PAGO PAGO TO SUVA

We sailed from Pago Pago for Fiji on the afternoon of June 18th. Just as the anchor had been catted and the yacht was filling away on her first tack a madly paddled canoe shot alongside and a letter was thrown aboard. It was addressed only to the "Yotta," no individual being specified, and ran as follows:

"Talofa. My love to you. Please send me one bicycle."

It was signed by one of the handmaidens of Seuka, the taupo of Pago Pago. For a simple, direct appeal this struck me as coming pretty near the record, and it is a pleasure to relate that, six months later, it met with a deserved reward. There are several ways to reach it, but no smoother road to the South Sea maiden's heart than the "bicycle path."

As we stood in past the Adams a crowd of our native friends on the dock began singing the plaintive half Samoan, half English farewell song, "Tuta-pai, mai feleni"—("Good-bye, my Friend") and the oft repeated refrain, "O Ai neppa will fa-get you," followed us till the yacht passed out of hearing around the point. The kindliest, handsomest and most amiable people in all the South Pacific, these Samoans.

It was our hope to put up a new record for the Samoa-Fiji run, as we had done for that from the Marquesas to Tahiti, but the flukiness of the wind, which became apparent as soon as we were clear of the harbour, held out little promise of success. The air was abnormally clear and the sky, unusually deep and rich in colour, hardly flecked by a cloud. The sea, owing to the veering tendency of the wind, was light and even. The wind was blowing fitfully from its regular quarter, E.S.E., when we came out in the early afternoon, but shortly began coming in puffs from due east. Then it blew slightly more southerly for a half hour, before hauling up to E.N.E., and so all afternoon, as a tide creeps foot by foot up a beach, it kept chopping around to the north. By dark it had worked on to N.N.W., and was blowing, not steadily, but in jerky puffs of ominous import.

The sunset that evening was a sinister thing of red and black. The sun, glowing like a huge coal, dropped down behind the southwest end of Tutuila just as the veering wind drove up a bank of sooty clouds from the lee of the island and began blowing it to pieces. The clouds tore up into inky strips, darkly opaque, like the bars of a grate, and between the bars, sullenly, murkily, hotly red, the unobscured sky glowed like the inside of a furnace. For the space of a minute, or two, or three, this held, with its magnified reflection upon the indolently heaving sea showing in alternate welts of glimmering purple and sang du boeuf; then a new flight of cloud hove up from the lee of the island and, as a closed door quenches the light of a furnace, hid the fire of the west behind its impenetrable pall. The mate characterized it politely to the ladies as an "angry sunset," and then went forward and alluded to it in mixed but forceful metaphor as "bloody murder swingin' on the hinges o' hell."

An insufferably hot and stuffy night gave way to an equally unpleasant day. The sea was oily smooth, the sky overcast with a dull, translucent film of cloud, and the sun, heavily ringed, grew increasingly dimmer as the greyness thickened overhead. The run to noon from three P. M. of the 18th was an even hundred miles.

The wind, still from the northwest, increased steadily as the afternoon lengthened, the yacht, under all-plain sail, driving along at close to nine knots an hour. About four o'clock, while still making fast time, she struck a large floating log—apparently a bread-fruit trunk—which gouged a long gash on her starboard side as she sped past it. The blow was a glancing one and nothing but the paint was damaged, though the consequences might have been really serious had the point of impact been twenty feet farther forward.

The sun went out behind a horizon of dull, black mud, and through the greasy dusk that was settling over the sea the wind came pouring out of the west with constantly accelerating force. Overhead, the clouds—mostly detached blotches of cumulo-nimbus—surged about in seeming aimlessness, those of the lower air scurrying away before the northwest wind that drove the yacht along, while, a couple of thousand feet or so higher, a counter current of great force from the southwest was ripping to pieces the vaporous masses of the upper heavens and stringing them out in long lines like the wake of a fleet of ferryboats. In the intermediate levels stray mavericks of cloud were pivoting about like prairie cattle milling in a blizzard. The sea, owing to the tendency of the wind to continue hauling westerly, was not running heavily as yet, but a barometer at 29.70—24 points drop in 27 hours—and the ominous aspect of the heavens gave fair warning that it was not the explosive broadside of a passing squall that was to be encountered this time, but the sustained bombardment of a real storm.

We were still a couple of months away from the so-called hurricane season, but hurricanes—like nuggets in the prospector's proverb—are where you find them, and it was on record that they had occurred in the southwest Pacific every month of the year. At any rate, the time for preparation for weather of some kind was plainly at hand, beginning with an immediate and expeditious shortening of canvas. No halfway measures to tide over a few hours' blow were resorted to. The maintopmast staysail was taken in and the lower sail reduced to double-reefed foresail, triple-reefed mainsail and reefed and unbonneted forestay-sail. Extra lashings were thrown on boats, water-butts, spars and other movables, and the skylights were closed and battened with planks to protect from waves that might break inboard.

Things were snugged up just in time, for at eight o'clock, to the accompaniment of a tenth more drop in the barometer, the storm broke fiercely in a heavy squall of rain; the next thirty-six hours were crowded full of education in the ways of a South Pacific gale. The after leach of the foresail carried away at nine o'clock and for some minutes the flogging canvas played a lively game of crack-the-whip with the sailors who were trying to smother it. Soon the effect of the wind began to show upon the sea, and all through the night the increasing force of the staggering blows upon the weather bow and the Maxim-like rattle of driven spray upon the sails told of steadily mounting waves. Rain kept pouring in heavy squalls, the fierce blasts serving to beat flat for brief spaces the rising swells, but only to release them to more furious onslaughts the moment the compressed-air buffers of the wind rolled on ahead.

At midnight the barometer was down to 28.50, after reading which the mate came on deck complaining that some one had knocked the bottom out of it. The yacht was behaving splendidly, and, except for the threat in the rapid falling of the barometer, our only serious worry was on account of the uncomfortable proximity of the extensive Curacao Reef and Shoals. We were chopping along on a W.S.W. course, which, allowing for a reasonable leeway, we reckoned would carry us a good ten miles to the windward of the danger point. Nevertheless, remembering our experience with Bellinghausen Island, a sharp watch was kept to leeward until morning.

Daylight broke from the southeast through an infernal cloud-shoal of copper and sulphur and tallow and olive upon a desolation of wallowing snow-capped mountain peaks. The wind, which the previous afternoon had been blowing with a force of less than "5" in the Beaufort Scale, had held from the same quarter all night and was now hurtling down on us at near "9." Seas, confounding in height, steep and sharp-crested, with hollow green sides and black, swollen bases, came charging down from the west in broken-ranked stampede. The yacht, under the scanty canvas still on her, was wonderfully buoyant, rising and falling to the waves like an empty biscuit tin, her comparatively short length giving her an advantage in recovering from a dive into the depths in time to meet the lift of the coming wave that would not have been shared by a larger ship. The decks were repeatedly swept by the last yard or two of a sharp crest that she could not quite surmount, but not once did she put her bowsprit into green water when she had not pulled up to an angle that allowed her to shake free from the ensuing deluge in time to meet the next wave.

The leaps from hollows to crests, and from crests back to hollows, were positively appalling in the contrasts of the sudden transitions. Up out of the fog of foam in the trough the yacht would stagger, and not until she stabbed the curling crest and began teetering undecidedly on the ridge would the wind that had been shrieking in the upper rigging have a chance to strike the hull. Then it came all at once, a palpably solid block of air, and no man could stand against it on the open deck. An instant more, and it was as though the world was falling away beneath her, and down, down, down she would go until one stirred and glanced at his neighbour and set himself for the jar of the keel against the bottom of the sea.

It was those age-long moments in the hollows, with half the weather sky and all the wind cut off, with the eyes blinded and the throat choked with spume, with the ears deafened with the thunderous volleys of the flapping sails, and in the heart the vague and ever-haunting dread that the next wave would be the one to break, the one against which the yacht's seaworthiness and the helmsman's cunning would alike be of no avail, that were the hardest to endure. The trough of the sea in a big storm is the nearest thing to primal chaos that can be experienced in this age of the world; only one must be in a small craft to get the full benefit of it. Apropos of which it may be of interest to note here that at this very time, 500 miles to the northeast, our friend McGrath, the trader of Nukahiva, who had been cast away from the Marquesas some weeks previously, was fighting through this same storm in a thirty-foot open boat in a desperate effort to make the harbour of Pago Pago.

The Commodore had just come on deck at seven o'clock with the disconcerting news that the barometer was down to 28.30 and still falling, when the lookout threw a bombshell on his own account into the cockpit by a half-articulate, wind-choked hail to the effect that he had sighted land abeam to lee. No one said anything as the yacht began to climb the next wave, but "Drifting on Curacao Reef" was written plain on every face; the angling slant of our quickly-quenched wake told only too plainly of the fearful leeway we were making. Each clawing the salt dust from his eyes with one hand, clutching a shroud or halyard with the other, and bracing mightily against the wind, we waited for the view to open up to leeward as the schooner reached the ridge of the soaring sea up which she struggled, to behold with untold relief, not the imminent and unending line of great breakers on a coral reef which we had expected, but a black triangle of rock, fully twenty miles distant, standing sharp and clear as the Cheop's Pyramid against the grey sky.

"Boscawen Island; barren rock, 2,000 feet high," quoted the Commodore from the Directory; to add, with renewed excitement, "But if that's Boscawen Island, then where in the name of—Neptune—is the Curacao Reef and Shoals?" Then, his eyes turning to the windward horizon in a puzzled search as the yacht topped the next wave, "We must have drifted right across them if the chart is right!"

We watched for an hour for the phantom reef with no result. There was little left to worry about on the score of danger, as we were well to the lee of the points dotted out as shoal on the chart, while in our own lee the sea stretched clear and open to Boscawen and beyond; but the manner of the mystery of this piece of marine legerdemain was—or would have been at a time when there was less to think about—an absorbing problem. Certain it was that our leeway was proving greater than our headway; also that, irrespective of the correctness of our reckoning of the day before, the yacht could not have reached the position she was in without drifting squarely across some portion of either the reef or shoal as they were charted. As sailing over the reef was impossible, and over the shoal, at least unknowingly, improbable, we were left to the conclusion that, notwithstanding the fact that neither is marked "P.D.," ("Position Doubtful,") both are incorrectly located on the chart. Outside of the half-dozen archipelagoes most navigated, chart errors in the South Pacific are by no means uncommon.

At eleven o'clock in the forenoon, with the barometer at 28.20, the wind, blowing more furiously than ever, hauled suddenly to S.S.W. At 11.45 the forestay-sail carried away, and, with every fresh blast threatening to strip off the remaining canvas, it did not take long to arrive at the conclusion that we were approaching, rather than getting away from, the centre of disturbance. Whether we had a fully developed hurricane to contend with, or, as was quite possible, a "southwester" of unusual violence, we could not definitely determine. The sinister sky, the low barometer, and the action of the wind up to that time all said "Hurricane"; the season, and the fact that the wind showed a tendency to continue from the Fiji quarter, indicated the "Southwester."

Assuming at the time, therefore, that we were boring into a hurricane whose centre was to the S.S.W., the Commodore made up his mind to hurry away from that centre as expeditiously as possible. Accordingly, after a new forestay-sail had, with considerable difficulty, been bent in the place of the one carried away, all the rest of the canvas was taken off the yacht and, under that sail alone, she was put on the port tack before the wind.

All that afternoon Lurline ran like a frightened deer, with the waves, like hounds, coming up on her trail and snapping viciously at her flanks as they rushed by. Time and again the helmsman, grinding the wheel hard up to keep her before the wind, would glance with the tail of his eye at a foam-splotched wall of green that blotted out the sky astern, to hunch his shoulders and grip his spokes the tighter, waiting with tensed muscles and set face the blow that menaced from above; time and again, yawing desperately as the tail of a galloping sea gave her nose a tweak, the yacht would seem on the point of broaching right under the hollow wall of the comber next in line; time and again—to lee on the windswept crests and to weather in the cross-gusts of the hollows—she would roll a rail deep under and dip up a deckful of solid water from which she could never quite clear herself before another came sousing aboard from the other side: and through it all nothing of serious moment happened.

Meanwhile active preparations for meeting the "worse to come" were underway. A storm trysail was dug out from the obscurity of a musty corner of the lazarette, spars were lashed up for a sea-anchor, bags of oakum were soaked with oil and the life-boats provisioned and watered. When there was nothing more to get ready some one looked at the barometer to find—this was about four in the afternoon—that it had risen twelve points since noon and was still displaying optimistic tendencies.

As it was our intention to run only until the barometer began to rise, all hands were promptly set to bending a new foresail in the place of the one carried away the night before. When this was accomplished we hove her to on the port tack under foresail, close-reefed, and the forestay-sail that was already on her. After that, though the sea continued to increase for some hours, she rode out the night with her deck unswept by anything heavier than the driving spray.

All night the barometer mounted until, at daybreak of the 21st, 28.60 was passed, a juncture at which it was deemed safe to resolve the unused sea-anchor into its component parts and stow the storm trysail and oil bags against another storm. The wind blew fiercely from the southwest all day, and not until midnight, when it began chopping around toward the east, did the sea show any signs of falling. Then it began smoothing rapidly, and by daybreak the yacht very comfortably stood the addition of the close-reefed mainsail and jib.

At noon of the 22nd reefs were shaken out and all-plain sail carried for the first time in four days. The barometer was by then up to 28.78, while the wind, blowing steadily from the southeast, enabled us finally to get back on the Fiji course of S.W. by W. The unclouded sky was a dome of cobalt again, and the sea, coldly green and laced with streaks of foam, a rolling plain of furrowed jade; but in spite of fair weather, the temperature of the air was away down to 74°, and the water but four degrees warmer. The sea, under the influence of the veering wind, continued to fall rapidly all afternoon. At six o'clock the lone rock of Niuafou, the most northwesterly outpost of the Fijis, appeared on the southern horizon, almost immediately to be swallowed up in the gathering dusk.

By morning of the 23rd the wind was back in its regular quarter, E.S.E., but blowing so gently that the yacht, though carrying most of her light sails, could average no better than six or seven knots an hour. The run to noon was 158 miles.

The lookout caught the flash of the Weilangilali Light at three o'clock in the morning of the 24th, and by daylight we were well down the Naniku Passage into the Fijis. The wind was light but steady, and the scores of small, low islands to windward, cutting the swell almost completely off, made splendid sailing. The flat horizon, unbroken save by the blur of an occasional island, was a welcome relief from the wave-crumpled skyline we had left behind in the open sea. The Fijian Archipelago is a veritable nest of reefs, large and small, and islands, both coral and volcanic, of every degree of magnitude. We picked up island after island during the day, and at night they still continued to push up ahead, grey banks of enchantment in the silver sea of the moonlight.

Two of the curious rocks that we passed in the course of the day, on account of their peculiar and distinctive outlines, are down on the chart as Hat and Cap Island, respectively. This circumstance was responsible for the following laconic entry in the frivolous "Ladies' Log":

"June 24th.—Passing Hat and Cap Islands caused quite a flutter in the bonnet of the forestay-sail."

The 180th meridian was passed early in the afternoon of the 24th, upon which that day became immediately Saturday, the 25th. This made the next day Sunday, which fact poor Clark, the cook, learned so tardily that it was by only the maddest of efforts that the indispensable "duff" was prepared in time for dinner.

The Trade-wind gave way to the cool land breeze from the big island of Viti Levu in the early morning of the 26th. This, fresh with a welcome earthy smell, coaxed the yacht gingerly along for several hours, only to die out toward noon and leave her becalmed fifteen miles off Suva entrance.

With every foot of sail spread to take advantage of the vagrant puffs of wind that were coming occasionally from the north, the yacht had shouldered along with the swells to within ten miles of the harbour, when the pilot, coming off in answer to our signal, boarded us to say that we might as well lower our sails and prepare to spend the night where we were. Promising, in case the wind was blowing, to come off in the morning and take us in, he bade us an officious good-bye, clambered down into his boat and set his crew of convict rowers pulling back to the land. Five minutes later the breeze freshened and the yacht, slipping swiftly through the smooth water, passed the pilot's boat and left it half a mile astern before we luffed up and waited for that thoroughly discomfited functionary to come alongside and climb aboard. An hour and a half later we had threaded the tortuous, buoy-marked passage through the reef and come to anchor a cable's length off the end of Suva pier.