South Sea Tales

by Jack London

  As he lifted one foot and rubbed the hot sole against the leg of his trousers, the mate laughed in a savage, snarling fashion.

  “The anteroom of hell,” he said. “Hell herself is right down there under your feet.”

  “It’s hot!” McCoy cried involuntarily, mopping his face with a bandana handkerchief.

  “Here’s Mangareva,” the captain said, bending over the table and pointing to a black speck in the midst of the white blankness of the chart. “And here, in between, is another island. Why not run for that?”

  McCoy did not look at the chart.

  “That’s Crescent Island ,” he answered. “It is uninhabited, and it is only two or three feet above water. Lagoon, but no entrance. No, Mangareva is the nearest place for your purpose.”

  “Mangareva it is, then,” said Captain Davenport, interrupting the mate’s growling objection. “Call the crew aft, Mr. Konig.”

  The sailors obeyed, shuffling wearily along the deck and painfully endeavoring to make haste. Exhaustion was evident in every movement. The cook came out of his galley to hear, and the cabin boy hung about near him.

  When Captain Davenport had explained the situation and announced his intention of running for Mangareva, an uproar broke out. Against a background of throaty rumbling arose inarticulate cries of rage, with here and there a distinct curse, or word, or phrase. A shrill Cockney voice soared and dominated for a moment, crying: “Gawd! After bein’ in ell for fifteen days—an’ now e wants us to sail this floatin’ ell to sea again?”

  The captain could not control them, but McCoy’s gentle presence seemed to rebuke and calm them, and the muttering and cursing died away, until the full crew, save here and there an anxious face directed at the captain, yearned dumbly toward the green clad peaks and beetling coast of Pitcairn.

  Soft as a spring zephyr was the voice of McCoy:

  “Captain, I thought I heard some of them say they were starving.”

  “Ay,” was the answer, “and so we are. I’ve had a sea biscuit and a spoonful of salmon in the last two days. We’re on whack. You see, when we discovered the fire, we battened down immediately to suffocate the fire. And then we found how little food there was in the pantry. But it was too late. We didn’t dare break out the lazarette. Hungry? I’m just as hungry as they are.”

  He spoke to the men again, and again the throat rumbling and cursing arose, their faces convulsed and animal-like with rage. The second and third mates had joined the captain, standing behind him at the break of the poop. Their faces were set and expressionless; they seemed bored, more than anything else, by this mutiny of the crew. Captain Davenport glanced questioningly at his first mate, and that person merely shrugged his shoulders in token of his helplessness.

  “You see,” the captain said to McCoy, “you can’t compel sailors to leave the safe land and go to sea on a burning vessel. She has been their floating coffin for over two weeks now. They are worked out, and starved out, and they’ve got enough of her. We’ll beat up for Pitcairn.”

  But the wind was light, the Pyrenees ‘ bottom was foul, and she could not beat up against the strong westerly current. At the end of two hours she had lost three miles. The sailors worked eagerly, as if by main strength they could compel the PYRENEES against the adverse elements. But steadily, port tack and starboard tack, she sagged off to the westward. The captain paced restlessly up and down, pausing occasionally to survey the vagrant smoke wisps and to trace them back to the portions of the deck from which they sprang. The carpenter was engaged constantly in attempting to locate such places, and, when he succeeded, in calking them tighter and tighter.

  “Well, what do you think?” the captain finally asked McCoy, who was watching the carpenter with all a child’s interest and curiosity in his eyes.

  McCoy looked shoreward, where the land was disappearing in the thickening haze.

  “I think it would be better to square away for Mangareva. With that breeze that is coming, you’ll be there tomorrow evening.”

  “But what if the fire breaks out? It is liable to do it any moment.”

  “Have your boats ready in the falls. The same breeze will carry your boats to Mangareva if the ship burns out from under.”

  Captain Davenport debated for a moment, and then McCoy heard the question he had not wanted to hear, but which he knew was surely coming.

  “I have no chart of Mangareva. On the general chart it is only a fly speck. I would not know where to look for the entrance into the lagoon. Will you come along and pilot her in for me?”

  McCoy’s serenity was unbroken.

  “Yes, Captain,” he said, with the same quiet unconcern with which he would have accepted an invitation to dinner; “I’ll go with you to Mangareva.”

  Again the crew was called aft, and the captain spoke to them from the break of the poop.

  “We’ve tried to work her up, but you see how we’ve lost ground. She’s setting off in a two-knot current. This gentleman is the Honorable McCoy, Chief Magistrate and Governor of Pitcairn Island. He will come along with us to Mangareva. So you see the situation is not so dangerous. He would not make such an offer if he thought he was going to lose his life. Besides, whatever risk there is, if he of his own free will come on board and take it, we can do no less. What do you say for Mangareva?”

  This time there was no uproar. McCoy’s presence, the surety and calm that seemed to radiate from him, had had its effect. They conferred with one another in low voices. There was little urging. They were virtually unanimous, and they shoved the Cockney out as their spokesman. That worthy was overwhelmed with consciousness of the heroism of himself and his mates, and with flashing eyes he cried:

  “By Gawd! If ‘e will, we will!”

  The crew mumbled its assent and started forward.

  “One moment, Captain,” McCoy said, as the other was turning to give orders to the mate. “I must go ashore first.”

  Mr. Konig was thunderstruck, staring at McCoy as if he were a madman.

  “Go ashore!” the captain cried. “What for? It will take you three hours to get there in your canoe.”

  McCoy measured the distance of the land away, and nodded.

  “Yes, it is six now. I won’t get ashore till nine. The people cannot be assembled earlier than ten. As the breeze freshens up tonight, you can begin to work up against it, and pick me up at daylight tomorrow morning.”

  “In the name of reason and common sense,” the captain burst forth, “what do you want to assemble the people for? Don’t you realize that my ship is burning beneath me?”

  McCoy was as placid as a summer sea, and the other’s anger produced not the slightest ripple upon it.

  “Yes, Captain,” he cooed in his dovelike voice. “I do realize that your ship is burning. That is why I am going with you to Mangareva. But I must get permission to go with you. It is our custom. It is an important matter when the governor leaves the island. The people’s interests are at stake, and so they have the right to vote their permission or refusal. But they will give it, I know that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Then if you know they will give it, why bother with getting it? Think of the delay—a whole night.”

  “It is our custom,” was the imperturbable reply. “Also, I am the governor, and I must make arrangements for the conduct of the island during my absence.”

  “But it is only a twenty-four hour run to Mangareva,” the captain objected. “Suppose it took you six times that long to return to windward; that would bring you back by the end of a week.”

  McCoy smiled his large, benevolent smile.

  “Very few vessels come to Pitcairn, and when they do, they are usually from San Francisco or from around the Horn. I shall be fortunate if I get back in six months. I may be away a year, and I may have to go to San Francisco in order to find a vessel that will bring me back. My father once left Pitcairn to be gone three months, and two years passed before he could get back. Then
, too, you are short of food. If you have to take to the boats, and the weather comes up bad, you may be days in reaching land. I can bring off two canoe loads of food in the morning. Dried bananas will be best. As the breeze freshens, you beat up against it. The nearer you are, the bigger loads I can bring off. Goodby.”

  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 life buoy.

  “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 tomorrow 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 tonight.”

  All day the Pyrenees , carrying her load of living fire, tore across the foaming sea. By nightfall, royals and topgallantsails 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 dogwatch 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 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, bitting 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 it through 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 mustache, 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 forever. 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 desire 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 lookout 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 watchers 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 her up that other half-point,” he confessed a moment later. “This cursed current plays the devil wi
th a navigator.”

  “The old navigators called the Paumotus the Dangerous Archipelago,” McCoy said, when they had 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 been trading in the Paumotus. He told me insurance was eighteen per cent. 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.”

  “My God!” 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 vapors 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 dogwatch 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 southeast 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 lookouts 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.