travelling with equal speed, was a stiff bending of the cocoanut palms and
a blur of flying leaves. The front of the wind on the water was a solid,
sharply defined strip of dark-coloured, wind-vexed water. In advance of
this strip, like skirmishers, were flashes of wind-flaws. Behind this strip, a
quarter of a mile in width, was a strip of what seemed glassy calm. Next
came another dark strip of wind, and behind that the lagoon was all
crisping, boiling whiteness.
“What is that calm streak?” Mulhall asked.
“Calm,” Warfield answered.
“But it travels as fast as the wind,” was the other’s objection.
“It has to, or it would be overtaken and it wouldn’t be any calm. It’s a
double-header. I saw a big squall like that off Savaii once. A regular
double-header. Smash! it hit us, then it lulled to nothing, and smashed us a
second time. Stand by and hold on! Here she is on top of us. Look at the
Roberta!”
The Roberta, lying nearest to the wind at slack chains, was swept off
broadside like a straw. Then her chains brought her up, bow on to the
wind, with an astonishing jerk. Schooner after schooner, the Malahini with
them, was now sweeping away with the first gust and fetching up on taut
chains. Mulhall and several of the Kanakas were taken off their feet when
the Malahini jerked to her anchors.
And then there was no wind. The flying calm streak had reached them.
Grief lighted a match, and the unshielded flame burned without flickering
in the still air. A very dim twilight prevailed. The cloud-sky, lowering as it
had been for hours, seemed now to have descended quite down upon the
sea.
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141
The Roberta tightened to her chains when the second head of the hurricane
hit, as did schooner after schooner in swift succession. The sea, white with
fury, boiled in tiny, spitting wavelets. The deck of the Malahini vibrated
under the men’s feet. The taut-stretched halyards beat a tattoo against the
masts, and all the rigging, as if smote by some mighty hand, set up a wild
thrumming. It was impossible to face the wind and breathe. Mulhall,
crouching with the others behind the shelter of the cabin, discovered this,
and his lungs were filled in an instant with so great a volume of driven air
which he could not expel that he nearly strangled ere he could turn his
head away.
“It’s incredible,” he gasped, but no one heard him.
Hermann and several Kanakas were crawling for’ard on hands and knees
to let go the third anchor. Grief touched Captain Warfield and pointed to
the Roberta. She was dragging down upon them. Warfield put his mouth
to Grief’s ear and shouted:
“We’re dragging, too!”
Grief sprang to the wheel and put it hard over, veering the Malahini to
port. The third anchor took hold, and the Roberta went by, stern-first, a
dozen yards away. They waved their hands to Peter Gee and Captain
Robinson, who, with a number of sailors, were at work on the bow.
“He’s knocking out the shackles!” Grief shouted. “Going to chance the
passage! Got to! Anchors skating!”
“We’re holding now!” came the answering shout. “There goes the Cactus
down on the Misi. That settles them!”
The Misi had been holding, but the added windage of the Cactus was too
much, and the entangled schooners slid away across the boiling white.
Their men could be seen chopping and fighting to get them apart. The
Roberta, cleared of her anchors, with a patch of tarpaulin set for’ard, was
heading for the passage at the northwestern end of the lagoon. They saw
her make it and drive out to sea. But the Misi and Cactus, unable to get
clear of each other, went ashore on the atoll half a mile from the passage.
The wind merely increased on itself and continued to increase. To face the
full blast of it required all one’s strength, and several minutes of crawling
on deck against it tired a man to exhaustion. Hermann, with his Kanakas,
plodded steadily, lashing and making secure, putting ever more gaskets on
the sails. The wind ripped and tore their thin undershirts from their backs.
They moved slowly, as if their bodies weighed tons, never releasing a
hand-hold until another had been secured. Loose ends of rope stood out
A SON OF THE SUN
142
stiffly horizontal, and, when a whipping gave, the loose end frazzled and
blew away.
Mulhall touched one and then another and pointed to the shore. The grasssheds
had disappeared, and Parlay’s house rocked drunkenly. Because the
wind blew lengthwise along the atoll, the house had been sheltered by the
miles of cocoanut trees. But the big seas, breaking across from outside,
were undermining it and hammering it to pieces. Already tilted down the
slope of sand, its end was imminent. Here and there in the cocoanut trees
people had lashed themselves. The trees did not sway or thresh about.
Bent over rigidly from the wind, they remained in that position and
vibrated monstrously. Underneath, across the sand, surged the white
spume of the breakers.
A big sea was likewise making down the length of the lagoon. It had
plenty of room to kick up in the ten-mile stretch from the windward rim of
the atoll, and all the schooners were bucking and plunging into it. The
Malahini had begun shoving her bow and fo’c’sle head under the bigger
ones, and at times her waist was filled rail-high with water.
“Now’s the time for your engine!” Grief bellowed; and Captain Warfield,
crawling over to where the engineer lay, shouted emphatic commands.
Under the engine, going full speed ahead, the Malahini behaved better.
While she continued to ship seas over her bow, she was not jerked down
so fiercely by her anchors. On the other hand, she was unable to get any
slack in the chains. The best her forty horsepower could do was to ease the
strain.
Still the wind increased. The little Nuhiva, lying abreast of the Malahini
and closer in to the beach, her engine still unrepaired and her captain
ashore, was having a bad time of it. She buried herself so frequently and
so deeply that they wondered each time if she could clear herself of the
water. At three in the afternoon, buried by a second sea before she could
free herself of the preceding one, she did not come up.
Mulhall looked at Grief.
“Burst in her hatches,” was the bellowed answer.
Captain Warfield pointed to the Winifred, a little schooner plunging and
burying outside of them, and shouted in Grief’s ear. His voice came in
patches of dim words, with intervals of silence when whisked away by the
roaring wind.
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143
“Rotten little tub . . . Anchors hold . . . But how she holds together . . . Old
as the ark—”
An hour later Hermann pointed to her. Her for’ard bitts, foremast, and
most of her bow were gone, having been jerked out of her by her anchors.
She swung broadside, rolling in the trough and settling by the head, and in
this plight was swept away to leeward.
Five vessels now remained, and of them the Malahini was the only one
with an engine. Fearing either the Nuhiva’s or the Winifred’s fate, two of
them followed the Roberta’s example, knocking out the chain-shackles
and running for the passage. The Dolly was the first, but her tarpaulin was
carried away, and she went to destruction on the lee-rim of the atoll near
the Misi and the Cactus. Undeterred by this, the Moana let go and
followed with the same result.
“Pretty good engine that, eh?” Captain Warfield yelled to his owner.
Grief put out his hand and shook. “She’s paying for herself!” he yelled
back. “The wind’s shifting around to the south’ard, and we ought to lie
easier!”
Slowly and steadily, but with ever-increasing velocity, the wind veered
around to the south and the southwest, till the three schooners that were
left pointed directly in toward the beach. The wreck of Parlays house was
picked up, hurled into the lagoon, and blown out upon them. Passing the
Malahini, it crashed into the Papara, lying a quarter of a mile astern.
There was wild work for’ard on her, and in a quarter of an hour the house
went clear, but it had taken the Papara’s foremast and bowsprit with it.
Inshore, on their port bow, lay the Tahaa, slim and yacht-like, but
excessively oversparred. Her anchors still held, but her captain, finding no
abatement in the wind, proceeded to reduce windage by chopping down
his masts.
“Pretty good engine that,” Grief congratulated his skipper. “It will save our
sticks for us yet.”
Captain Warfield shook his head dubiously.
The sea on the lagoon went swiftly down with the change of wind, but
they were beginning to feel the heave and lift of the outer sea breaking