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

We watched for an hour for the phantom reef with no result. There was little left to worry about on the score of danger, as we were well to the lee of the points dotted out as shoal on the chart, while in our own lee the sea stretched clear and open to Boscawen and beyond; but the manner of the mystery of this piece of marine legerdemain was—or would have been at a time when there was less to think about—an absorbing problem. Certain it was that our leeway was proving greater than our headway; also that, irrespective of the correctness of our reckoning of the day before, the yacht could not have reached the position she was in without drifting squarely across some portion of either the reef or shoal as they were charted. As sailing over the reef was impossible, and over the shoal, at least unknowingly, improbable, we were left to the conclusion that, notwithstanding the fact that neither is marked "P.D.," ("Position Doubtful,") both are incorrectly located on the chart. Outside of the half-dozen archipelagoes most navigated, chart errors in the South Pacific are by no means uncommon.

At eleven o'clock in the forenoon, with the barometer at 28.20, the wind, blowing more furiously than ever, hauled suddenly to S.S.W. At 11.45 the forestay-sail carried away, and, with every fresh blast threatening to strip off the remaining canvas, it did not take long to arrive at the conclusion that we were approaching, rather than getting away from, the centre of disturbance. Whether we had a fully developed hurricane to contend with, or, as was quite possible, a "southwester" of unusual violence, we could not definitely determine. The sinister sky, the low barometer, and the action of the wind up to that time all said "Hurricane"; the season, and the fact that the wind showed a tendency to continue from the Fiji quarter, indicated the "Southwester."

Assuming at the time, therefore, that we were boring into a hurricane whose centre was to the S.S.W., the Commodore made up his mind to hurry away from that centre as expeditiously as possible. Accordingly, after a new forestay-sail had, with considerable difficulty, been bent in the place of the one carried away, all the rest of the canvas was taken off the yacht and, under that sail alone, she was put on the port tack before the wind.

All that afternoon Lurline ran like a frightened deer, with the waves, like hounds, coming up on her trail and snapping viciously at her flanks as they rushed by. Time and again the helmsman, grinding the wheel hard up to keep her before the wind, would glance with the tail of his eye at a foam-splotched wall of green that blotted out the sky astern, to hunch his shoulders and grip his spokes the tighter, waiting with tensed muscles and set face the blow that menaced from above; time and again, yawing desperately as the tail of a galloping sea gave her nose a tweak, the yacht would seem on the point of broaching right under the hollow wall of the comber next in line; time and again—to lee on the windswept crests and to weather in the cross-gusts of the hollows—she would roll a rail deep under and dip up a deckful of solid water from which she could never quite clear herself before another came sousing aboard from the other side: and through it all nothing of serious moment happened.

Meanwhile active preparations for meeting the "worse to come" were underway. A storm trysail was dug out from the obscurity of a musty corner of the lazarette, spars were lashed up for a sea-anchor, bags of oakum were soaked with oil and the life-boats provisioned and watered. When there was nothing more to get ready some one looked at the barometer to find—this was about four in the afternoon—that it had risen twelve points since noon and was still displaying optimistic tendencies.

As it was our intention to run only until the barometer began to rise, all hands were promptly set to bending a new foresail in the place of the one carried away the night before. When this was accomplished we hove her to on the port tack under foresail, close-reefed, and the forestay-sail that was already on her. After that, though the sea continued to increase for some hours, she rode out the night with her deck unswept by anything heavier than the driving spray.

All night the barometer mounted until, at daybreak of the 21st, 28.60 was passed, a juncture at which it was deemed safe to resolve the unused sea-anchor into its component parts and stow the storm trysail and oil bags against another storm. The wind blew fiercely from the southwest all day, and not until midnight, when it began chopping around toward the east, did the sea show any signs of falling. Then it began smoothing rapidly, and by daybreak the yacht very comfortably stood the addition of the close-reefed mainsail and jib.

At noon of the 22nd reefs were shaken out and all-plain sail carried for the first time in four days. The barometer was by then up to 28.78, while the wind, blowing steadily from the southeast, enabled us finally to get back on the Fiji course of S.W. by W. The unclouded sky was a dome of cobalt again, and the sea, coldly green and laced with streaks of foam, a rolling plain of furrowed jade; but in spite of fair weather, the temperature of the air was away down to 74°, and the water but four degrees warmer. The sea, under the influence of the veering wind, continued to fall rapidly all afternoon. At six o'clock the lone rock of Niuafou, the most northwesterly outpost of the Fijis, appeared on the southern horizon, almost immediately to be swallowed up in the gathering dusk.

By morning of the 23rd the wind was back in its regular quarter, E.S.E., but blowing so gently that the yacht, though carrying most of her light sails, could average no better than six or seven knots an hour. The run to noon was 158 miles.