Count Luckner, the Sea Devil

by Lowell Thomas; Graf von Felix Luckner

We had all along figured that we might have to go to the Fiji Islands, where a constant stream of sailing ships was always taking aboard copra for the munition factories in the United States. But we also were fully aware that sailing in a little open boat from the Cook Islands to the Fijis might easily be a perilous venture. Our voyage so far had gone fairly smoothly. There had been no hurricanes, and we thanked God for that. Our itinerary from our starting point at Mopelia in the Society group to the adjoining Cook group and among the islands of the latter represented jumps of several hundred miles each and quite a few days at sea. On to the Fijis, however, meant a sail across twenty degrees of longitude. The first half of the jaunt, or about a thousand miles, was over a vast open space of sea where there were no islands on which to find fresh food or on which to take refuge in case of need. In fact, we were to sail for thirteen days out of sight of land. We had expected, when we left Mopelia, that the leg to the Fijis would be a hard one, even if we had fair weather all the way. But now the weather turned against us for a whole week, and we began to think we had run across St. Swithin's day. We had forgotten—if we had ever known it—that this was the time when the equinoctial storms broke in those waters. Had we known it, we never would have headed for the Fijis.

For ten days we sailed through a drenching downpour, the rainy season. The sea was choppy. The wind whipped the spray and the crests of waves over us in driving sheets. In our cockleshell, things were afloat, and it was bitter cold o' nights. We threw our mattresses overboard. In their soaked condition they were far worse to sleep on than the wet planks, and there was no use keeping them any longer. When the sun occasionally shone, our drenched clothes would dry quickly and stiffen like boards of salt. They rubbed and scratched the skin off our bodies. When they got wet again, which they promptly did, the salt would soak into the raw flesh and inflame it. Our bodies felt as though they were on fire. We had no regular sleep. Instead, a man would doze away suddenly at almost any time. Even the helmsman would drowse off like that, and, with a free rudder, the boat would veer around crazily.

One morning, when dawn came, we could hardly believe our eyes. The sea had turned from its normal blue to yellow. On scooping up a pail of it we found a scum that we concluded must be brimstone and ash. We were sailing through a field of brimstone. For three days we saw from horizon to horizon this yellowish expanse of volcanic dust. It no doubt came from some submarine eruption, perhaps the one we could thank for the tidal wave that had wrecked the Seeadler. The waves carried the gritty dust into the boat. It penetrated everything. Every surface became like sandpaper. Our skin grew rough and caked with it. Our blankets were like sandpaper, and so were our clothes.

As the voyage grew longer, we had to be more and more sparing with our drinking water. The supply began to run low. We could no longer collect rain water in our sails. They were coated with salt. We tried to wash them out in the rain, but then the spray and the waves kept washing in and kept the sails salty and added a further salting to any water we collected. Our supply of fruit that we had picked up in the Cook Islands ran out now, and about all we had left was hardtack, not in itself a thirst-quenching kind of food. We also had a side of delicious bacon, but of course we dared not touch it for fear of increasing our thirst. You have often heard of the torments of thirst at sea? Well, they are not exaggerated, for exaggeration is impossible. When the rains stopped and the blazing tropical sun beat down on us all day and we still had days to sail on and on, then the torments of the damned, the torments of thirst smote us with a fiery agony. Our gums dried out and were like rough iron. We sucked our fingers and gnawed at our knuckles to bring a flow of saliva and refresh our burning mouths.

And then came the sailor's worst enemy, scurvy. Our diet of hardtack, lack of exercise, and general hardships brought it on. Our knees swelled up so badly that we had to cut our trousers. The rocking of the boat knocked them together or against the wooden sides, and then the pain was almost unendurable. Our lips were black and broken. Our tongues were swollen and hard. It was as if you had a stone in your mouth. Our gums became snow white and seemed to recede. Our teeth felt as though they were sticking far out of our jaws. They hurt constantly and were loose and felt as if they were going to drop out. With these shaking teeth we ate our hardtack. I never before knew how hard hardtack was. We had unending headaches, and it seemed as if something were pressing our eyes right out of their sockets. We got water in our legs, and could hardly stand any more. We had to slide around the seats to do what had to be done in navigating the boat. In scurvy, the blood turns to water, first in the legs and then upward. When it reaches the heart you die. Where the blood is water the flesh is white, and you can see the line of the white creep slowly up. We wondered who would be the first—the first to have the line of white rise to the heart. My boys made marks to show the line clearly and mark its daily progress upward. It was a kind of sport. It was keeping a daily log, a log of death. Parmien was the youngest of us, but he seemed to be on his way to win the race. The line was higher on him than on the others. He joked about it. There was nothing terrible in it. We were all in a deep apathy. Our brains were like balls of cotton. Nothing mattered, certainly not death. Death would come, we thought, as a relief from these sufferings. The prospect of its arrival became more and more attractive.

"Boys," I said, "let us take pieces of ballast iron and tie them around our necks. One plunge and in a few seconds all of our pains will be gone."

"Yes. All right." There were mutterings of assent.

But Parmien, the youngest, the one who was nearest death, picked up the comic volume, Fritz Reuter's Trip to Constantinople, and began to read a funny story. We all laughed. That book had eased many a hard hour before, on this ghastly voyage, and now, perhaps, it saved our lives.

And so we continued on with but one instinct left in us, the sailor's instinct to navigate his craft. Mechanically, without any particular hope, without any particular thought, we trimmed the sails, guided the helm, and calculated our position as best we could. Nautical science was at a low ebb among us now. We were too far gone to reckon exactly where we were, and were only vague in our steering. All we knew was that we should steer to the west where the island groups were.

You have read in many a sea story about the delight, the almost insane ecstasy, of castaway men adrift in open boats who are dying of hunger, thirst, and disease, when, at last, a rescuing ship approaches or they see land. No matter how the writers describe it, even the greatest of writers, they can tell you only a tiny bit, only a grain of sand. So, I won't try to say how we felt when we saw a speck on the horizon and the speck grew bigger and turned into the familiar green of a tropical island. We had been so much like dead men, who had thought that nothing could ever make us glad again. By Joe, that sight gladdened our hearts, though. We grew even weaker, but it was the weakness of happiness. As we drew near, we thought of nothing but land, fresh water, and soft food, a soft banana, for our loose, shaky teeth. Never mind ships or capturing ships. Never mind being taken prisoners. We headed straight toward a crude pier that stuck out into the water.