Our Island Home.
The Illusion of the Golden Haze—The Wall of breakers—A Struggle for Life—The Islet of Palms.
“Keel never ploughed that lonely sea,
That isle no human eye hath viewed;
Around it still in tumult rude,
The surges everlastingly,
Burst on the coral-girded shore
With mighty bound and ceaseless roar;
A fresh unsullied work of God,
By human footstep yet untrod.”
The native lad now seemed to be quite overwhelmed with grief. He had made no manifestations of it while we were endeavouring to discover some trace of his companions, but when at length we relinquished the attempt, and it became certain that they had all perished, he uttered a low, wailing cry, full of distress and anguish, and laying his head upon his hands, sobbed bitterly.
The Frenchman had told us that the island lay to the northward; and we now put the head of the boat in that direction, steering by the sun, which was just setting.
When the first violence of the boy’s grief had somewhat abated, Arthur spoke to him gently, in the dialect of the Society Islands. He listened attentively, turning his large eyes upon Arthur’s face with an expression of mingled timidity and interest and replied in a low, musical voice. They seemed to understand one another, and talked together for some time. The language spoken by the boy, differed so little, as Arthur told us, from that of the Tahitians, that he easily gathered the meaning of what he said. Upon being questioned as to the distance of the island, and the course which we must steer in order to reach it, he pointed to a bright star, just beginning to be visible in the north-east.
It is customary with the South-sea Islanders, before setting out on their long voyages, in which it is necessary to venture out of sight of land, to select some star by which to regulate their course in the night-time; this they call the “aveia,” or guiding star of the voyage. They are thus enabled to sail from island to island, and from group to group, between which all intercourse would otherwise be impossible without a compass. The star now pointed out to us, had been fixed upon by the companions of the little islander, at the commencement of their ill-fated voyage, as marking the direction of the home which they were destined never to regain. Among other things, we learned from the boy, that his native island, which we were now endeavouring to reach, was the largest of a group of three, over all of which his father’s authority, as chief or king, extended: that there were six whites living among them, who had arrived there many years before, with the one who had just perished, and had come from an uninhabited island to the southward, upon which they had been wrecked.
During the night the wind continued fair, and animated by the hopes to which the statements of the little native had given rise, we renewed our watch, which had lately been discontinued, and sailed steadily northward, cherishing a strong confidence that we should reach land before morning.
The second watch—from a little after midnight to dawn—fell to me. As it began to grow light I almost feared to look northward, dreading the shock of a fresh disappointment, that must consign us again to the benumbing apathy from which we had yesterday rallied.
There seemed to me to be something unusual in the atmosphere, that impeded, or rather confused and bewildered the sight; and when the sun rose, I had not made out anything like land. It was not mist or fog, for the air was dry, and there were already indications of a fiercely hot day, though it was yet fresh and cool. The sky above us, too, was perfectly clear, all the clouds seemed to have slid down to the horizon, along which a white army of them was marshalled, in rounded fleecy masses, like Alpine peaks towering one above another, or shining icebergs, pale and cold as those that drift in Arctic seas.