Wreck of the 'Pro Patria' From Med to Mum. Iii

I

OUR second day at Pitcairn was rainier, if possible, than the first. The settlement looked forlorn indeed in the gray light of early morning, and before that light appeared I heard the Young family at morning worship. Despite the rain, the villagers went about their affairs as usual. It was, in fact, a blessing to them, for they had had none in three months until two days before the arrival of the Pro Patria. Now all their cisterns were filled and there was no longer need to carry water down the trail from Brown’s Well.

Amateurs of Pitcairn history will remember that at the time of the mutineers’ arrival they discovered, in addition to the carvings on the rocks at the foot of the great precipice called ‘The Rope,’ stone adzes and other implements and some stone images on the sites of some ancient maraes, or temples, similar to those found elsewhere in Polynesia. Upon questioning Uncle Ben Young about these, he told me that some of them had stood on the lookout point above Bounty Bay.

‘That’s where one of their heathen altars must have been,’ he said. ‘ When I was a young man, some of us chucked the idols over the cliff, and I reckon you’d still find pieces of them below, in the sea. But now I recollect there’s still one somewhere about in the settlement.’

We found it serving as a foundation stone for a near-by house. One of the scantlings supporting the floor of the front porch was resting upon it, but by getting down on my hands and knees I could see something of it. Only the trunk remained, resting on its back, the hands clasped over its belly. It seemed content to be there, and something in its patient, reposeful attitude made the arrival of the Bounty appear as an event of the week before last. But as I walked away from the village, time expanded again, like the changeful bubble it is, according to our changeful moods, drawing Christian and his fellow mutineers with it far down the slope of Yesterday.

I walked into the main valley, climbing to an upland slope under the western ridge, pointed out to me the day before as the place where Christian was killed. Uncle Ben Young believes he was unquestionably killed on the day of the massacre of the whites by the native men. No Pitcairner doubts the truth of the story handed down from John Adams of the events of that day, and, while the site of Christian’s grave is unknown, the place of his murder is considered almost as definite as Young’s Rock or Ship-Landing Point.

I have never been anything like so certain on this point, remembering Sir John Barrow’s footnote in his Bounty history, in which he speaks of ‘some singular circumstances that happened in England which might render Christian’s death almost a matter of doubt.’

About the year 1808-09 [Barrow wrote], a very general opinion was prevalent in the neighborhood of the lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, that Christian was in that part of the country and made frequent visits to an aunt who was living there. Being the near relative of Mr. Christian Curwen, long member of Parliament for Carlisle, and himself a native, he was well known in the neighborhood. This, however, might be passed over as mere gossip, had not another circumstance happened about the same time, for the truth of which the Editor [Sir John Barrow himself] does not hesitate to avouch.

In Fore Street, Plymouth Dock, Captain Heywood found himself one day walking behind a man whose shape had so much the appearance of Christian’s that he involuntarily quickened his pace. Both were walking very fast, and the rapid steps behind him having roused the stranger’s attention, he suddenly turned his face, looked at Heywood, and immediately ran off. But the face was as much like Christian’s as the back, and Heywood, exceedingly excited, ran also. Both ran as fast as they were able, but the stranger had the advantage, and, after making several short turns, disappeared.

That Christian should be in England, Heywood considered as highly improbable, though not out of the scope of possibility, for at this time no account of him whatsoever had been received since they parted at Otaheite. At any rate, the resemblance, the agitation, and the efforts of the stranger to elude him, were circumstances too strong not to make a deep impression on his mind. At the moment, his first thought was to set about making some further enquiries, but on recollection of the pain and trouble such a discovery must occasion, he considered it more prudent to let the matter drop; but the circumstance was frequently called to his memory for the remainder of his life.

Heywood, it will be remembered, was one of the Bounty midshipmen, and had been taken home in irons by the Pandora, with the other members of the company who remained on Tahiti, for court-martial. He was condemned to death, but was recommended to the King’s clemency and pardoned, surviving to complete a long and honorable career in the navy. He knew Christian well, of course. Could it have been Christian himself that he saw in Fore Street, Plymouth Dock? It is by no means a fantastic possibility. Captain Folger visited Pitcairn in September 1808. Supposing that Christian had not been killed, he might have persuaded Folger to give him a passage to Valparaiso, pledging him, at the same time, never to divulge the fact. Christian might easily have reached England early in 1809, when he was thought to have been seen near his old home, in Cumberland. And before leaving Pitcairn he might have pledged John Adams to secrecy as well. When I spoke of this to Uncle Ben Young, he shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I am sure that Christian was killed, here, in 1793. If he had n’t been, John Adams would have said so, before his death, when he knew that no harm could come to Christian by telling. Or Captain Folger himself would have left some record of it. Such a thing could n’t have been hushed up forever.’

All of which seems likely; and yet there will always be the doubt, never to be cleared up now.

Even on so gloomy a day it was possible to imagine what a pleasant place that high slope must be in fine weather. Christian must have chosen it for his yam garden for the beauty as well as for the fertility of the spot. After an hour or two of hard work, he would have only to walk a few yards up the slope to the crest of the ridge. There he could sit, fanned by the cool breeze, with the whole of the island outspread beneath him. I could see him there, bared to the waist, his arms clasped around his updrawn knees, and Edward Young with him, as he must have been on many a day, the two of them side by side, long silences broken by intervals of talk. I have no doubt that Young often played the part of comforter in his relations with Christian. I seemed to hear their voices, their very words, as I sat there, so long after them, the rain trickling in streams from the points of my umbrella. (An umbrella was an incongruous object in that place, but it enabled me to muse with at least a measure of comfort.)

Young’s part in the mutiny has always been a matter of mystery to me. I have read all the accounts of the events of the morning when the ship was seized, and in none of them is Young’s presence or his actions accounted for. In fact, he does not appear on the scene until after the launch had been cast adrift. Where was he when Bligh was seized and brought, bound, on deck? Young was a member of Mr. Peckover’s watch and had been on duty from midnight until four o’clock. No doubt he went to the midshipmen’s berth when Christian’s watch came on deck, but it is hardly possible that he could have slept through the uproar that began about four-thirty and continued for the ensuing two or three hours. It is certain that he took no part in the mutiny; otherwise, the fact would have come out in the court-martial proceedings. Barrow supposes that he must have been kept below by some of the mutineers. This seems to me the most likely supposition, but I have sometimes wondered whether Young was not an eighteenth-century Lord Jim, with unreadiness as one of the flaws in his character. This would explain his strange decision, afterward, to throw in his lot with Christian. Having lacked the resolution to decide instantly where his duty lay, and, perhaps, the courage to take the desperate chance in the open boat with the other loyal men, he would realize that he could never go home again. He could not face his family and friends with that stain upon his character. As we know, Midshipman Heywood, too, was unready, and remained with the ship, but he was only a lad of fifteen, and his action is understandable on the basis of his youth. Young, however, was in his early twenties.

But enough of this. Perhaps I do a great injustice to Young’s memory in putting forward such a supposition. It is a speculation based upon the scantiest of evidence. Sir John Barrow’s is a much more generous one, and, I have little doubt, much nearer the truth of the matter.

II

Having seen present-day Pitcairners, I found a no less interesting subject for speculation concerning their maternal ancestors. What sort of women were they?

It is fairly certain that two, at least, were women of good Polynesian blood, the kindred of chiefs, perhaps. Christian and Young would have availed themselves of their opportunity, as officers, to choose as their companions during the Tahiti sojourn women of high birth. Captain Wallis and his officers had done so, Bougainville and his, Cook and his, and there is no reason to suppose that Captain Bligh and the Bounty officers failed to follow so pleasant and by that time so well established a precedent. The Bounty’s sojourn had been longer than that of any other vessel that had called at Tahiti, and it is likely that both Christian and Young had formed attachments there which it cost them dear to break when they sailed for home, as they then thought. Upon their return, after the mutiny, those attachments must have been resumed, and, although not certain, it seems to me likely that they succeeded in persuading their former consorts to go with them to Pitcairn.

There is also the likelihood that the wife of Taaroa (Tetahiti, the Transplanted One, he later called himself) was of the kindred of chiefs. This would make three to gift the children of the mutineers with strains of distinguished Polynesian blood. The women of the other mutineers were almost certainly from the ranks of the commoners. Wholesome, vigorous blood theirs would be, but not that from which rulers and leaders come.

It is plain that these mothers of the clan were women of courage. Their decision, after the massacre of 1793, to leave the island, and their attempt to do so, were worthy of mothers in Greek tragedy. Their action gives one not alone a conception of their spirit, but a vivid glimpse, as well, through the mists surrounding the Pitcairn of those days. What a deep sense of horror, of loathing for the island and their white lords, must have urged them on to so desperate a venture! Where did they hope to go? Home, doubtless, — back to Tahiti, — and they could have had only a vague notion of where the island lay. One sees the small unseaworthy open boat, with its freight of women and small children, putting out through the surf of Bounty Bay, and heading westward. But they were not to go far, if, indeed, they got beyond the cove itself. Fate was kind to them against their will, and brought them back clinging to the overturned boat.

It has always seemed to me unfortunate that the British Government did not, from the beginning, take a greater interest in this unique colony, founded by Chance in mid-ocean. The Admiralty first learned of it on May 14, 1809, when the official news of Captain Folger’s visit reached England, via Valparaiso; but, as Barrow says, ‘It does not appear that any steps were taken in consequence of this authenticated information, nor was anything further heard of this interesting little society until the latter part of 1814.’ In that year the British frigates Briton and Tagus, cruising in the Pacific, called at Pitcairn, and the reports of the visit sent home by Captains Staines and Pipon were of a nature to have interested any species of mankind save governmental officials. They remained indifferent, and Pitcairn was again lost sight of until 1825, when Captain Beechey called, in the Blossom. His detailed and fascinating account did receive a certain amount of attention, but no one appears to have recognized the fact that the Pitcairn colony offered a situation all but unique in the history of mankind: an isolated community of English and Polynesian blood, living in ignorance of the outside world, and under human and natural conditions that approached the ideal.

I do not, of course, mean that the colony should have been preserved as a human biological laboratory, where the results of heredity, environment, crossbreeding, and inbreeding should have been studied; but care should have been taken to protect its members from recruits from the outside world likely to work them harm. They lived in a state of simplicity which made them easy prey, in particular to that universal pest and mischief-worker, the wellmeaning man — the man who, hearing of some community far removed from contact with the world at large, feels that he must go there to give its unfortunate members the benefit of his presence, of his superior talents, knowledge, and education. Had the Admiralty supervised this small outpost of England to the extent of scrutinizing the character and the qualifications of outsiders who wished to settle on the island, intelligently regulating their numbers and rejecting rigorously the unfit, the inhabitants of latter-day Pitcairn would have been the gainers by it, and vastly more like those concerning whom Captains Staines and Pipon and Beechey and Monsieur Moerenhout have left us such interesting accounts.

But Chance was left to take its course with the Pitcairners, and, having first brought them two acceptable additions to their numbers, in the persons of John Buffet and John Evans, presented them, in 1828, with an addition of another kind in the person of John Hunn Nobbs — the first of the well-meaning tribe whose members will go through fire and flood, braving earthquake, shipwreck, famine, and pestilence, to reach the unfortunates they feel themselves called upon to succor. The strength of Nobbs’s determination can be measured by the fact that, finding other means lacking for reaching Pitcairn, he procured a small launch, and with one other companion, an American named Bunker, made the voyage from Valparaiso. Bunker killed himself shortly after reaching Pitcairn, but Nobbs lived to accomplish his mission. Before his arrival the religion of the little community had been that taught the children by John Adams. It was worship untainted by dogmatism — simple and natural and unselfconscious. Nobbs injected cant into it, and by his wellmeant meddling caused serious dissensions within the colony.

Pitcairn history, from that time on, makes interesting but rather melancholy reading. The king of all the mischief-makers arrived in 1832, in the person of a man named Joshua Hill. He was removed by the British Government five years later, and the peace that followed must have been welcome indeed to the wretched victims of this insane despot.

And so the years passed, Chance ruling the destinies of the Pitcairners, until the year 1876, when it brought them a large packet of Seventh-day Adventist literature, accompanied by letters from two of the leading ministers of that faith, Elders James White and J. N. Loughborough, earnestly requesting the people to give the tracts a careful reading. Thus was the ground prepared for the advent of the Reverend John I. Tay. Before he left the island he had convinced the entire community of the imminence of Christ’s second appearance upon earth, and all ‘were observing and thoroughly believing in the seventh day as the sabbath of the Lord.’

A curious and incongruous event to stand as one result of His Majesty George the Third’s decision to send a vessel ‘ to the island of Otaheite for the purpose of transporting the breadfruit tree to His Majesty’s dominions in the West Indies,’ where, it was hoped, it would provide an abundant source of cheap food for the Negro slaves. No doubt the Reverend Mr. Tay would say that there was nothing curious about it; that the hand of the Lord was in it. However that may be, certain it is that the islanders now wait, with patience but with increasing assurance, for the day so near at hand when they and all devout Adventists shall ascend into Heaven in chariots of cloud and fire.

It was, in part, this atmosphere of primitive evangelicalism which kept me away from the settlement during the greater part of my stay ashore; but there was another reason. My observations of the inhabitants gave me a most uncomfortable impression. It is true that one sees some fine specimens of manhood or womanhood; nevertheless, I became increasingly convinced that Aunt Ann McCoy had good reason to be worried about the future of the Pitcairners. The effects of inbreeding and of their isolated manner of life are apparent even to superficial observation. It is sad indeed to compare the condition of the early Pitcairners, as reported by Staines and Pipon and Beechey and Moerenhout, with that of their present-day descendants. One realizes that there has been a steady deterioration in the stock. Adamstown of to-day is anything but the Adamstown of the early nineteenth century, with its neat, well-kept houses and gardens and plantations. It is a huddle of forlorn habitations occupied by people who seem to have no hopes for the future, except in the religious sense. The island has no true contact with the outside world. Vessels of New Zealand steamship companies call there frequently, weather permitting, but only for an hour or so, and the Pitcairners board them in the guise of peddlers of fruit and souvenirs. It is not this sort of contact which is needed to give a people self-respect, and the feeling that they are linked with humanity at large. Not to be linked might be greatly preferable if the island were larger, but an area of two square miles is not sufficient for isolation without deterioration. The British Colonial Office is much to blame, in my opinion, for its languid and spasmodic interest in Pitcairn. It needs new blood and direction from outside. Its young people in particular seem to me to be desperately in need of teachers from outside to arouse their minds, to drive from their faces the vacant expression common to nearly all of them. The situation, which at present is far from hopeless, may and I believe will be quite otherwise if the colony is left to its own devices during the next fifty years. In that case the reflections of the visitor of 1983, as he wanders about this rich and beautiful island, may be melancholy indeed.

III

Late in the afternoon the Pro Patria stood close in to Bounty Bay, where all the village had gathered to bid us goodbye. The easterly swell was considerably higher than it had been the day before, burying the rocks and the bit of beach and sending up fountains of spume as the waves swept in. Nevertheless, men, women, and children, as many as the thirty-seven-foot boat would hold, came off with us to the schooner for a last farewell. All were talking and shouting at once, but I noticed that, despite the confusion, the twelve oarsmen heard and instantly obeyed the orders of the helmsman. It was nearly dark when our kindly hosts swarmed into their boat again. We towed them back toward the cove; then the line was cast off and they headed for shore, singing in full chorus as they went: —

The old chapel hymn was sung with a truly moving effect, under those circumstances. In the fading light, under the wet windy sky, the island looked lonely indeed, and the boat lonelier still as it drew away from us. Now it was lifted for an instant on the crest of the long swell; now it vanished in the trough, and the music came more and more faintly to our ears. As I stood at the rail, aft, looking back toward the island, I realized that the story of the Bounty mutiny is not yet ended; that chapters of it remain to be written, perhaps for centuries to come. The gloom of the evening may have had something to do with the color of my mood. However that may be, I felt none too sanguine concerning the chapters yet to be written on Pitcairn.

I could just make out a group of tiny figures clustered on the lookout point above the cove. No doubt John Adams stood on that spot, — and, perhaps, on just such a stormy evening, — watching the departure of the Topaz. A moment later we lost sight of Bounty Bay. The Pro Patria was headed west-by-north, and Captain B-remarked: ‘We’ll reach Manga Reva in fifty hours if this wind holds.’

IV

During the return voyage from Pitcairn toward Manga Reva, I made considerable, though erratic, progress in Volume XVIII of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Passing by, for the time at least, the articles on Medical Education and Jurisprudence, I turned to the ten-page article on the Medici Family, and by the following afternoon had finished it. Meanwhile the stormy weather continued; sky and sea were as cold and hostile in appearance as they had been on the outward voyage. Captain B—— had had no opportunity to shoot the sun and we were sailing by dead reckoning. However, the Pro Patria seemed to know where she was going. Hers had been a long and faithful service in the Pacific, and, although her log was 10 per cent more sanguine than her performance justified, I hoped that Captain B——’s expectation would be fulfilled, and that we might catch a fleeting distant view of Mount Duff through the cloud rack before dark on our third evening from Pitcairn. We were disappointed, and when that night fell it fell heavily indeed.

The power of the engines had been added to that of sails in the hope of sighting Manga Reva that evening, but, finding the effort useless, Captain B—— ordered them stopped, and we proceeded under the foresail alone. The presumption was that we were still to the south’ard of Manga Reva and somewhere in the region of fifty miles to windward. At 8 P.M. the course was altered to bring us clear of two small but undoubted obstacles which lay between us and the Gambier Islands: the Portland Reef and the uninhabited coral island of Timoe.

I read during the early part of the evening, and then made an unsuccessful attempt to sleep. I had no premonition of disaster, but I did have an uncomfortable sense of the near presence to leeward of Timoe and the Portland Reef. It seemed to me that the Pro Patria was presuming too much on her intuitions of position and her long immunity from mishap.

Arthur Young, a younger brother of Uncle Ben, had told me something of the Portland Reef. It was a villainous place, he said, of considerable extent, and covered in fine weather to a depth of three or four fathoms. He had once sailed over it in a small schooner, and had anchored an empty oil drum there as a buoy. He had also seen it from afar, in boisterous weather, when great seas were breaking over it, and he had been more than satisfied with the distant daylight view. Any vessel meeting Portland on a stormy night would have small chance, in his opinion, of surviving the experience.

I was thinking of this when I came on deck, at 1 A.M., for a look at the weather. It was still raining and blowing, and water was spilling from the awning by the barrelful each time the vessel rolled. The light of the binnacle lamp shone into the face of the Tahitian lad at the wheel, who stood gazing at the compass with a pensive, abstracted expression. I wished that it might have been a little less abstracted, and that Tahitian sailors as a class had not been gifted with the faculty for dreaming awake. And when they sleep they are as nearly dead as sleeping men may be. I stumbled over the other man ‘on watch.’ He was curled up behind the wheel box with a bed quilt over his head, but falling on him disturbed him no more than if he had been a parcel of cargo. A small electric bulb hanging amidships swayed to and fro, casting faint shadows over the wet black expanse of the foresail, but that of the mate of the watch was not one of them. He had eaten fern seed, so that not even his shadow was visible. The tiny light was nothing and less than nothing in the centre of the vast globe of gloom.

But, if the gloom was vast, so was the Pacific, compared to which Timoe and the Portland Reef were as two grains of sand. ‘We are probably well to the north of both of them by this time,’ I thought, and, with this agreeable hope, went below, undressed, and climbed into my bunk. I rolled as the vessel rolled, and was soon asleep.

I knew what had happened the instant it happened. No apprenticeship in misfortunes at sea is necessary to school one as to the meaning of the grinding, rending noise caused by a ship’s keel meeting with a coral reef. At the same instant I heard a terrified call for the captain from the man at the wheel. Trousers, shirt, sweater, and tennis shoes got themselves on me without my knowing how it was done, and I was on deck when we struck for the third time. The second and third crashes had in them none of the ‘sliding-over’ sound of the first one, but something quite otherwise. The rudder had been smashed at once and the wheel shaft pushed up and forward so that the wheel was leaning far over, as though for a glimpse of the compass. It was a shocking sight, as that would be of some friend, in whom one had implicit trust, discovered in a state of complete demoralization.

It was just 3 A.M. by the clock over the companion way. The rain was coming down in sheets, but the wind seemed less violent than it had been toward midnight. I have never known a blacker night; we could see nothing beyond the ship, and had no idea where we were, whether on one of Timoe’s reefs or, perhaps, on the great windward barrier that encloses the Manga Reva lagoon. Fortunately the electric lights did not go out; there was the one small lonely bulb amidships, another aft, and the cabin was lighted as well. Terii, the engineer, who looked after the batteries, had them under his bunk instead of in the engine room. Had they failed us, our situation would have been even worse than it was.

Great seas were piling in, beating the schooner against the reef. We could do nothing except hang on to something until we knew what the sea meant to do with us. What seemed certain was that after a few more bashings the schooner would be stove in, would fill and sink outside the reef. It was a horrible experience, waiting. I can imagine nothing worse than the ‘gone’ feeling one has at such a time, the result of the belief that within five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, one’s body, still so much alive, — more than ever so, in fact, — will be rolling about in the sea, battered beyond recognition on jagged masses of coral. It brings a bitter, salty taste into the mouth, as anyone knows who has faced that seeming certainty.

The thought that flashed through my mind, ‘I have Captain Bligh to thank for my share in this shipwreck,’ brought, as I have said, the shadow of the ghost of the suspicion of a smile to my lips, but I fancy that if I could have seen my face in a mirror at the moment, its presence could not have been detected there.

But the very violence of the sea was in our favor. Of a sudden the Pro Patria was lifted up and thrown broadside against a ledge of reef, where she stuck fast, canted to port, and every following sea lodged her more firmly there. They broke over her and foamed around her, and battered and harried her, but she held fast where she was. I knew enough about shipwreck from the experiences of others to be certain that such a solidly built vessel as ours does not break up immediately, once she is lodged on the reef; therefore I went below for a moment, carrying in my hand a life preserver, which looked like a large white doughnut. I discovered afterward that the thing had been made merely for show and would n’t even float, but I carried it down to give to one of our three lady passengers, and there I saw an amazing sight. The floor of Madame P——’s small cabin was now half wall and the port side half floor. The impact of tons of solid water just beyond was an awe-inspiring sound; nevertheless Madame P—— was engaged in methodically packing her things!

I had meant to soothe and reassure, if possible, and I was the one to be soothed by a sight so customary, performed so quietly. I felt almost ashamed to offer her the gigantic doughnut. Not a man of us had thought of packing anything; some of us were no more than half dressed, not believing that our need for clothing would extend beyond the next fifteen or twenty minutes; and there was Madame P—— stowing things into her bags as though she were in a cabin on board a transpacific liner about to dock at San Francisco. It gave me a new conception, not only of a woman’s self-possession, but of her practical mind, and, most of all, of the enormous importance to women, under whatever conditions, of things.

The port boat was now within about two feet of the water. It was unlashed with great difficulty from the davits and lowered. The schooner, taking the brunt of the seas, made a little lee for us, and presently Mr. Miller and several of the sailors jumped into her. Mr. Miller got into the bow with his electric torch and turned the light toward the wall of darkness to leeward. A moment later the boat vanished into it.

The rest of us on the schooner watched that tiny spark of light with the keenest interest. We knew by this time that we must be on the windward reef of Timoe, but there was no way of knowing whether we had struck bare reef washed over by the sea or on one of the small islands threaded along it. Meanwhile the surf battered away at the Pro Patria; every moment or two a wall of solid water would strike her with terrific impact, and seemingly solid pieces of the wall would come toppling down upon us, but we held as fast to her as she did to the reef.

The tiny point of light seemed to go a very long way; then we saw it slowly coming back. It came alongside, and Mr. Miller shouted: ‘It’s all right! There’s land here!’

V

The ships’ boats of Tahiti trading schooners are built for just such work as one of them performed that night. It was a truly villainous reef, of the kind of coral that resembles solidified lava, and honeycombed with deep holes and crevices. We got out of the boat in waist-deep water, and Madame P——, who had my arm, almost immediately disappeared in one of these holes. But she came up again, and, as nearly as I could judge by the light of Mr. Miller’s torch, she was still not greatly discomposed. We followed the torch across about fifty yards of reef until we came to one of those walls, common to atoll beaches, where great masses of coral fragments have been heaped up in storms of the past. It was a sloping rampart, a dozen or fifteen feet high, but how gratefully solid it felt! And how sweet the damp air to lungs that had expected, a short while back, to be flooded with air much damper — nine-tenths water, in fact.

Human beings react as differently to the experience of shipwreck as they do to the other vicissitudes of life: some are garrulous with joy, some silent, and there is certain to be at least one wise after the event. I heard a voice say: ‘We should have hove to early in the evening and waited for daylight to show us where we were.’ There was more than a suspicion of truth in what he said, but there seemed no point in offering the suggestion so belatedly.

Of a sudden a cock crew, near at hand in the darkness, and I knew that our other Terii, the cook, was on shore with a pet rooster he had brought all the way from Tahiti. I have always had great admiration and respect for roosters; they deserve better consorts than they have in the usual hen. Thoreau, in speaking of the cock in general, said: ‘What gem is so bright as his eye?’ To which he might have added: ‘And what creature, including the best of the human ones, has a more valiant spirit?’ Nothing daunts him, and his small heart is a reservoir always filled with three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. I have no doubt that Terii’s cock crew while the Pro Patria was being thrown against the outer ledge of the reef, and that only the thunder of the surf prevented us from hearing him.

I remember that the Earl of Pembroke, writing in South Sea Bubbles, declared that his experience of shipwreck bored him. If ‘boredom’ meant in the eighteen-seventies what it does in the nineteen-thirties, then I think he must have been mistaken in giving a name to the state of his consciousness at the time when his yacht was being battered against the reef and he was waiting with his companions to learn whether Chance meant to drown or save them.

I was scared, and I know of only one member of the Pro Patria’s company who professes not to have been. To be sure, we preserved an outward aspect of decorum; consideration for one another demanded that; but we were scared, nevertheless. Low Island reefs are evil places, often enough, even in the daytime; and when Low Island reefs and autumnal equinoctial gales meet, at three o’clock in the morning, with a small schooner between them, those aboard the vessel are anything but bored.

Nor was I in the least bored, later, while sitting, wet through on the beach. Life had never seemed sweeter to me than at that moment.

The third boatload, bringing the Captain and the rest of the crew, was now ashore, and we were scattered here and there among the coral boulders, invisible to one another, each one, doubtless, chewing the savory cud of conscious existence. The lights on the schooner still burned, and a weird sight it was to see them; they offered a tiny scale to measure darkness, forsakenness, by. We had scuttled like rats from the faithful old ship, which had turned up her starboard side for a bulwark between the sea and us. Unlike rats, we felt deeply sorry for her, but we did n’t return, then, to offer her the comfort of companionship. A few moments later, out went the lights.

Presently a curious thing happened.

The clouds vanished to leeward, not gradually, but suddenly, like a vast curtain swept majestically aside. The sky was ablaze with stars to the farthest east and silvery with the light of the approaching last-quarter moon. As she rose, Captain B——, who was seated near me, rose as well, and stood for a moment, arms folded, gazing at her; then he sat down again. He said nothing. His silence and his attitude as he stood facing the moon were more eloquent than any words could have been. Had she come only an hour earlier! But the concentrated reproaches of the Pro Patria, Captain B——, Mr. Miller, and the rest of us, had no effect upon the quality of serenity in the belated light she cast upon Timoe, nor did the vanishing cloud bank seem to retire westward any the less majestically.

Dawn was not far behind the moon, and showed us clearly where we were and how we were. Had the schooner been a mile — only a mile!—farther offshore at 3 A.M., she must have cleared Timoe. She had struck not four hundred yards from the point where the outer reef curved away from the course she was then on, and there was all the sea-room of the Pacific beyond.

Now that we were safe on shore, we could appreciate the majesty in the sight of the surf piling in along the windward reefs, and the clouds of spray and solid water that half concealed the vessel at moments. The false keel had come ashore almost as soon as ourselves and now lay stranded halfway across the fifty-yard band of reef between us and the vessel, and one of the topmasts swayed to and fro whenever a sea struck her.

Meanwhile, we basked in the earlymorning sunshine and dried our clothing. Then, as Terii’s coffee was not forthcoming as usual, I set out to explore the island.

(To be continued)