The wind, still from the northwest, increased steadily as the afternoon lengthened, the yacht, under all-plain sail, driving along at close to nine knots an hour. About four o'clock, while still making fast time, she struck a large floating log—apparently a bread-fruit trunk—which gouged a long gash on her starboard side as she sped past it. The blow was a glancing one and nothing but the paint was damaged, though the consequences might have been really serious had the point of impact been twenty feet farther forward.
The sun went out behind a horizon of dull, black mud, and through the greasy dusk that was settling over the sea the wind came pouring out of the west with constantly accelerating force. Overhead, the clouds—mostly detached blotches of cumulo-nimbus—surged about in seeming aimlessness, those of the lower air scurrying away before the northwest wind that drove the yacht along, while, a couple of thousand feet or so higher, a counter current of great force from the southwest was ripping to pieces the vaporous masses of the upper heavens and stringing them out in long lines like the wake of a fleet of ferryboats. In the intermediate levels stray mavericks of cloud were pivoting about like prairie cattle milling in a blizzard. The sea, owing to the tendency of the wind to continue hauling westerly, was not running heavily as yet, but a barometer at 29.70—24 points drop in 27 hours—and the ominous aspect of the heavens gave fair warning that it was not the explosive broadside of a passing squall that was to be encountered this time, but the sustained bombardment of a real storm.
We were still a couple of months away from the so-called hurricane season, but hurricanes—like nuggets in the prospector's proverb—are where you find them, and it was on record that they had occurred in the southwest Pacific every month of the year. At any rate, the time for preparation for weather of some kind was plainly at hand, beginning with an immediate and expeditious shortening of canvas. No halfway measures to tide over a few hours' blow were resorted to. The maintopmast staysail was taken in and the lower sail reduced to double-reefed foresail, triple-reefed mainsail and reefed and unbonneted forestay-sail. Extra lashings were thrown on boats, water-butts, spars and other movables, and the skylights were closed and battened with planks to protect from waves that might break inboard.
Things were snugged up just in time, for at eight o'clock, to the accompaniment of a tenth more drop in the barometer, the storm broke fiercely in a heavy squall of rain; the next thirty-six hours were crowded full of education in the ways of a South Pacific gale. The after leach of the foresail carried away at nine o'clock and for some minutes the flogging canvas played a lively game of crack-the-whip with the sailors who were trying to smother it. Soon the effect of the wind began to show upon the sea, and all through the night the increasing force of the staggering blows upon the weather bow and the Maxim-like rattle of driven spray upon the sails told of steadily mounting waves. Rain kept pouring in heavy squalls, the fierce blasts serving to beat flat for brief spaces the rising swells, but only to release them to more furious onslaughts the moment the compressed-air buffers of the wind rolled on ahead.
At midnight the barometer was down to 28.50, after reading which the mate came on deck complaining that some one had knocked the bottom out of it. The yacht was behaving splendidly, and, except for the threat in the rapid falling of the barometer, our only serious worry was on account of the uncomfortable proximity of the extensive Curacao Reef and Shoals. We were chopping along on a W.S.W. course, which, allowing for a reasonable leeway, we reckoned would carry us a good ten miles to the windward of the danger point. Nevertheless, remembering our experience with Bellinghausen Island, a sharp watch was kept to leeward until morning.
Daylight broke from the southeast through an infernal cloud-shoal of copper and sulphur and tallow and olive upon a desolation of wallowing snow-capped mountain peaks. The wind, which the previous afternoon had been blowing with a force of less than "5" in the Beaufort Scale, had held from the same quarter all night and was now hurtling down on us at near "9." Seas, confounding in height, steep and sharp-crested, with hollow green sides and black, swollen bases, came charging down from the west in broken-ranked stampede. The yacht, under the scanty canvas still on her, was wonderfully buoyant, rising and falling to the waves like an empty biscuit tin, her comparatively short length giving her an advantage in recovering from a dive into the depths in time to meet the lift of the coming wave that would not have been shared by a larger ship. The decks were repeatedly swept by the last yard or two of a sharp crest that she could not quite surmount, but not once did she put her bowsprit into green water when she had not pulled up to an angle that allowed her to shake free from the ensuing deluge in time to meet the next wave.
The leaps from hollows to crests, and from crests back to hollows, were positively appalling in the contrasts of the sudden transitions. Up out of the fog of foam in the trough the yacht would stagger, and not until she stabbed the curling crest and began teetering undecidedly on the ridge would the wind that had been shrieking in the upper rigging have a chance to strike the hull. Then it came all at once, a palpably solid block of air, and no man could stand against it on the open deck. An instant more, and it was as though the world was falling away beneath her, and down, down, down she would go until one stirred and glanced at his neighbour and set himself for the jar of the keel against the bottom of the sea.
It was those age-long moments in the hollows, with half the weather sky and all the wind cut off, with the eyes blinded and the throat choked with spume, with the ears deafened with the thunderous volleys of the flapping sails, and in the heart the vague and ever-haunting dread that the next wave would be the one to break, the one against which the yacht's seaworthiness and the helmsman's cunning would alike be of no avail, that were the hardest to endure. The trough of the sea in a big storm is the nearest thing to primal chaos that can be experienced in this age of the world; only one must be in a small craft to get the full benefit of it. Apropos of which it may be of interest to note here that at this very time, 500 miles to the northeast, our friend McGrath, the trader of Nukahiva, who had been cast away from the Marquesas some weeks previously, was fighting through this same storm in a thirty-foot open boat in a desperate effort to make the harbour of Pago Pago.
The Commodore had just come on deck at seven o'clock with the disconcerting news that the barometer was down to 28.30 and still falling, when the lookout threw a bombshell on his own account into the cockpit by a half-articulate, wind-choked hail to the effect that he had sighted land abeam to lee. No one said anything as the yacht began to climb the next wave, but "Drifting on Curacao Reef" was written plain on every face; the angling slant of our quickly-quenched wake told only too plainly of the fearful leeway we were making. Each clawing the salt dust from his eyes with one hand, clutching a shroud or halyard with the other, and bracing mightily against the wind, we waited for the view to open up to leeward as the schooner reached the ridge of the soaring sea up which she struggled, to behold with untold relief, not the imminent and unending line of great breakers on a coral reef which we had expected, but a black triangle of rock, fully twenty miles distant, standing sharp and clear as the Cheop's Pyramid against the grey sky.
"Boscawen Island; barren rock, 2,000 feet high," quoted the Commodore from the Directory; to add, with renewed excitement, "But if that's Boscawen Island, then where in the name of—Neptune—is the Curacao Reef and Shoals?" Then, his eyes turning to the windward horizon in a puzzled search as the yacht topped the next wave, "We must have drifted right across them if the chart is right!"