Under Sail

by Lincoln Colcord

"About this time it fell flat calm; he noticed a heavy squall gathering on the eastern horizon. He took down the sail and started to row with two short oars which he carried for an emergency. But four or five miles lay between him and the island; before he'd covered a third of the distance, the squall met him head on.

"It was one of those savage arch-squalls that occur on the fringe of the trade winds once or twice in the course of a year. The island lay to windward of him; he didn't set the sail, of course, for he would have been unable to do anything but run before it. In fact, there was nothing left but to try to keep her head in the wind with the two short oars. The squall became more violent; a short choppy sea sprang up as if by magic, and spray flew from the wave-tops in blinding sheets. At last he had to give it up. He managed to save the oars; with one of them in his hand he scrambled aft. The boat sped around like a chip as his weight settled in the stern. Then she gathered headway, and he began to steer, running away from the island. Darkness was falling; he couldn't see how fast he was dropping the land. But his sailor's instinct told him all about it. As night closed in, he realized the worst; he and the whaleboat were being blown to sea.

"It seemed as if the squall would never end. The gale rushed at him for hours, a veritable hurricane of wind, accompanied by a deluge of warm rain. He was badly frightened, not so much for his physical safety as on account of his imagination. He says that during those long hours of tumult and darkness, a premonition of doom became as real to his fancy as if an actual spirit, an embodiment of disaster, had settled down out of the night to keep him company. He didn't feel alone—fate sailed with him.

"In the morning, the island had, of course, disappeared. The squall had at length passed over; the sea grew calm, and the hot sun burned down on the water. It remained calm all day, so that he couldn't use the sail. He rowed the heavy boat until his hands could barely touch the oars, steering as best he knew how by the sun. He had no compass, and his idea of the direction of the island was vague; the squall, he thought, had struck him from about E.S.E., but he couldn't be certain. It might have veered a point or two in the night, blowing him off at a new angle. And what did it matter?—for he couldn't pick out the points of the compass with the wind gone and the sun directly overhead. A horrible fear oppressed him that with all his frantic pulling he was shaping a course past the island. But which side—which side? As the day wore on, with no land appearing, this fear became a certainty.

"The second night was terrible; he had begun to comprehend the immensity of the ocean. He was lost on the Pacific. Nothing but a miracle of miracles would lead him back to the island. In his mind's eyes he saw a chart of the region; a dot marked the island, a smaller dot his present position—the rest was a waste of waters. Thousands of lines radiated from the smaller dot; these were the possible directions in which he might steer. Only three or four of them approached the island; the rest led nowhere.

"He remembered that he was far from the track of vessels. Not that he wanted to return to the world, but a vessel might help him to find the island. He was too full of life to want to die.... Scenes of the island crossed his mind with poignant intensity. They would be searching for him in their frail dug-out canoes. The women would be wailing behind the village. Would his love believe that he had left her? No, he felt her faith, across the silence. In fancy, he saw her standing at the head of the beach, where she had first appeared to him. But her face now was drawn in wild sorrow, her streaming eyes ranged the horizon as if she would pierce the veil of death. He cried out to her; but the vast cavern of the sky swallowed his words.

"It would have been merciful to kill him there in the boat; hunger and thirst of the body are nothing, are soon over with. But think of the surpassing cruelty of saving him! Great pains were taken to that end; winds were manipulated, a ship was selected and driven from her course; it was as if the elements had conspired together and the whole machinery of the universe had paused a moment for the consummation of the act. On a certain morning he was sighted from the quarter-deck of the Vanguard; an hour later he was picked up, half dead from thirst, and babbling of an island—as mad as a hatter, of course, since the nearest land was the Marquesas, five hundred miles away"

III

"I've often tried to imagine Devereux's outlook on life, as he begged the captain of the Vanguard that morning to turn his ship about and institute a search for an uncharted island. How the refusal must have stunned him, with the reality still a living presence in his heart. By Jove, you know, the smell of the land lingered in his nostrils as if he'd just that moment left it; he could hear the voices, could feel the touch of lips that were barely parted from his.... But they were rough and practical on board the Vanguard; they had to be, for weren't they sailing in the employment of a strictly ordered enterprise? They laughed at him, and held their course. It was then that he began to hate a world that wouldn't listen. He's used to it now; like the savages, he has learned his lesson. And his interpretation of it is accepted only as a further indication of his madness. He says simply that we have lost our souls.

"On the top of this, came the experience in San Francisco. To have his hopes raised so high, only to be shattered overnight when public interest threw down the new plaything, was the final stroke of disillusionment. He went back to the sea; this was his only means of livelihood, and in spite of the romantic hallucination he remained a good sailor. The ship on which he sailed from San Francisco took him south through the Pacific, along the route of homeward bound vessels. This, of all Pacific sailing routes, strikes nearest to the region where Devereux had been lost and found. But it doesn't run quite far enough to the westward actually to cross it. Devereux went to the captain, told him straight-forwardly the inwardness of his trouble and adventure, and begged him to shift the course a little—just to run to leeward, so that they might strike the longitude of the place. He didn't ask to waste any time in search. But the captain, who'd heard about his mate before he shipped him, saw nothing in this but a mild outcropping of the madness, and of course couldn't listen to the appeal. Running a ship to leeward was a matter of dollars and cents.... So they drew near the island, passed it a few hundred miles away, and left it astern as they picked up the southeast trades.