But no fish broke surface or collided against the hidden legs. At
last the chief fisherman entered the trap. He waded around
everywhere, carefully. But there were no fish boiling up and out
upon the sand. There was not a sardine, not a minnow, not a polly-
wog. Something must have been wrong with that prayer; or else, and
more likely, as one grizzled fellow put it, the wind was not in its
usual quarter and the fish were elsewhere in the lagoon. In fact,
there had been no fish to drive.
"About once in five these drives are failures," Allicot consoled us.
Well, it was the stone-fishing that had brought us to Bora Bora, and
it was our luck to draw the one chance in five. Had it been a
raffle, it would have been the other way about. This is not
pessimism. Nor is it an indictment of the plan of the universe. It
is merely that feeling which is familiar to most fishermen at the
empty end of a hard day.
CHAPTER XIV - THE AMATEUR NAVIGATOR
There are captains and captains, and some mighty fine captains, I
know; but the run of the captains on the Snark has been remarkably
otherwise. My experience with them has been that it is harder to
take care of one captain on a small boat than of two small babies.
Of course, this is no more than is to be expected. The good men
have positions, and are not likely to forsake their one-thousand-to-
fifteen-thousand-ton billets for the Snark with her ten tons net.
The Snark has had to cull her navigators from the beach, and the
navigator on the beach is usually a congenital inefficient - the sort
of man who beats about for a fortnight trying vainly to find an
ocean isle and who returns with his schooner to report the island
sunk with all on board, the sort of man whose temper or thirst for
strong waters works him out of billets faster than he can work into
them.
The Snark has had three captains, and by the grace of God she shall
have no more. The first captain was so senile as to be unable to
give a measurement for a boom-jaw to a carpenter. So utterly agedly
helpless was he, that he was unable to order a sailor to throw a few
buckets of salt water on the Snark's deck. For twelve days, at
anchor, under an overhead tropic sun, the deck lay dry. It was a
new deck. It cost me one hundred and thirty-five dollars to recaulk
it. The second captain was angry. He was born angry. "Papa is
always angry," was the description given him by his half-breed son.
The third captain was so crooked that he couldn't hide behind a
corkscrew.
