces upon the wall, and these had first claim to volunteer or "pressed" aid. The gendarmerie, assisted by soldiers from the barracks, were going about the streets and into the clubs and hotels requisitioning relief forces, and I was at my wit's end for half an hour dodging the minions of the law and avoiding service with one of these press gangs.
At last the crew was run to cover at the end of a fragrant tunnel of blossoming burao and flamboyant, where the wail of concertinas and the throb of hard-hit drum logs told me that a hula was in progress, even before I had pushed aside a cluster of hibiscus and peered in at a window. Bill, the light-footed Dane of the port watch, the axis of a vortex of capering vahines, was leaping in the maddest of hornpipes to the music of an accordion, with bugle obligato by Perkins, who had mastered that instrument while in the navy. Big, blond Gus, surrounded by another nimbus of tropic loveliness, was draining a newly-cracked coconut as he would have tossed off a seidel of lager, and Victor, the mate, a white tiare blossom behind each ear, was shifting a cat's cradle from his rack of stubby, red fingers to a frame of slender brown ones. It was a shame to put an end to their innocent fun, but the north was blackening again, and—well, a sailor must learn to take his pleasure as a patron of a railway lunch counter does his food, in hasty gulps. Besides, there would probably be other evenings ashore, and the way of a stranger in Tahiti to a session of song and dance is the turning to the first open door.
How thoroughly engrossing these little parties are may be judged from the fact that the crew came along only under protest, swearing, jointly and severally, that they had heard nothing whatever of a storm which, as was afterwards estimated, did a hundred thousand francs' damage on the water front of Papeete and destroyed the season's crop of bananas and plantains!