PAPEETE TO PAGO PAGO

Situated well around on the leeward side of the island of Tahiti, with the great 8000-foot peak of Orohena cutting off all but stray gusts of the Trade wind, Papeete harbour is ordinarily as placid a bit of looped-in water as ever mirrored in its depths the silver disc of the tropic moon. Seaward the reef intercepts the surf as completely as does the volcano the wind from the opposite direction, and with the latter blowing from the southeast, where it belongs, the inner bay is safe for even the slenderest of outrigger canoes when the state of the weather outside is such as to keep the mail steamer at its dock. The trading schooners, each with a couple of frizzled mooring lines run out to convenient buraos or banyans, lie right against the tottering sea-wall, and even the dock of the San Francisco and Auckland boats is hardly more than a raised platform on the bank.

No one seems to dream that there is ever going to be other than southeast weather, and no one makes provision against anything else. Then some fine day a hurricane comes boring in from the north or west, and when it is over the survivors salve pieces of ship out of the tops of the coco palms, and perhaps some of them living a quarter of a mile inland, finding a schooner lodged in their taro patch, prop it up on an even keel and use it in place of the house of thatch which has been resolved into its component parts by the storm. In a few weeks every one but the missionaries—who, by the way, are much given to picturing hell for the natives, not as a hot place, but as an island where the lost souls are endlessly tossed by Æon-long hurricanes—has forgotten all about the storm, and is as liable as ever to be caught napping when the next one comes along.

We reached Tahiti somewhat too early for hurricanes, but a very good imitation one in the form of a northwest squall was brought off for our benefit, which left very little to the imagination regarding what a real blow from that direction might mean. It is only the unexpected that is a serious menace to the careful skipper, as I have mentioned before, and it is in this respect that one of these sudden twisters, coming with a fierceness beyond description from an unlikely quarter, may work irreparable harm in spite of all precautions, where a hurricane, heralded for hours, perhaps days, by a falling barometer, may, in a large measure, be prepared for or avoided.

The thing occurred one evening shortly following our arrival in Papeete, just after three days of hard work had obliterated all traces of the internal and external wear and tear incident to the 3000 miles of sailing the yacht had done since leaving Hawaii. She had received a fresh coat of white paint, decks had been scoured, hardwood newly oiled and the brass work rubbed to the highest degree of resplendency. Sails were in covers, awnings up fore-and-aft, deck cushions out of their sea jackets, and, in short, everything made ready to receive official calls. She was lying to her port anchor with twenty-five fathoms of chain out. A kedge astern held her head to the prevailing southeast wind and kept her from swinging with the tide.

So empty of threat was the evening that the crew, with the exception of the single sailor whose turn it was to stand the anchor watch, had been given shore leave. The rest of us, tired from an afternoon of the ceremonious calling exigent upon the newcomers who would break the ice of officialdom in any French colony, were lounging on the quarterdeck and in the cockpit, glad of the chance to unstiffen and be quiet.

It was a night drowsy with soporific suggestiveness. Seaward the air was pulsing to the drowsing monotone of the surf upon the reef, rising and falling at regular intervals like the heavy breathing of a tired sleeper. Landward, a league of liquid lullaby, the tiny wavelets of the bay tinkled on beach and sea-wall, and through the rondure of blue-black foliage which masked the village, lights blinked sleepily, with here and there the tracery of a palm or banana frond showing in dark outline against the warm yellow rectangle of an open doorway. The yacht, rocking gently as a cradle, set the Japanese lanterns around the awnings nodding in languorous lines, and, above and beyond, clouds and stars rubbed lazily against each other in somnolent jumble. The spirit hand of the land breeze in the rigging was sounding the "stand-by" call for the watch of Morpheus.

The arms of the Sleep God must have enfolded with especial tenderness the hulking frame of Heinrich, the husky Teuton who was standing anchor watch, for an inky splotch of cloud had grown from a speck on the northeastern horizon to a bituminous blur that blotted out everything in that quarter from the zenith down, before he raised his head from where he had pillowed it in his arms upon the forecastle ice chest and roused the ship with an explosive "Gott in Himmel!" Simultaneously with that of Heinrich there was another explosion, like the bursting of a Vial of Wrath, and forthwith the gathering squall came charging in across the Motu Iti Quarantine Station on the reef and began systematically scooping dry the bottom of the bay. Spreading like an inverted fan, it blotted out the stars to east and west, and, with the roar of a battery of quick-firers, swept down upon us in a solid wall of air and water, only a few short, nervous puffs of wind scurrying uneasily in advance.

The squall was swooping down to strike the yacht on her port quarter, realizing which, we hurriedly buoyed the line to the now useless kedge and cast it loose. So quiet was the water and air in the half-minute-long interval before the wind came that the yacht lay motionless, half-broadside to the squall's advance, just as she had been stretched to the kedge, and when it struck her inertia was so great that the lee rail was hove well under before she began swinging. The lines of Japanese lanterns snapped in a half dozen places and went streaming off to leeward like the tails of kites. The awnings bellied monstrously and began splitting under the terrific uplift of the wind; and here and there lashings gave way and left corners threshing desperately for freer play.

There were no waves at first; only sheets of water torn from the top of the sea and thrown on ahead. The air was fairly clogged with spray, and the yacht was deluged with water, fore and aft, as though she had no more freeboard than a plank. The boats, which were made fast to booms run out on either side amidships, worked like the arms of Dutch windmills, and one of them, as the yacht reached the end of her cable, was tossed bodily over its boom, to land bottom up and fill.

The yacht was driven across the arc of her cable-sweep as a frightened broncho rushes to the end of his picket rope, and with a somewhat similar result. The anchor fouled and began dragging. So swiftly were we carried down the bay that it seemed inconceivable that there was any anchor at all at the end of the cable, and it was not until later that we ascertained definitely that the chain had not parted. We were heading—or rather backing—at an angle toward the sea-wall, and in a direction which allowed the yacht something over a quarter of a mile to go before she would crash into the line of schooners moored beyond the American Consulate, the grinding and pounding among which became distinctly audible as the interval decreased.

The port anchor was our only hope, and on the getting over and letting go of this the Commodore and Heinrich began furiously working, while to me, with the assistance of a press-gang composed of the Mater, Claribel and the Chinese cook, was delegated the task of reducing the awnings, the great spreads of which were acting as sails in driving the yacht the quicker to an apparently inevitable doom. That there would be ample chance to get ashore in safety, no one had much doubt; but more indubitable still appeared the fact that we were scheduled to have a graphic illustration of the meaning of that commonest of South Sea expressions, "piling up on the beach."

The port anchor was let go and the awnings brought to a fashion of a furl at about the same time, and six white faces, peering anxiously shoreward for results, only paled the more as the foam-white belt that marked the line of the submerged sea-wall continued to grow perceptibly nearer. Stars were appearing under the lower line of the squall along the northern horizon, but the centre of the disturbance was now overhead, and the wind had increased to a force before which the coco palms along the bank were bending to the ground and snapping with sharp, explosive detonations. A piece of steel cable, used as a "hurricane guy" to hold down a corner of the Consulate in just such an emergency as the present, had parted under the strain and was swiftly flailing the galvanized iron roof of the veranda to pieces. The clang of bells resounded through the town, summoning aid for the pounding schooners along the sea-wall, and in sheltered corners ashore could be seen black knots of men gesticulating wildly in the light of lanterns.

We were now a scant fifty feet from the wall in front of the Consulate, and perhaps twice that distance from the first of the jumble of pounding schooners, the big Eimoo, the largest and fastest trader that sailed from Tahiti. The seas were streaming over her as though she was a surf-beaten rock on a stretch of iron-bound coast, but in the smother on her forward deck some of her crew could be seen surging round the capstan in a frantic effort to haul her off the deadly wall. From the ships beyond came a babel of shoutings that rose above the grind and pound of keels, and presently these keyed higher into yells of excitement and dismay as one of the schooners—luckily the last in line—broke loose and began battering to pieces against the barrier of stone.

The inevitable end of every South Sea trading schooner

A Tahitian couple

For us on the Lurline there was nothing more to be done. Jewelry and other portable valuables had been tossed into a canvas sack, and the Mater and Claribel, swathed in life-preservers, hurriedly coached as to the proper manner of jumping ashore from the taffrail of a grounded yacht. White figures had appeared, clinging to the pillars of the Consulate veranda, ready—as we afterwards learned—to rush to our aid when the schooner struck. There was still some question as to whether it was the Eimoo we were going to bump first, or the wall; or first the former, and then, in company with her, the latter. The Commodore was just grimly opining that salvage operations would be simpler if Lurline and Eimoo struck separately, when the squall gave up its rain, the wind and sea fell sufficiently to allow the anchors to hold, and the worst was all over in a minute.

The squall had blown itself out not a moment too soon, for when the anchors finally stopped dragging one could have stood in the cockpit and skimmed a biscuit over the port quarter to the veranda of the Consulate, while flung to starboard at a similar angle it would have sailed to the deck of the Eimoo. For the present we were safe until another squall blew up, in which event, especially if it came from anywhere to the east of north, the twenty-five fathoms of chain out to each of the anchors would be enough to allow us to swing around onto the sea-wall. Plainly it was imperative that the yacht be worked into a safer position without delay.

The sky was darkening again to the north as the Commodore sent me ashore with orders not to return without the crew, or a working equivalent. The town was in an uproar, and the impracticability of rounding up a "working equivalent" of the crew was at once apparent. Two schooners and a sloop were loose and pounding to pieces upon the wall, and these had first claim to volunteer or "pressed" aid. The gendarmerie, assisted by soldiers from the barracks, were going about the streets and into the clubs and hotels requisitioning relief forces, and I was at my wit's end for half an hour dodging the minions of the law and avoiding service with one of these press gangs.

At last the crew was run to cover at the end of a fragrant tunnel of blossoming burao and flamboyant, where the wail of concertinas and the throb of hard-hit drum logs told me that a hula was in progress, even before I had pushed aside a cluster of hibiscus and peered in at a window. Bill, the light-footed Dane of the port watch, the axis of a vortex of capering vahines, was leaping in the maddest of hornpipes to the music of an accordion, with bugle obligato by Perkins, who had mastered that instrument while in the navy. Big, blond Gus, surrounded by another nimbus of tropic loveliness, was draining a newly-cracked coconut as he would have tossed off a seidel of lager, and Victor, the mate, a white tiare blossom behind each ear, was shifting a cat's cradle from his rack of stubby, red fingers to a frame of slender brown ones. It was a shame to put an end to their innocent fun, but the north was blackening again, and—well, a sailor must learn to take his pleasure as a patron of a railway lunch counter does his food, in hasty gulps. Besides, there would probably be other evenings ashore, and the way of a stranger in Tahiti to a session of song and dance is the turning to the first open door.

How thoroughly engrossing these little parties are may be judged from the fact that the crew came along only under protest, swearing, jointly and severally, that they had heard nothing whatever of a storm which, as was afterwards estimated, did a hundred thousand francs' damage on the water front of Papeete and destroyed the season's crop of bananas and plantains!

There was a sinister tower of cloud piled up beyond the reef by the time I had brought my reluctant charges back aboard the yacht, but its east side was showing blacker than its west, and before long we had the satisfaction of seeing it bear off in the former direction and disappear, roaring mightily, behind Point Venus. The rest of the night we were left in peace to haul off out of danger.

For the last two or three hundred yards the yacht had backed in a course which lacked but a few degrees of being parallel to the sea-wall, so that the anchors were but little further from the shore than the schooner herself. "Hauling off," therefore, was a tedious and not entirely simple proceeding. We first hove short on the starboard anchor, broke it out and brought it just awash. Several lashings were then passed through its ring and round and round the port life-boat, just aft of the beam, after which a line from the yacht was made fast to the anchor and the shackle knocked off. This left it suspended in the water in a manner best calculated to trim the boat and not hamper the rowers.

While the boat pulled offshore and dropped the starboard anchor the port was broken out and catted. Then the line from the former was put on the winch and the yacht hauled offshore as far as possible. Here the port anchor was let go, following which the starboard was hove up, re-shackled and dropped again. The next morning, taking advantage of a favourable slant of wind, we dropped back to within a hundred feet of the sea-wall and ran mooring lines to a couple of cannon which projected from the coral, a berth which proved both safe and convenient.

Friday, the 13th of May, was set for our day of departure for Samoa, but the unlucky coincidence of the day of the week and the month evoked such a storm of protest from the sailors that the Commodore postponed sailing for another twenty-fours and thereby lost a fair wind out of the harbour. On the morning of the 14th a fitful N.W. wind blowing directly down the passage made it impossible to get under weigh without running a strong chance of piling the yacht up on the beach. After a bootless wait of a couple of hours for a shift of wind, a line was finally carried to the mail-boat's buoy, out to which the yacht was laboriously hauled by winding in on the winches. Letting go here at noon, we sailed down the bay with a beam wind, dipping in turn to the flags of the American and British Consulates and the gunboat Zelee.

As we hauled up to thread the entrance the wind was brought dead ahead, and for the next fifteen minutes the yacht was put about so often in the scant working room of the narrow passage that the sails were hardly filled on one tack before, with shoaling water and an imminent surf, it was necessary to go off on the other. The trading schooners make it a rule never to attempt the passage with a head wind, but Lurline's superiority in pointing up, as well as the greater ease with which she handled, made comparatively simple a performance that for the others would have been really hazardous. At 12.30 P. M. we were clear of the harbour, and at two o'clock took departure, Point Venus Light bearing S.E. by S., distant eight miles.

Close-hauled to a baffling N.W. wind, a course of due N. was sailed until ten o'clock, when the yacht was put about to a westerly course for the rest of the night, her speed averaging less than six miles an hour. Tahiti was still visible under a dense cloud rack at daybreak, while the northern side of Moorea presented a crazy skyline of sharp pinnacles. Toward noon Neahau was sighted, Raiatea almost immediately appearing beyond. At sunset all the leeward islands were in sight, Tahaa and Bora Bora showing up beyond Raiatea. Between the two former a sharp sail-like rock appeared, the tips of the pinnacles of Moorea were still visible to the south, while above and beyond them a heavy cloudbank betrayed the position of the veiled Orohena.

The north line of Bora Bora showed forward of the starboard beam at daylight of the 16th, our course then being due west. At eight o'clock Tubai raised a fogged outline to the south, and just across its leeward end the hazy form of Marua, the most westerly of the Societies, was dimly visible. Marua and the skyline of the great cliff of Bora Bora held places on the horizon till sunset, and with darkness we saw the last of the French islands.

The wind, which had been light for the last two days, had fallen away entirely by the morning of the 17th, the calm for the next eighteen hours being so complete that the yacht had not enough way to straighten out the log-line. From midnight of the 16th to that of the 17th but twenty-six miles were covered, most of the distance being made in one watch. By morning of the 18th, however, the renegade Trade-wind again began asserting itself, to stand faithfully by nearly all the rest of the way to the Samoas.

The coming of the Trade-wind was coincident with another happening which served graphically to illustrate the dangers that little-navigated seas hold for the most careful skippers. From the observations of the 17th it appeared that Bellinghausen Island, a low uninhabited reef of considerable extent, lay directly upon our course to Tutuila, and at a distance which made it probable that we would come up to it toward the end of the night. Findlay's "Directory" gave warning of a southerly setting current of a mile an hour, allowing for which our course was so altered as to give the dangerous reef an amply wide berth. That course, we figured, would carry us from ten to twenty miles north of the island in spite of the current, but at midnight, to make assurance doubly sure, it was decided to edge still farther to the north, and the course was altered to N.W. by W. This we were to hold until daybreak and then, the danger being past, head off due west for Tutuila again. Of course we would pass out of sight and sound of the reef, we thought; but that was the safest way, and there wouldn't be much to see anyhow.

Just before daybreak, as the yacht, driven by the newfound Trade-wind, was settling contentedly down to an easy eight knots, the excited hail of "Breakers on the lee bow!" brought every one rushing on deck, and presently, out of the dissolving mist ahead, we saw long lines of surf tumbling over a submerged reef, and beyond low drifts of sand scantily covered with scrubby coconuts and pandanus. There was no need of altering our course. Still heading in a direction which we had figured would carry us twenty miles to the north of Bellinghausen Island, we slipped quietly by, a mile off its sinister southern line, before hauling up again for Tutuila. Every point we had altered our course had only brought us nearer to the danger we had sought to avoid, and the chances are, if we had made assurance a bit surer, that, with the added speed of the incidental slant of wind, the yacht would have sailed into the breakers before daylight.

There was nothing wrong with our reckoning on this occasion except the allowance made for the current, and this was figured according to the only authority available. Probably not an average of one ship a year makes the voyage from the Societies to the Samoas, and only the occasional government vessel keeps a record that is likely to be reflected on the charts. The southerly set of the current past the western end of the Societies is, at least in the Fall months, certainly much greater than Findlay estimates it.

With mainsail and foresail wing-and-wing and both gaff topsails set, good speed was made all day of the 18th. Morning of the 19th found the wind dead astern, however, and this, in combination with an exasperating swell which set in from the south for no apparent reason whatever and made it impossible to run wing-and-wing, compelled us to steer a point wide of our course of due west. It was our original intention to rig up a square foresail for this run before the Trade from Tahiti to Samoa, but the baffling headwinds of the first few days made the use of such a sail impossible, and the advantage was deemed hardly worth the trouble for the few days that remained.

We learned later that the heavy seas from the south were the result of a tremendous gale which swept the Pacific beyond the Tropic of Capricorn a few days previously. Beam seas and a strong following wind make about the most uncomfortable combination a fore-and-after can encounter, and the next four days were lively ones aboard Lurline. A sea would come rolling up out of the south in a great sky-scraping ridge of pea green and heel the yacht to starboard until the mainboom dipped into the water and buckled under the strain like a rod before the first rush of a ten-pound salmon. Then it would pass on, leaving the yacht to tumble off its back and roll her port rail under just in time to dip a deckful out of the next wave. Much of the time the foresail was lowered with the boom hauled amidships, and the mainsail, double-reefed, carried to starboard. The jib and forestay-sail were usually set but rendered little service, most of such wind as they caught being shaken out in the roll.

Under these circumstances very creditable speed was made. The run to noon of the 19th was 195 miles, and for the three following days 193, 174 and 175 miles, respectively. The wear and tear on sails and sheets and halyards was very great, however. On the 21st the fore peak halyard chafed through at noon, and at ten P. M. of the same day the forestay-sail sheet came to similar grief. Nothing else carried away before we reached port, but the steady banging of these four days made a general overhauling of the rigging necessary before we were in shape to put to sea again from Pago Pago.

The several small islands which constitute the Manua division of the Samoan group were sighted to the N.E. at daybreak of the 23rd. The peaks of Tutuila, distant forty miles, came above the horizon at four in the afternoon of the same day, but as there was no hope of reaching Pago Pago before dark in the light airs then prevailing, canvas was shortened to mainsail and forestay-sail and the night was spent in standing off and on. Morning of the 24th found us twenty miles off shore, and for several hours the yacht scarcely made steerageway in an almost dead calm. Toward noon a light easterly breeze sprang up, and taking advantage of every puff we managed to worry in through the cliff-walled entrance of the remarkable bay of Pago Pago by three o'clock.

The port doctor met us as we came abreast of the quarantine station and piloted the yacht up the bay to an anchorage, but through a faulty diagnosis of the lay of the bottom, combined with a faulty prescription when his original mistake was discovered, missed only by the narrowest of margins leaving his patient a subject for the marine hospital. A few of the details may be worth recording in their bearing on the much-mooted question of the advisability of placing surgeons in command of the government hospital ships.

The doctor boarded the yacht as she came gliding up before the gentle evening breeze, and after satisfying himself that she bore no evidences of plague or yellow fever in cabin or forecastle, kindly volunteered, in the absence of a harbour master (which functionary the port did not boast), to show us the way to the safest and most convenient anchorage available for a visiting craft. We accepted his well-meant offer without misgivings, and the quarantine boat, its gaily-turbaned fita-fitas leaning lazily on their oars, was soon trailing astern, while the doctor, clearing his throat, began "piloting."

"Straight down the middle," was his first order; and "Straight down middl', Sir," muttered Perkins at the wheel, holding the yacht to her even course up the bay in apparently correct interpretation of the direction as meaning something akin to the regulation "Steady as she goes."

"Now in past the Wheeling," was the next command; and when we had swept smartly in past the U. S. S. Wheeling, "Now edge in a bit toward the shore," carried the yacht under the shadow of the towering southwestern harbour walls.

At this juncture the doctor went forward to reconnoiter, and while we still slipped at no mean speed through the water—quite without apprehension because of the considerable distance still intervening between the yacht and the apparently steep-to-shore—the excited order came booming back to "Keep her off! Keep her off!"

Here was a properly phrased nautical order at last, and Perkins grinned appreciatively as he spun the wheel up, mechanically muttering "Keep 'er off, Sir." An instant later the Commodore, dashing wildly aft, cleared the cockpit rail at a bound, and, knocking the surprised Perkins backward with his shoulder, began climbing up the spokes of the wheel like a monkey as he threw it hard down. The yacht wavered for an instant, as though confused by the unwonted treatment, and then, with a slatting of canvas and banging of blocks, came up into the wind and paid off on the other tack just in time to avoid the thrust of a jutting point of coral. We felt fully justified in setting aside our volunteer pilot and finding our own anchorage after that.

Regarding which it might be in order to explain that the shores of Pago Pago Bay, though the volcanic walls themselves shelve off abruptly to a great depth, are fringed with a hundred-yard-wide table of coral which rises to within three or four feet of its surface all the way around. The outer edge of the latter drops off sheer to deep water, and anywhere beyond is good anchorage. The doctor, of course, knew of this coral bank but had miscalculated its position. When its jagged brown rim suddenly leered up at him through the green water, quite correctly anticipating that if the yacht drove in upon it she might do herself harm, he very naturally shouted to "Keep her off!" which order the man at the wheel, quite as naturally, interpreted to mean "Keep her off the wind." This he did, with the result that he was heading her more directly than ever onto the reef, when the Commodore, catching the lay of things and realizing the danger of complicating an already hopelessly mixed situation by giving orders, sprang to the wheel himself, threw the yacht up into the wind and avoided by a scant dozen feet the jagged edge of the coral bank.