Robert Louis Stevenson was lost for nearly two weeks among these lagoons; whaling and trading ships avoid them; and navigators have given them the name Dangerous Archipelago.
We had been in the Marquesas Islands a little over two weeks when Jack decided that we had better be getting on. So word was sent out to the natives that on a certain day we would want fruit and fowl; and on that day, canoes were coming and going from daybreak to twilight, and by evening our decks were littered with good things of every shape and colour; the life-boat had been filled with oranges; sacks containing pineapples, yams, and taro were piled on the deck; the cockpit was so full of green cocoanuts that there was barely room left for us to steer; and there were bananas of every stage of ripeness, from very green to very ripe, hung upside down to the davits.
We had expected to start away on December 17, p181 but we did not do so, for late in the afternoon a white spot showed on the horizon at the mouth of the bay and gradually got brighter until the schooner Tameraihoe Tahiti dropped anchor close to us. Here was news, and we could not leave until we knew what was going on in the world. The schooner had met the steamer in Papeete, Tahiti, two months before, and had some three-months-old San Francisco papers aboard.
There were three white men on this ship. One was such an interesting subject that I must tell of him. He had come years before, when only a young man. He was in the employ of some trading concern that he still worked for, and on his rounds among the islands he had met and fallen in love with a native girl, but she only laughed at him, saying that he was not nearly so good-looking as the natives, because not tattooed. Now, the girl's brother was just learning this art, and as he thought the white man's skin would be fine for practise, he persuaded the trader to be tattooed. The man quit the company, and for six months lived in a native house in the mountains while the boy practised tattooing on him every day, until the work was done and the skin healed up. Then he made his way to the girl's home. At first the girl was frightened; then she nearly went into hysterics, and ridiculed him; and finally, she insulted him in the worst possible manner—she spat upon him, and ran away into the jungle. And the tattooed white man never saw her p182 again. Now he is one of the wealthiest men in Polynesia; pearl shell, copra, and sandalwood have reaped him a fortune that is of no use to him, for he can never return to civilised people again.
On December 18 we left Taiohae Bay, at seven-thirty in the evening. We started thus late because we had to wait for a land-breeze to spring up before we could set sail. The trading vessel gave us three salutes with their cannon as we started. Owing to the lightness of the breeze, we were an hour getting out. All the time the vessel was giving us three salutes, while Hermann kept the shotgun hot answering. As long as I live, I shall never forget that clearing. The full moon was just rising over the mountains, making it almost as light as day. We caught the trades just out of the mouth, and soon were flying southeast at six knots. No one was seasick; it seemed almost as if we had not been ashore at all, but were still on the long traverse from Hilo.
The days were very hot. We accordingly changed our working hours, getting up early and laying off during the extreme heat. I say "working hours," but the truth is that extremely little work was done at all. Jack wrote as usual, Mrs. London did her typing, and all took their tricks at the wheel, but most of the time we just lay around on deck and read or chatted.
For the first two days or so we skirted the shores of numerous small islands of the Marquesan group, p183 but we soon left them behind. On the fourth day out, squalls began to blow up every few minutes, looking like storms as they came up over the horizon, but always fizzling away in a little rain. That evening the wind suddenly shifted from east to west, sending the sails across deck with a boom, almost enough to tear the masts out. As it was, it carried away a stanchion on the rail, and the boom tackle.
Everybody's nerves were on end, what of the nasty and uncertain weather. According to the chart, we had a coral reef about fifteen miles on either side of us, making this a bad place in which to encounter a storm. Early on the morning of the 24th, we sighted cocoanut palms on our port side, but no land at all, only the tall palms above the horizon. We left them behind, and soon picked up another island, but could see only the palms as before, though more of them. The barometer had been falling for thirty-six hours, and numerous quick squalls swept over us. All hands were kept on deck all of Christmas Eve and all of Christmas Day. No one seemed to realise that it was Christmas, for the heat and squalls and barometer together had greatly worried us. This was the middle of the typhoon season, and we were in the most dangerous part of the world for storms.
The day after Christmas we sighted the tall cocoanut palms growing on the first of the Taumotu Islands; then for two days longer we could see the tops of the palm trees on every side, but during this time we p184 could catch no glimpse of land, as the islands rise only between two and six feet above the water, and cannot be seen over five or six miles away.
Jack had decided that our first stop in the Taumotus would be on one of the largest of the atolls, known as Rangiroa. Early on the fifth morning we sighted what we supposed to be this atoll. We had not been able to make observations since leaving the Marquesas, for the sky had been overcast with low, black, threatening clouds, so we were navigating by dead reckoning only; and as the currents and tides are known to be very treacherous, it was merely blind guess-work instead of real navigating.