Leaving Tahiti—The sunset over Moorea—Bound for the Paumotu Atolls—The Schooner Marara, Flying Fish—Captain Jean Moet and others aboard—Sighting and Landing on Niau.

“NOUS partons! We air off—off!” shouted Capitaine Moet, gaily, as the Marara, the schooner Flying Fish, slipped through the narrow, treacherous pass of the barrier-reef of Papeete Harbor. “Mon ami, you weel by ’n’ by say dam Moet for take you to ze Iles Dangereuses. You air goin’ to ze worse climate in ze sacrÉ mundo. Eet ees hot and ze win’ blow many time like ’urricane. An’ you nevaire wash, because ze wataire ees salt como se o-c-ean.”

We had waited for a wafting breeze all afternoon, the brown crew alert to raise the anchor at every zephyr, but it was almost dark when we were clear of the reef and, with all sails raised, fair on our voyage to the mysterious atolls of the Paumotu Archipelago. Often I had planned that pilgrimage in my long stay in Tahiti. At the Cercle Bougainville, the business club, where the pearl and shell traders and the copra buyers drank their rum and Doctor Funks, I had heard many stories of a nature in these Paumotus strangely different of aspect from all other parts of the world, of a native people who had amazing knowledge of the secrets of the sea and its inhabitants, and of white dwellers altered by residence there to a pattern very contrary from other whites. For scores of years these traders and sailors or their forerunners had played all the tricks of commerce on the Paumotuans, and they laughed reminiscently over them; yet they hinted of demons there, of ghosts that soared and whistled, and of dancers they had seen transfixed in the air. What was true or untrue I had not known; nor had they, I believed.

Llewellyn, the Welsh-Tahitian gentleman, after four or five glasses of Pernoud, would ask, “Do you know why the Paumotus are unearthly?” and would answer in the same liquorish breath, “Because they haven’t any earth about them. They’re all white bones.”

Woronick, the Parisian expert in pearls, referred often to the wonderful jewel he had bought in Takaroa from a Paumotuan, and the fortune he had made on it.

“That pearl was made by God and fish and man, and how it was grown and Tepeva a Tepeva got it, is a something to learn; unique. It is bizarre, effrayant. I will not recite it here, for you must go to Takaroa to hear it.”

And Lying Bill and McHenry, in a score of vivid phrases, told of the cyclones that had swept entire populations into the sea, felled the trees of scores of years’ growth, and left the bare atoll as when first it emerged from the depths.

“I knew a Dane who rode over Anaa on a tree like a bloody ’orse on the turf,” said Lying Bill to me, with a frightening bang of his tumbler on the table. “’E was caught by the top of a big wave, an’ away ’e drove from one side of the bleedin’ island to the other, and come right side up. A bit ’urt in the ’ead, ’e was, but able to take ’is bloomin’ oath on what ’appened.”

I had not depended on these raconteurs for a vicarious understanding of the Paumotus; for I had read and noted all that I could find in books and calendars about them, but yet I had felt that these unlettered actors in the real dramas laid there gave me a valid picture. My hopes were fixed in finding in spirit what they saw only materially.

Moet stood by the wheel until we cleared the waters where the lofty bulk of the island confused the winds, and I, when the actions of the sailors in shifting the sails with his repeated orders had lost newness, looked with some anguish at that sweet land I was leaving. It had meant so much to me.

A poetic mood only could paint the swiftly changing panorama as the schooner on its seaward tacks moved slowly under the faint vesper breeze; the mood of a diarist could tell how “the sun setting behind Moorea in a brilliant saffron sky, splashed with small golden and mauve-colored clouds, threw boldly forward in a clear-cut, opaque purple mass that fantastically pinnacled island, near the summit of whose highest peak there glittered, star-like, a speck of light—the sky seen through a hole pierced in the mountain. How in the sea, smooth as a mirror, within the reef, and here and there to seaward, blue ruffled by a catspaw, away to the horizon was reflected the saffron hue from above; how against purple Moorea a cocoa-crowned islet in the harbor appeared olive-green—a gem set in the yellow water. How the sunlight left the vivid green shore of palm-fringed Tahiti, and stole upward till only the highest ridges and precipices were illuminated with strange pink and violet tints springing straight from the mysterious depth of dark-blue shadow. How from the loftiest crags there floated a long streamer cloud—the cloud-banner of Tyndal. Then, as the sun sank lower and lower, the saffron of the sky paled to the turquoise-blue of a brief tropical twilight, the cloud-banner melted and vanished, and the whole color deepened and went out in the sudden darkness of the night.”

If one must say farewell to Tahiti, let it be in the evening, in the tender hues of the sunset, the effacing shadows of the sinking orb in sympathy with the day’s tasks done; the screen of night being drawn amid flaming, dying lights across a workaday world, the dream pictures of the Supreme Artist appearing and fainting in the purpling heavens. I was leaving people and scenes that had taught me a new path in life, or, at least, had hung lamps to guide my feet in an appreciation of values before unknown to me.

I came back to the deck of the schooner with Moet’s call for a steersman, and his invitation to go below for food and drink. I refused despite his “Sapristi! Eef you no eat by ’n’ by you cannot drink!” and when he disappeared down the companion-ladder I climbed to the roof of the low cabin. The moon was now high—a plate of glowing gold in an indigo ceiling. The swelling sea rocked the vessel and now and then lifted her sharp prow out of the water and struck it a blow of friendship as it rejoined it. I unrolled a straw mat, and, placing it well aft so that the jibing boom would not touch me, lay upon my back, and visioned the prodigious world I was seeking. The very names given by discoverers were suggestive of extravagant adventure. The Half-drowned Islands, the Low Archipelago, the Dangerous Isles, the Pernicious Islands, were the titles of the early mariners. For three hundred years the Paumotus had been dimly known on the charts as set in the most perilous sea in all the round of the globe. I had read that they were more hazardous than any other shores, as they were more singular in form. They had excited the wonder of learned men and laymen by even the scant depiction of their astounding appearance. For decades after the eyes of a European glimpsed them they were thought by many bookish men to be as fabulous as Atlantis or Micomicon; too chimerical to exist, though witches then were a surety, and hell a burning reality.

I fell asleep, and as during the night the wind shifted and with it the schooner veered, I had but a precarious hold upon the mat and was several times stood on my feet in the narrow passageway. The dream jinn seized these shiftings and twistings, the shouts of the mate in charge, the chants of the sailors at work, the whistle of the wind through the cordage, and wove them into fantasies,—ecstasies or nightmares,—and thus warded off my waking.

But the sun, roused from his slumber beneath the dip of the sphere, could be put off with no fine frenzies. When even half above the dipping horizon his beams opened my eyes as if a furnace door had been flung wide, and I turned over to see my hard couch occupied by others. Beside me was McHenry, next to him Moet, and furthest, the one white woman aboard, the captain’s wife. We yawned in unison; and, with a quick, accustomed movement, she dropped below. The day had begun on the schooner.

The Marara was once a French gunboat of these seas when cannons were needed to prevent dishonor to the tricolor by failure to obey French discipline, while France was making good colonists or corpses of all peoples hereabout. She was the very pattern of the rakish craft in which the blackbirders and pirates sailed this ocean for generations—built for speed, for entering threatening passes, for stealing silently away under giant sweeps, and for handling by a small number of strong and fearless men. The bitts on the poop were still marked by the gun emplacements, and the rail about the stern was but two feet high.

Now her owners were a company of Tahiti Europeans who, trusting largely to the seamanship and business shrewdness of her master, despatched her every few weeks or months on voyages about the French islands within a thousand miles or so to sell the natives all they would buy, and to get from them at the least cost the copra, shells, and pearls which were virtually the sole products of these islands.

The cabin was one room, stuffy and hot, and malodorous of decades of cargo. A small table in the center for dining was alone free from shelves and boxes holding merchandise, which was displayed as in a country store. Besides all kinds of articles salable to a primitive people, there were foods in barrels, boxes, tins, and glass, for whites and for educated native palates.

Jean Moet, the commander of the Marara, was of the type of French sailor encountered in the Mediterranean, and especially about Marseilles and Spanish ports. He had a slight person, with hair and moustache black as the stones of Papenoo beach—nervous, excitable, moving incessantly, gesturing with every word. Twenty-eight of his forty years had been passed in ships. He had visited the Ile du Diable, and had seen Dreyfus there; he chattered of New York, Senegal, Yokohama, Cayenne, was full of French ocean oaths, breaking into English or Spanish to enlighten me or press a point, singing a Parisian music-hall chansonette, or a Spanish cancioncita. His language was a curious hodge-podge bespeaking the wanderings of the man and his intensely mercurial temperament.

His wife, who sailed with him on all voyages since their marriage five years before, was his opposite—large-boned and heavy, like a Millet peasant, looking at her brilliant husband as a wistful cow at her master, but not fearing to caution him against extravagance in stimulant or money. Her life had begun in Tahiti, and she had always been there until the dashing son of the Midi had lifted her from the house of her father—a petty official—to the deck of the Flying Fish. She was a housekeeper and accountant.

She paid especial attention to the shelves of pain-killers, cough cures, perunas, bitters and medical discoveries from America, which, in islands where all alcoholic liquors were forbidden to the aborigines, sold readily to all who sickened for them. Moet was affectionate but stern toward Virginie, the wife, and talked to her as does a kind but wise master to a trained seal.

For breakfast, the captain, Madame Moet, McHenry, and I had canned sardines, canned hash from Chicago, California olives, canned pineapple from Hawaii, and red wine from Bordeaux.

Virginie explained in Tahitian French that Jean had forgotten to get aboard stores of fresh food. He had been at the Cercle Bougainville until we had gone aboard, she said caustically. Jean put his arm about her fat waist.

“Mais, dar-leeng,” he said, soothingly, “tais-toi!” And then to me, “We are camarades, ma femme y mi, compaÑeros buenos. Ma wife she wash ze linge. That good, eh? Amerique ze woman got boss hand now. Diable! C’est rottan! Hombre, ze wife ees for ze cuisine, and ze babee.”

He pressed her middle, and advised her to clear up the table while we went on deck for a smoke.

He became confidential with me after a pousse cafÉ or two.

“We faire ze chose Économique, Virginie y mi,” he said. “Maybee som’ day we weesh avoir leetle farm en France. En vÉritÉ, mon ami, I forget ze vegetable an’ ze meat because I beat McHenry at ÉcartÉ in ze Cercle Bougainville, jus’ avant we go ’way from Papeete. I nevaire play ze carte on ze schoonaire! Jamais de la vie!”

The captain had aboard a brown pup, a mongrel he had found in the Marquesas Islands. He had named him Chocolat, and passed hours each day in teaching him tricks—to lie down and sit up at command, to stand and to bark. The dog liked to run over the roof of the cabin and to crouch upon the low rail at the stern. As any roll or pitch of the vessel might toss him into the ocean, I feared for his longevity, but Chocolat—pronounced by Moet “Shockolah”—was able to fall inboard whenever the motion jeopardized his safety.

“Eh, petit chien,” Jean Moet would cry, when Chocolat skated down the inclined deck into the scuppers, or hung for a moment indecisively on the rail, “you by ’n’ by goin’-a be eat by ze requin. Ze big shark getta you, perrillo, an’ you forget all my teach you, mi querido!”

He whipped Chocolat many times a day, when the puppy let down from “attention” before told, or when he attacked his food before a certain whistled note.

“What will you do with him when his education is complete?” I asked Moet.

“When he ees educate, hein? He will be like ze saircuss animal. One year old, maybe, he make turnover, fight ze boxe, drink wine, an’, puedeser, he talk leetle. Zen I sell heem some tourist, some crazee Americain who zink he do for heem like me. I sharge five hunder franc.”

McHenry, who kicked Chocolat whenever he had an opportunity unseen, ridiculed Moet’s dream of gain.

“You will like hell!” said McHenry. “When you’ve got the dirty little bastard sayin’, ‘Good mornin’, ‘nice an’ proper, he’ll sneak ashore in some boat-load o’ truck, an’ some Paumotuan ’ll hotpot him. Wait till he’s fat! You know what they’ll do for fresh meat.”

“Non, non!” answered the captain, angrily. “I am not afraid of zat. I teach heem I keel heem he go in boat, but maybe you take heem an’ sell heem on ze quiet, McHenry.”

The small, cold eyes of McHenry gleamed, and a queer smile twisted his mouth.

“Well, keep him from under my feet!” he warned, and laughed at some thought now fully formed in his mind. I could see it squirming in his small brain.

McHenry was as rollicking a rascal as I knew in all the South Seas. He was bitter and yet had a flavor of real humor at odd times. Without schooling except that of a wharf-rat in Liverpool, New York, and San Francisco, he had come into these latitudes twenty years before. Cunning yet drunken, cruel but now and again doing a kindness out of sheer animal spirits or a desire to show off, he had many enemies, and yet he had a few friends. When the itching for money or the desire to feel power over those about him urged him, as most of the time, he proved himself the ripest and rottenest product of his early and present environment. He had had desperate fights to keep from being a decaying beachcomber, a parasite without the law; but a certain Scotch caution, a love of making and amassing profits, and, as I learned later, a firm and towering native wife, had kept him at least out of jail and in the groove of trading.

Boasting was his chief weakness. He would go far to find the chance to ease his latent sense of inferiority to an audience that did not know fully his poverty of character and attainment. After years of ups and downs he had now quarreled with his recent employers, and was going to pitch his trade tent on some Paumotu atoll where copra and pearl-shell might be found. He thought that he might stay a while in Takaroa, one of our ports, because the diving season was about to open there. He and I being the only ones whose language was English, we were much together, but I always half despised myself for not speaking my mind to him. Still, those lonely places make a man compromise as much as do cities. What one might fear most would be having no one to talk with.

We lived on deck, all four of us, the Moets, McHenry, and I, along with a half-caste mate, sleeping always on the roof of the cabin, and taking our meals off it, except in rain. In that moist case we bundled on the floor of the cabin. There was no ceremony. The cook brought the food through the cabin, and we handed up and down the dishes through the after scuttle, helping ourselves at will to the wine and rum which were in clay bottles on the roof. McHenry and I were the only passengers, and the crew of six Tahitians was ample for all tasks. They were Piri a Tuahine, the boat-steerer; Peretia a Huitofa, Moe a Nahe, Roometua a Terehe, Piha a Teina, and Huahine, with Tamataura, the cook.

The whole forward deck of the schooner was crowded with native men, women, and children, the families of church leaders who were returning to their Paumotu homes after attending a religious festival in Tahiti. They lay huddled at night, sleeping silently in the moonlight and under the stars. All day, and until eight or nine o’clock, they conversed and ate, and worked with their hands, plaiting hats of pandanus, sugar-cane, bamboo, and other materials. White laborers massed in such discomfort would have quarreled, squabbled for place, and eased their annoyance in loud words, but the Polynesian, of all races, loves his fellow and keeps his temper.

These were the first Paumotuan people I had seen intimately, and I listened to them and asked them questions. A deacon who at night removed a black coat and slept in a white-flowered blue loin-cloth, the pareu of all the Polynesians, gazed at the heavens for hours. He knew many of the stars.

“Our old people,” he said, “believed that the gods were always making new worlds in distant sky places beyond the Milky Way, the Maoroaheita. When a new world was made by the strong hands of the gods, the Atua, it went like a great bird to the place fixed for it. That star, Rehua,”—he pointed toward Sirius “was first placed by the Atua near the Tauha, the Southern Cross, but afterwards they changed it, and sent it to where it is now.”

I looked at the glowing cross, and remembered the emotion its first sight had stirred in me. I was tossing on the royal yard of a bark bound for Brazil, up a hundred feet and more from deck, when, raising my head from the sail I had made fast, there burst upon me the wonderful form and brilliance of the constellation which five thousand years ago entranced the Old World but which is hidden from it now.

The deacon again raised his hand and indicated the spot where Rehua had shone before the divine mind had changed. It was the Coal-sack, the black vacancy in the Magellan Clouds, so conspicuous below the cross when all the rest of the sky is cloudless and clear. The Maori mind had wisely settled upon that vast space in the stellar system in which not even an atom of stellar dust sheds a single flicker of luminosity as the point from which the gods had plucked Rehua. I had no such lucid reason for this amazing, celestial void as the half-naked deacon on the deck of the Marara.

We had a poor wind for two days, and I looked long hours in the water, so close to the deck, at the manifestations of organic and vegetable vitality. All life of the ocean, I knew, depended ultimately on minute plants. The great fish and mammals fed on plant forms which were distributed throughout the seas. These grew in the waters themselves or were cast into them along their shores or by the thousands of rivers which eventually feed the ocean. The flora of all the earth, seeds, nuts, beans, leaves, kernels, swam or sank in the majority element, and aided in the nourishment of the creatures there. They had, also, taken root on shores foreign to their birth, and had, from immigrants, become esteemed natives of many lands. They had increased man’s knowledge, too, as the sea-beans found on the shores of Scotland led to the discovery of that puzzle of all currents, the Gulf Stream. After all was said, the land was insignificant compared to the water—little more than a fourth of the surface of the globe, and in mass as puny. The average elevation of the land was less than a fifth of a mile, while the average depth of the sea was two miles, or thirty times the mass of the land. If the solid earth were smoothed down to a level, it would be entirely covered a mile deep by the water. I felt very close to the sea, and fearful of its might. I envied the natives their assurance, or, at least, stolidity.

The days were intensely hot. When the sails were furled or flapped idly, and the Marara lay almost still, listening for even a whisper of wind, I suffered keenly. The second noon our common exasperation broke out in the inflammable Moet.

The captain shouted to Huahine, a sailor, to cover his head with a hat. The man was a giant, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, but Moet addressed him as he would a child.

“Sapristi!” he yelled, “Taupoo! Maamaa! Your hat, you fool!”

“Diablo! amigo,” he said, testily. “Zose nateev air babee. I have ze men paralyze by ze sun in ze Marqueses. In ze viento, when ze win’ blow, no dan-gair, but when no blow—sacrÉ! ze sun melts ze brain off-off.”

Captain Moet was dramatic. Whatever he said he acted with face, hands and arms, feet, and even his whole body. He made a gesture that caused me to touch my own hat, to consider its resistance to the sun, to feel an anticipation of harm. Suddenly he took the arm of the sailor at the wheel, Piha a Teina, a Tahitian, and, releasing the spokes from his hands, himself began to steer.

“Go there in the lee of the mainsail,” he said in Tahitian, “and tell the American about your terrible adventure when you almost died of thirst!”

“Look at him!” said Moet to me. “He is old before his time. The sun did that.”

Piha a Teina stood beside me, shy, slow to begin his epic. He was shriveled and withered, pitifully marked by some experience unusual even to these Maori masters of this sea. I gave him a cigarette, and, lighting it, he began;

“I am Piha a Teina,” he said. “I was living in the island of Marutea in the Paumotus when this thing happened. I set out one day in a cutter for Manga Reva. That island was seven hundred miles away, and we were sent, Pere Ani, my friend, and I, to bring back copra. The cutter was small, not so large as a ship’s boat. We had food for eight or nine days, and as the wind was as we wanted it, blowing steadily toward Manga Reva, we felt sure we would arrive there in that time. But we lost the stars. They would not show themselves, and soon we did not know which way to steer. This schooner has a compass, but we could not tell the direction by the sun as we had not the aveia. We became uneasy and then afraid. Still we kept on by guess and hope, believing the wind could not have changed its mind since we started. On the tenth day we ate the last bite of our food. We had not stinted ourselves until the eighth day, and then we felt sure the next day or the next would bring the land.

“But on the eleventh day we saw nothing but the sea. I had a pearl hook and with it we caught bonito. We ate them raw. They made us thirsty, and we drank all our water. It did not rain for many days, and we drank the salt water. When it rained we had nothing in which to catch and keep the fresh water. We could only suck the wet sail which we had taken down because we had become too weak to handle it if the gale had caught us with it up. We drifted and drifted with the current. The sun beat upon us and we were burned like the breadfruit in the oven. I could not touch my breast in the daytime it was so hot. The time went on as slowly as the cocoanut-tree grows from the nut we plant. We left in the month you call October. Days and nights we floated without using the tiller except to keep the cutter before the wind when it blew hard. We had been asleep maybe a day or two when a storm came. We did not wake up, but it cast us on the island of Rapa-iti. Pere Ani never woke up, but I am here. The sun killed him.”

“How long were you in the cutter?” I asked.

Moet heard my question and replied:

“Mais, zey lef’ Marutea in octobre, an’ ze Zelee, the Franche war-sheep, fin’ zem on Rapa-iti in Januaire. Zey was—yo no se—more zan seexty day in ze boat.”

Piha a Teina expressed neither gladness nor sorrow that he had escaped the fate of Pere Ani. He knew, as his race, that fate was inexorable, and he contemplated life as the gift of a powerful force that could not be argued with nor threatened by prayers, though, to be in the mode, he might make such supplications.

“If I had had such a hohoa moana, a chart of the sea, as we formerly made of sticks,” he said, “I could have found Manga Reva without the stars. We made them of straight and curved pieces of wood or bamboo, and we marked islands on them with shells. They showed the currents from the four quarters of the sea, and with them we made journeys of thousands of miles to the Marquesas and to Hawaii and Samoa. But we have forgotten how to make them, and I know nothing of the paper charts the white man has, but I can read the aveia, the compass of the schooner. We did not take our hooa in our canoes, but studied them at home.”

The captain whistled, caught my eye, touched his forehead to signify Piha a Teina was wandering mentally, and summoned the sailor to take the wheel.

“He ees maamaa evvair since zat leetle voyage,” he said, sagely.

On the morning of the fourth day from Papeete the first of the eighty Paumotu atolls raised a delicate green fringe of trees four or five miles away. It lay so low that from the deck of the schooner it could not be seen even on the clearest days at a greater distance. One heard the surf before the island appeared. It was only a few feet above the plane of the sea, flat, with no hill or eminence upon it, a leaf upon the surface of a pond. I could hardly believe it part of the familiar globe. It was more like the fairy-island of childhood, the coral strand of youth, the lotus land of poesy. It was, in reality, the most beautiful, fascinating, inconceivable sight upon the ocean.

McHenry and I stood with Chocolat and watched the slow rise of the atoll of Niau, as the Marara, under lessened sail and with Captain Moet at the helm, cautiously approached the land. We crept up to it, as one might to a trap in which one hoped to snare a hare but feared to find a wolf. All hands stood by for orders. Though the sky was azure and the sun broiling, one never knew in the Pernicious Islands when the unforeseen might happen.

Seven miles long and five wide, Niau was a matchless bracelet of ivory and jade. Grieg Island, some Anglo-Saxon discoverer once named it, but Grieg had fame abroad only. None spoke his name as we advanced warily over the road, familiar to them all as the Sulu Sea to me. The cargo for Niau came through the hatches, thrown up from the hold, sailor to sailor, and was piled on deck until all was checked. Madame Moet was on the poop by the after door of the cabin, hanging over each item and marking it off upon her inventory, while Jean hummed the “Carmagnole,” and swung the Flying Fish about on short tacks for her goal. Between the shifting of the canvas the long-boat was lowered, and the goods heaped in it: boxes and barrels, bales and buckets, edibles and clothing, matches and tobacco, gimcracks and patent medicines.

As closer we went, I saw that Niau was a perfect oval, composed of a number of separate islets or motus. These formed the land on which were the trees and shrubs and the people, but this oval itself was inclosed by a hidden reef, several hundred feet wide, on which the breakers crashed and spilled in a flood of foaming billows.

There was no enthusiasm over the beauty of Niau except in my heaving breast, and I concealed it as I would free thinking in a monastery. To McHenry and Jean and Virginia, a lovely atoll was but a speck upon the ocean on which to cozen inferior creatures.

“Madre de Dios!” vociferated the skipper, when, a mile from the gleaming teeth of the reef, he brought the Marara up into the wind and halted her like a panting mare thrown upon her haunches. “Mc’onree et M’sieu’ O’Breeon, eef you go ’shore, tomble een, pronto!”

He released the wheel to the mate, and we three scrambled over the rail and jumped upon the cargo as the boat rose on a wave, joining the four Tahitians who were at the heavy oars, with Piri a Tuahine at the stern, holding a long sweep for a rudder. It was attached by a bight of rope, and by a longer rope kept from floating away in case of mishap.

Now came as delicate a bit of action with sails as a yachtsman, with his mother-in-law as a guest, might recklessly essay. Captain Moet sang out from his perch on a barrel to the half-caste at the wheel to go ahead, and the Flying Fish, which for a few minutes had been trembling in leash, turned on her heel and headed directly for the streak of foam, the roar of which drowned our voices at that distance.

Eight hundred feet away, when it must have looked to a landsman on the schooner that she was almost in the breakers, we cast off the line and took to our oars. It was nice seamanship to save time by minimizing rowing, but certainly not in Lloyd’s rules of safety. Those who reckon dangers do not laugh in these parts. A merry rashness helps ease of mind.

In five minutes our boat was in the surf, rolling and tumbling, and I on my merchandise peak clasped a bale fervently, though McHenry and Moet appeared glued to barrels which they rode jauntily. It was now I saw the art of the Polynesians, the ablest breaker boatmen in the world.

All about seemed to me solid coral rock or distorted masses of limestone covering and uncovering with the surging water, but suddenly there came into my altering view, as the steersman headed toward it, a strange pit in the unyielding strata. Into this maelstrom the water rushed furiously, drawn in and sucked out with each roll of the ocean. The Tahitians, at a word, stopped rowing, while Piri a Tuahine scrutinized intently the onrushing waves. He judged the speed and force of each as it neared him, and on his accuracy of eye and mind depended our lives.

The oarsmen tugged with their blades to hold the boat against the sweeping tide, and abruptly, with a wild shout, Piri a Tuahine set them to pulling like mad, while he with his long oar both steered and sculled.

“Tamau te paina!” all yelled amid the boom of the surf.

“Hold on to the wood!” and down into the pit we tore; down and in, the boat raced through the vortex of the chute, the pilot avoiding narrowly the coffin-like sides of the menacing depression, and the sailors, with their oars aloft for the few dread seconds, awaiting with joyous shouts the emergence into the shallows. All was in the strong hands and steady nerves of Piri a Tuahine. A miscalculated swerve of his sturdy lever, and we would have been smashed like egg-shells, boat and bodies, against the massive sides. But spirit and wood were stedfast, and I rode as high and dry from the imminent Scylla as if on a camel in the Sahara.

In a few twinklings of an eye we were past the reef, and in the moat in fast shoaling, quiet water, studded with hummocks and heaps of coral. The sailors leaped into it shoulder-deep, and guided and forced the boat as far shoreward as possible, to curtail the cargo-carrying distance. Captain Moet, McHenry, and I went up to our waists, and reached the beach.