The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  He held out his hand. The captain shook it, and was reluctant to let go. He seemed to cling to it as a drowning sailor clings to a lifebuoy.

  “How do I know you will come back in the morning?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s it!” cried the mate. “How do we know but what he’s skinning out to save his own hide?”

  McCoy did not speak. He looked at them sweetly and benignantly, and it seemed to them that they received a message from his tremendous certitude of soul.

  The captain released his hand, and, with a last sweeping glance that embraced the crew in its benediction, McCoy went over the rail and descended into his canoe.

  The wind freshened, and the Pyrenees, despite the foulness of her bottom, won half a dozen miles away from the westerly current. At daylight, with Pitcairn three miles to windward, Captain Davenport made out two canoes coming off to him. Again McCoy clambered up the side and dropped over the rail to the hot deck. He was followed by many packages of dried bananas, each package wrapped in dry leaves.

  “Now, captain,” he said, “swing the yards and drive for dear life. You see, I am no navigator,” he explained a few minutes later, as he stood by the captain aft, the latter with gaze wandering from aloft to overside as he estimated the Pyrenees’ speed. “You must fetch her to Mangareva. When you have picked up the land, then I will pilot her in. What do you think she is making?”

  “Eleven,” Captain Davenport answered, with a final glance at the water rushing past.

  “Eleven. Let me see, if she keeps up that gait, we’ll sight Mangareva between eight and nine o’clock to-morrow morning. I’ll have her on the beach by ten, or by eleven at latest. And then your troubles will be all over.”

  It almost seemed to the captain that the blissful moment had already arrived, such was the persuasive convincingness of McCoy. Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his burning ship for over two weeks, and he was beginning to feel that he had had enough.

  A heavier flaw of wind struck the back of his neck and whistled by his ears. He measured the weight of it, and looked quickly overside.

  “The wind is making all the time,” he announced. “The old girl’s doing nearer twelve than eleven right now. If this keeps up, we’ll be shortening down to-night.”

  All day the Pyrenees, carrying her load of living fire, tore across the foaming sea. By nightfall, royals and topgallant-sails were in, and she flew on into the darkness, with great crested seas roaring after her. The auspicious wind had had its effect, and fore and aft a visible brightening was apparent. In the second dog-watch some careless soul started a song, and by eight bells the whole crew was singing.

  Captain Davenport had his blankets brought up and spread on top of the house.

  “I’ve forgotten what sleep is,” he explained to McCoy. “I’m all in. But give me a call at any time you think necessary.”

  At three in the morning he was aroused by a gentle tugging at his arm. He sat up quickly, bracing himself against the skylight, stupid yet from his heavy sleep. The wind was thrumming its war-song in the rigging, and a wild sea was buffeting the Pyrenees. Amidships she was wallowing first one rail under and then the other, flooding the waist more often than not. McCoy was shouting something he could not hear. He reached out, clutched the other by the shoulder, and drew him close so that his own ear was close to the other’s lips.

  “It’s three o’clock,” came McCoy’s voice, still retaining its dovelike quality, but curiously muffled, as if from a long way off. “We’ve run two hundred and fifty. Crescent Island is only thirty miles away, somewhere there dead ahead. There’s no lights on it. If we keep running, we’ll pile up, and lose ourselves as well as the ship.”

  “What d’ye think—heave to?”

  “Yes; heave to till daylight. It will only put us back four hours.”

  So the Pyrenees, with her cargo of fire, was hove to, biting the teeth of the gale, and fighting, and smashing the pounding seas. She was a shell, filled with a conflagration, and on the outside of the shell, clinging precariously, the little motes of men, by pull and haul, helped her in the battle.

  “It is most unusual, this gale,” McCoy told the captain, in the lee of the cabin. “By rights there should be no gale at this time of the year. But everything about the weather has been unusual. There has been a stoppage of the trades, and now it’s howling right out of the trade quarter.” He waved his hand into the darkness, as if his vision could dimly penetrate for hundreds of miles. “It is off to the westward. There is something big making off there somewhere—a hurricane or something. We’re lucky to be so far to the eastward. But this is only a little blow,” he added. “It can’t last. I can tell you that much.”

  By daylight the gale had eased down to normal. But daylight revealed a new danger. It had come on thick. The sea was covered by a fog, or, rather, by a pearly mist that was fog-like in density in so far as it obstructed vision, but that was no more than a film on the sea, for the sun shot through it and filled it with a glowing radiance.

  The deck of the Pyrenees was making more smoke than on the preceding day, and the cheerfulness of officers and crew had vanished. In the lee of the galley the cabin-boy could be heard whimpering. It was his first voyage, and the fear of death was at his heart. The captain wandered about like a lost soul, nervously chewing his moustache, scowling, unable to make up his mind what to do.

  “What do you think?” he asked, pausing by the side of McCoy, who was making a breakfast off fried bananas and a mug of water.

  McCoy finished the last banana, drained the mug, and looked slowly around. In his eyes was a smile of tenderness as he said:

  “Well, captain, we might as well drive as burn. Your decks are not going to hold out for ever. They are hotter this morning. You haven’t a pair of shoes I can wear? It is getting uncomfortable for my bare feet.”

  The Pyrenees shipped two heavy seas as she was swung off and put once more before it, and the first mate expressed a desired to have all that water down in the hold, if only it could be introduced without taking off the hatches. McCoy ducked his head into the binnacle and watched the course set.

  “I’d hold her up some more, captain,” he said. “She’s been making drift when hove to.”

  “I’ve set it to a point higher already,” was the answer. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “I’d make it two points, captain. This bit of a blow kicked that westerly current ahead faster than you imagine.”

  Captain Davenport compromised on a point and a half, and then went aloft, accompanied by McCoy and the first mate, to keep a look-out for land. Sail had been made, so that the Pyrenees was doing ten knots. The following sea was dying down rapidly. There was no break in the pearly fog, and by ten o’clock Captain Davenport was growing nervous. All hands were at their stations, ready, at the first warning of land ahead, to spring like fiends to the task of bringing the Pyrenees up on the wind. That land ahead, a surf-washed outer reef, would be perilously close when it revealed itself in such a fog.

  Another hour passed. The three watches aloft stared intently into the pearly radiance.

  “What if we miss Mangareva?” Captain Davenport asked abruptly.

  McCoy, without shifting his gaze, answered softly:

  “Why, let her drive, captain. That is all we can do. All the Paumotus are before us. We can drive for a thousand miles through reefs and atolls. We are bound to fetch up somewhere.”

  “Then drive it is.” Captain Davenport evidenced his intention of descending to the deck. “We’ve missed Mangareva. God knows where the next land is. I wish I’d held up that other half-point,” he confessed a moment later. “This cursed current plays the devil with a navigator.”

  “The old navigators called the Paumotus the Dangerous Archipelago,” McCoy said when they had partly regained the poop. “This very current was partly responsible for that name.”

  “I was talking with a sailor chap in Sydney once,” said Mr. Konig. “He’d b
een trading in the Pautomus. He told me insurance was eighteen percent. Is that right?” McCoy smiled and nodded.

  “Except that they don’t insure,” he explained. “The owners write off twenty per cent of the cost of their schooners each year.”

  Captain Davenport groaned. “That makes the life of a schooner only five years!” He shook his head sadly, murmuring, “Bad waters! bad waters!”

  Again they went into the cabin to consult the big general chart; but the poisonous vapours drove them coughing and gasping on deck.

  “Here is Moerenhout Island.” Captain Davenport pointed it out on the chart, which he had spread on the house. “It can’t be more than a hundred miles to leeward.”

  “A hundred and ten.” McCoy shook his head doubtfully. “It might be done, but it is very difficult. I might beach her, and then, again, I might put her on the reef. A bad place, a very bad place.”

  “We’ll take the chance,” was Captain Davenport’s decision, as he set about working out the course.

  Sail was shortened early in the afternoon, to avoid running past in the night; and in the second dog-watch the crew manifested its regained cheerfulness. Land was so very near, and their troubles would be over in the morning.

  But morning broke clear, with a blazing tropic sun. The south-east trade had swung around to the eastward, and was driving the Pyrenees through the water at an eight-knot clip. Captain Davenport worked up his dead reckoning, allowing generously for drift, and announced Moerenhout Island to be not more than ten miles off. The Pyrenees sailed the ten miles; she sailed ten miles more; and the look-outs at the three mastheads saw naught but the naked, sun-washed sea.

  “But the land is there, I tell you,” Captain Davenport shouted to them from the poop.

  McCoy smiled soothingly, but the captain glared about him like a madman, fetched his sextant, and took a chronometer sight.

  “I knew I was right,” he almost shouted, when he had worked up the observation. “Twenty-one, fifty-five, south; one-thirty-six, two, west. There you are. We’re eight miles to windward yet. What did you make it out, Mr. Konig?”

  The first mate glanced at his own figures, and said in a low voice:

  “Twenty-one, fifty-five all right; but my longitude’s one-thirty-six, fortyeight. That puts us considerably to leeward——”

  But Captain Davenport ignored his figures with so contemptuous a silence as to make Mr. Konig grit his teeth and curse savagely under his breath.

  “Keep her off,” the captain ordered the man at the wheel. “Three points— steady there, as she goes!”

  Then he returned to his figures and worked them over. The sweat poured from his face. He chewed his moustache, his lips, and his pencil, staring at the figures as a man might at a ghost. Suddenly, with a fierce, muscular outburst, he crumpled the scribbled paper in his fist and crushed it under foot. Mr. Konig grinned vindictively and turned away, while Captain Davenport leaned against the cabin and for half an hour spoke no word, contenting himself with gazing to leeward with an expression of musing hopelessness on his face.

  “Mr. McCoy,” he broke silence abruptly. “The chart indicates a group of islands, but not how many, off there to the north’ard, or nor’-nor’-west-ward, about forty miles—the Acteon Islands. What about them?”

  “There are four, all low,” McCoy answered. “First, to the south-east is Matueri—no people, no entrance to the lagoon. Then comes Tenarunga. There used to be about a dozen people there, but they may be all gone now. Anyway, there is no entrance for a ship—only a boat entrance, with a fathom of water. Vehauga and Teua-raro are the other two. No entrances, no people, very low. There is no bed for the Pyrenees in that group. She would be a total wreck.”

  “Listen to that!” Captain Davenport was frantic. “No people! No entrances! What in the devil are islands good for?

  “Well, then,” he barked suddenly, like an excited terrier, “the chart gives a whole mess of islands off to the nor’-west. What about them? What one has an entrance where I can lay my ship?”

  McCoy calmly considered. He did not refer to the chart. All these islands, reefs, shoals, lagoons, entrances, and distances were marked on the chart of his memory. He knew them as the city dweller knows his buildings, streets, and alleys.

  “Papakena and Vanavana are off there to the westward, or west-nor’-westward, a hundred miles, and a bit more” he said. “One is uninhabited, and I heard that the people on the other had gone off to Cadmus Island. Anyway, neither lagoon has an entrance. Ahunui is another hundred miles on to the nor’-west. No entrance, no people.”

  “Well, forty miles beyond them are two islands?” Captain Davenport queried, raising his head from the chart.

  McCoy shook his head.

  “Pros and Manuhungi—no entrances, no people. Nengo-Nengo is forty miles beyond them, in turn, and it has no people and no entrance. But there is Hao Island. It is just the place. The lagoon is thirty miles long and five miles wide. There are plenty of people. You can usually find water. And any ship in the world can go through the entrance.”

  He ceased, and gazed solicitously at Captain Davenport, who, bending over the chart with a pair of dividers in hand, had just emitted a low groan.

  “Is there any lagoon with an entrance anywhere nearer than Hao Island?” he asked.

  “No, captain; that is the nearest.”

  “Well, it’s three hundred and forty miles.” Captain Davenport was speaking very slowly, with decision. “I won’t risk the responsibility of all these lives. I’ll wreck her on the Acteons. And she’s a good ship, too,” he added regretfully, after altering the course, this time making more allowance than ever for the westerly current.

  An hour later the sky was overcast. The south-east trade still held, but the ocean was a checker-board of squalls.

  “We’ll be there by one o’clock,” Captain Davenport announced confidently—“by two o’clock at the outside. McCoy, you put her ashore on the one where the people are.”

  The sun did not appear again, nor, at one o’clock, was any land to be seen. Captain Davenport looked astern at the Pyrenees’ canting wake.

  “Good Lord!” he cried. “An easterly current! Look at that!”

  Mr. Konig was incredulous. McCoy was non-committal, though he said that in the Paumotus there was no reason why it should not be an easterly current. A few minutes later a squall robbed the Pyrenees temporarily of all her wind, and she was left rolling heavily in the trough.

  “Where’s that deep lead? Over with it, you there!” Captain Davenport held the lead-line and watched it sag off mo the north-east. “There, look at that! Take hold of it for yourself.”

  McCoy and the mate tried it, and felt the line thrumming and vibrating savagely to the grip of the tidal stream.

  “A four-knot current,” said Mr. Konig.

  “An easterly current instead of a westerly,” said Captain Davenport, glaring accusingly at McCoy, as if to cast the blame for it upon him.

  “That is one of the reasons, captain, for insurance being eighteen percent in these waters,” McCoy answered cheerfully. “You never can tell. The currents are always changing. There was a man who wrote books, I forget his name, in the yacht Casco. He missed Takaroa by thirty miles and fetched Tikei, all because of the shifting currents. You are up to windward now, and you’d better keep off a few points.”

  “But how much has this current set me? The captain demanded irately. “How am I to know how much to keep off ?”

  “I don’t know, captain,” McCoy said with great gentleness.

  The wind returned, and the Pyrenees, her deck smoking and shimmering in the bright grey light, ran off dead to leeward. Then she worked back, port tack and starboard tack, crisscrossing her track, combing the sea for the Acteon Islands, which the masthead look-outs failed to sight.

  Captain Davenport was beside himself. His rage took the form of sullen silence, and he spent the afternoon in pacing the poop or leaning against the weather-shrouds. At nightfa
ll, without even consulting McCoy, he squared away and headed into the north-west. Mr. Konig, surreptitiously consulting chart and binnacle, and McCoy, openly and innocently consulting the binnacle, knew that they were running for Hao Island. By midnight the squalls ceased, and the stars came out. Captain Davenport was cheered by the promise of a clear day.

  “I’ll get an observation in the morning,” he told McCoy, “though what my latitude is, is a puzzler. But I’ll use the Sumner method and settle that. Do you know the Sumner line?”

  And thereupon he explained it in detail to McCoy.

  The day proved clear, the trade blew steadily out of the east, and the Pyrenees just as steadily logged her nine knots. Both the captain and mate worked out the position on a Sumner line, and agreed, and at noon agreed again, and verified the morning sights by the noon sights.

  “Another twenty-four hours and we’ll be there,” Captain Davenport assured McCoy. “It’s a miracle the way the old girl’s decks hold out. But they can’t last. They can’t last. Look at the smoke, more and more every day. Yet it was a tight deck to begin with, fresh-caulked in ’Frisco. I was surprised when the fire first broke out and we battened down. Look at that!”

  He broke off to gaze with dropped jaw at a spiral of smoke that coiled and twisted in the lee of the mizzen-mast twenty feet above the deck.

  “Now, how did that get there?” he demanded indignantly.

  Beneath it there was no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from the wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that height. It writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the captain like some threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked it away, and the captain’s jaw returned to place.