About an hour after the boat had gone, we set to work to get some coconuts to drink, both for ourselves and the boat's crew when they returned. Yorke ascended a very tall palm—about sixty feet in height—like a native, and began throwing down the young nuts. I took a shorter tree near by, and was leisurely twisting off the heavy nuts, when he, who had a good view of the sea, called out to me that it had fallen calm.
“And what I don't like, Drake, is this,” he added—“there's a dull, greasy look on the water over to the eastward there, and I'd like to be on board the Francesca instead of being here. I don't like it, I can tell you, and I'm sorry we did not go off in the boat.”
I, in my fatuous, youthful conceit, laughed at his forebodings.
“It's only a New Britain squall—a lot of wind for ten minutes, then a power of rain for another twenty, and then it'll be over.”
Yorke, however, was too old and experienced a seaman to disregard the signs of coming danger. He quickly descended from his tree, and I followed suit.
“There's something more than a squall coming, my lad. Let us cut through the bush across to the weather side of the island, and try and stop the boat. We can do it if we are quick.”
The island was less than a mile in width, even at its broadest portion, which was where we had landed; so, after a hurried drink, we picked up our rifles and started off to try to intercept the boat as she was pulling down the outer and eastern shore. But before we had made two hundred yards, we came to a dead stop, our progress being barred by a dense thicket of thorny and stunted undergrowth. We turned aside and skirted the thicket for a quarter of a mile, then tried again, with the same result—it was absolutely impossible to force our way through the obstacle.
By this time the air had become stiflingly hot and oppressive, and the rapidly darkening sky presaged the coming storm. From every pore in our bodies the perspiration was streaming profusely, and our hands and faces were scratched and bleeding.
“We must go back,” said Yorke, “we cannot possibly get to the other side of the island through this damnable scrub. The only thing we can do is to run along the inner beach of the island till we come to its end, wade across the reef, and try to stop the boat before she has gone too far. This is no common squall, I'm afraid—it's going to be a hurricane. Come on.”
We started off at a run, along the hard sand, but before we had done the first quarter of a mile, I felt that I could go no further, for I was pumped out, could scarcely breathe, and felt a strange, unnatural faintness overcoming me—a not uncommon sensation experienced by many people just before a hurricane or an earthquake.