But the wind had not shifted. Captain Steve had been awake all night, he explained, never taking his eyes off the anchor line and ready, at any moment, to leap into the surf and swim for it.
"I'll never understand how we survived," he muttered, staring up at the cliffs where the colony of mean Japs was still clustered around their campfires. "Now I know what they mean about South Point. It is a dangerous place."
"The Land of Po," I said.
"Yeah," he said, reeling in the last of our all-night fishing lines. All the hot dogs had been gnawed off by eels, but the hooks were otherwise clean. Not even a sea snake had taken our wrong-minded bait, and the water all around us was littered with floating debris: beer bottles, orange peels, plastic baggies and mangled tuna fish cans. About ten yards off the stern was an empty Wild Turkey bottle with a piece of paper inside.
Ackerman had tossed it over some time during the night, after finishing off the whiskey and stuffing the bottle with a sheet of Kona Inn stationery on which I had scrawled: "Beware. There ARE no fish." I thought it would be halfway to Guam by now, a warning to other fools who might try to fish in the Land of Po.
Captain Steve was staring glumly over the side of the boat at the anchor line. "All we have to do now," he said, "is haul up the anchor and get the hell out of this place." He shook his head and made a nervous whistling noise. "Let me tell you one thing for sure," he added, "we are lucky to be alive right now. That's the worst night I ever spent in my life." He pointed in the general direction of land, where the surf was still pounding and foaming against the rocks. "One shift in the wind," he said, "could have swung us around so fast that I couldn't even have got the engine started. We'd be driftwood by now."
He was still staring down at the anchor line. The other end of it, I knew, was tied securely around a rock far below, and we both understood what would have to be done. There was no way to haul it up, or to maneuver it loose with the boat. We would have to either chop the line and leave the anchor behind, or somebody would have to go down with a tank and untie the knot.
We stood there for a while on the fantail, staring down at the cold black water. Ackerman was out of the question, so it was either me or Captain Steve. He had gone down the night before, and I knew it was my turn now. That was fair. That was the rule of the sea, a true cornerstone of the macho way of life.
I zipped up my jacket and opened a beer. "How much do anchors cost?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "Well. . . with ninety feet of line, at, say, about two dollars a foot. . ." He seemed to be adding it up very carefully in his mind.
"Yeah," he said finally. "Call it four hundred, maybe four fifty."
"That's cheap," I said, reaching for my belt knife. "I'll give you a check." I leaned out to grab the anchor line with my other hand, preparing to cut us loose. Nothing short of extreme physical violence could have got me in the water that morning.
Captain Steve stayed my hand before I could slash the line. "Wait a minute," he said. "I can't go back to the harbor with no anchor. They'd laugh me out of town."
"Fuck those people," I said. "They weren't on the boat last night."
He was strapping on the tanks.
I watched him go over the side and disappear.
It was 4 February, a fine, warm early morning. The natives of Kealakekua Bay were up early for the word had got about that the great ships were leaving. The shores on both sides, divided by that great black slab of cliff, were thick with dark bodies, some waving white cloths.
For Cook's men there was a strong measure of regret at parting after the contentment occasioned by this visit. For the Hawaiians, it had been a strange two and a half weeks, busy, emotional, traumatic even, like no other period in their lives or their history: an unpredicted divine descent upon the steady round of the seasons; an event of great satisfaction paid for at a great price.
By the early morning of 6 February they were at the northern extremity of a deep bay just south of the northern tip of Hawaii, Upolu Point. They had all but completed their clockwise circumnavigation of the island, in accordance with the legendary annual practice of Lono. Then it came on to blow very hard for 36 hours.
On 8 February, three years to the day -- almost to the hour -- since Cook had volunteered at the Admiralty to command this voyage, the Resolution's foremast split. . . They could not proceed in this condition, especially as the old leak under the buttock had opened up again like an unhealable wound.
In the storm-swept dawn light, Cook had to make the critical decision on where to put in for repairs. Should he continue to Maui and trust that he would find shelter on the west or southerly coast, which he had not yet traced? Or perhaps to another island? Kauai and Niihau had already proved unpromising. In all their sailing among these islands, Kealakekua Bay was the only safe anchorage they had discovered.
To give himself time, Cook sent Bligh across the storm-tossed waters to acquaint Clerke of their situation. Now both ships' companies were conscious of their dilemma. They had already been too long at Kealakekua Bay. They had cleared the whole area of its immediately available food. All those hogs could not have been given to them without depriving the people of supplies. Repairs would take at least a week, probably two weeks.
Cook set himself upon the safer of the two courses open to him, and at 10 a.m. on the morning of 8 February, the two sloops bore away south for their old anchorage, "all hands much chagrined," wrote King, "and damning the foremast."
Richard Hough
The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook
Ackerman woke up while Captain Steve was down and I told him the story. "That crazy bastard," he muttered, reaching down for a diving knife that he kept in a sheath around his leg. "Start the engine. Let him swim back." He began to cut the line, then hesitated and pulled back. "No," he said, "the minute we start the engine, he'll hear the noise and come up like a rocket. We'll have a case of the bends on our hands."
Captain Steve finally emerged from the depths and signaled me to haul in the anchor. Twenty minutes later we were out of the surf and running north at easy trolling speed. The Captain had gone groggy while we were hauling him back into the boat and dropped his scuba tank on Ackerman's foot, crushing his big toe and putting blood all over the deck. Ackerman gobbled another handful of Dramamine and fell into a deep stupor. We put his foot in an ice bag and stretched him out like a corpse on a cushion in the shade of the bridge.
I took the helm while Captain Steve set the outriggers. "Are you out of your goddamn mind?" I yelled down at him from my perch on the tuna tower. "Get away from those lines! Go to sleep."
"No!" he shouted. "This is a fishing boat! We must catch fish."
The strain of the long night at South Point was beginning to tell on him. His eyes had swollen up like rotten eggs and he had chewed his own lips so severely during the night that now he could barely talk. When he tried to climb back to the bridge he lost his grip on the ladder and fell on his back in the cockpit, where he thrashed wildly around on the deck in a puddle of bloody filth.
It was an ugly thing to see. From my seat on the bridge I could look straight down on the main deck of the Haere Marue and see both the captain and the first mate badly disabled. One appeared to be dead, with his mouth hung open and his eyes rolled back in his head, and the other was twitching around like a fish with a broken neck.
The maze of human wreckage down below looked like something King Kam might have brought back to Kona in one of his war canoes that got caught in an ambush on Maui. We were victims of the same flaky hubris that had killed off the cream of Hawaiian warriors in the time of the Great Wars. We had gone off in a frenzy of conquest -- to the wrong place at the wrong time and probably for all the wrong reasons -- and now we were limping back home with our decks full of blood and our nerves turned to jelly. All we could hope for, now, was no more trouble and a welcoming party of good friends and beautiful women at the dock. After that, we could rest and lick our wounds.
/> I couldn't leave the wheel, or the boat would start running in circles and tangle its own propeller in the long fishing lines we were trailing. In order to keep the lures on the surface I had to maintain a constant engine speed of 1750rpm and keep moving straight ahead. Any variation in either the speed or the course might be ruinous. If we fouled the prop and lost power it would mean calling for help on the radio, then wallowing helplessly around in the waves for eight hours until a rescue boat arrived to tow us in.
That was unacceptable. The crew was in no condition to endure another day and night at sea. I aimed the boat closer to shore and put a bit of weight on the throttle. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, I reasoned, then a straight line at top speed would be even shorter.
I was still congratulating myself on my breakthrough into higher mathematics when I was startled by a squawk from below. I looked over the rail to see Captain Steve on his knees in the stern, pointing frantically back at his carefully set lures -- which were now almost airborne, bouncing across the water like flying fish. "Slow it down!" he was screaming. "Are you crazy?"
Crazy? I thought. I almost hurled a beer bottle down on his neck. The course he had set would have taken us far out to sea through the marlin grounds, a lazy parabolic loop that would have added another two or three hours to the trip. He was still obsessed with the notion that we were going to catch fish. I could see it in his eyes, the feverish gleam of Ahab.
"Forget it," I yelled down to him. "The joke's over. It's time to go home."
The anguished look on his face told me it was useless to argue with him. There was no room in his mind for the idea of coming back to port without a fish; and I had a feeling he might go over the side at any moment with a knife in his teeth, if that's what it took to get one.
And it was, after all, his boat. I was not ready for mutiny, so I eased off on the throttle and altered our course. This seemed to satisfy him. He went back to fussing with the lines and drinking beer. I settled back in the catbird seat and listened to the radio for a while, feeling drowsy as the sun got hotter and hotter. Every once in a while some outburst of gibberish on the radio would wake me up:
". . . calling Humdinger, do you read me?"
Long pause and crackling of static, then:
"Goddammit, goddammit, yes, goddammit, yes, this is Humdinger. I read you, what's your location? Over."
"The wrong place, over."
(Harsh laughter and more crackling static. . .)
"Well goddammit you stay there, you bastard, don't come anywhere near me."
"What? Say that again, Humdinger."
"Stay away! I got two nekkid women on board."
(Pause and crackling.)
"What's your location, Humdinger? I'm nekkid myself. Let's get together."
The banter went on for a while, then I lashed the wheel so the boat wouldn't wander and went down the ladder for a beer. Captain Steve had crawled into the cabin and passed out on top of the ice locker. I watched him for a while, making sure he was really sleeping, then I walked back to the stern and reeled in all the lines. Ackerman still looked dead and he seemed to be barely breathing, so I rolled him over on his side and hung a bell around his neck so I could hear him if he started vomiting.
Then I went back up on the bridge and aimed the boat straight for the harbor, taking it so close into shore that I could almost read the signs up on Highway One. I turned up the radio to cover the engine noise, then slowly increased our speed until we were planing across the waves like some kind of mongrel Cigarette boat. Ah ha, I thought, now this is the way to fish -- just run the bastards down, chop their brains off with the prop and then circle back to pick up whatever's left.
Three hours later I stopped by the buoy outside the harbor and reeled out the fishing lines, then I twisted Ackerman's leg until he came thrashing awake like an alligator caught in a trap. "Time to work," I said. "We're home."
He sat up and looked around, then slowly stood up and reached for the bottle of rum in the tool box. "Where's the Captain?" he asked.
I pointed to Steve, still asleep on the ice locker, only inches from the rail. Ackerman walked over to him and put a foot in the small of his back, and shoved him violently over the side.
Captain Steve grabbed wildly for a hand-hold, then disappeared into the sea. He came sputtering to the surface, still not completely awake, and clawing desperately at the slippery side of the boat.
Ackerman wanted to drag him in with a gaffing hook, but I restrained him.
After we hauled Captain Steve back aboard he sulked for a while in the cockpit, then climbed up to take the wheel. He eased the boat into the harbor, squatting darkly in his seat on the bridge and avoiding the eyes of the smiling Kanakas on the gasoline dock.
Nobody was there to meet us, but it didn't matter. We were warriors, returned from the Land of Po, and we had terrible stories to tell. But not in the harbor, or at the bar in the Kona Inn. Our tale was too grim.
Captain Steve was still hunkered down on the bridge when Ackerman and I finished off-loading our gear and prepared to leave. "Where're you guys going?" he called out. "To Huggo's?"
I shrugged, too weak and whipped to care where I was going, just as long as it was away from the sea. I felt like driving up the mountain to Waimea and applying for a job as a cowboy on the Parker Ranch. Get back to the land for a while, drink gin all night and run around naked with the menehunes.
But when I mentioned this to Ackerman he shook his head. "No," he said. "There's only one place for us now -- the City of Refuge."
THE BALCONY LIFE
It was time to leave. Ackerman's notion of fleeing to the City of Refuge had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the scene we found back at the compound on our return from South Point was too ugly to cure by anything as simple as a drive down the coast to some temple of ancient superstition where we may or may not have found refuge. Right, I thought, never mind that silly native bullshit. Where's a telephone? What we need now is a quick call to Aloha Airlines.
Ackerman agreed. We were both stunned by the chaos we saw when we turned the little VW convertible into the driveway. The same storm that had almost whipped us to death in the ocean off South Point the night before had moved north and was now pounding the Kona Coast with fifteen-foot waves and a blinding monsoon rain. On the way in from the Honokohau we'd seen cars and mopeds abandoned all along Alii Drive, which was littered with driftwood and jagged black rocks. Huge waves were breaking over the highway at Disappearing Beach -- which had long since disappeared, once again -- and it took us almost two hours to get from the boat to the compound which was taking a serious surf.
Everyone noticed the profound change in the atmosphere in the bay, and the contrast with their first arrival. The waters were empty of canoes, the black lowering line of cliff revealed not a single spectator along its crest. Some of Cook's men were uneasy, others, as King observed, felt their vanity hurt that they were so disregarded. Just as they were concluding that the entire population had been evacuated or struck down by some plague, a single canoe put off and headed for the Discovery. Up the sloop's gangway there climbed a ferocious looking chief wearing a fine red-feathered cloak. He was the king's nephew, Kamehameha, whose appearance had so alarmed them three weeks earlier when he had introduced himself with Terreeoboo's two sons. . .
The sailmakers, carpenters and the marines, with King again in command, found no objection to their reinstalling themselves in the old field with their tents by the heiau. Bayly even got his clock and telescopes ashore with his tents. The priests seemed as friendly as before, and were ready to taboo the area again, and the carpenters were able to go about their special craft of cleaning out the mast's heel, dealing with the sprung fishes, shaping new ones from some hard toa wood they had providentially kept from Moorea.
On the following morning King Terreeoboo arrived in the bay as he had before, in great style and at a fine pace. At once the waters o
f the bay were un-tabooed, and suddenly it was almost as if nothing had changed since those days when there were always numberless canoes plying between shore and ships, and the noise and bustle of trading lasted from dawn to dusk.
But things were not the same. Just below the surface, violence now lurked among these Hawaiians. A great black seam of hostility had been thrust up close to the surface as if Mauna Loa's volcano had erupted again and a lava stream of hatred were about to flow.
King Terreeoboo, shaking and held steady by his two sons, came out to the Resolution. Why had they returned? What were they doing? How long this time? "He appeared much dissatisfied," noted Jem Burney.
Richard Hough
The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook
Both houses were empty, the pool was swamped, the surf was foaming up on the porch and deck chairs were scattered around the lawn in a maze of what looked like red seaweed. On closer examination it turned out to be the slimy wet remnants of two or three hundred thousand Chinese firecrackers, a flood of red rice paper from the dozens of Chinese Thunder-bombs we'd been amusing ourselves with. I thought it had been washed out to sea -- which was true, for a while -- but it had not washed out far enough, and now the sea was tossing it back.
Ralph and The Family were gone. The door to their house stood open, and the place where he'd parked his car was ankle-deep in salt water. The fronts of both houses were gummed up with a layer of red slime and there was no sign of life anywhere. Everything was gone; both houses had been abandoned to the ravaging surf, and my first thought was that everything in them including the occupants had been sucked out to sea by riptides and bashed to death on the rocks.
The Curse of Lono Page 10