The traverse was
accomplished. Sixty days from land to land, across a lonely sea
above whose horizons never rise the straining sails of ships.
CHAPTER X - TYPEE
To the eastward Ua-huka was being blotted out by an evening rain-
squall that was fast overtaking the Snark. But that little craft,
her big spinnaker filled by the southeast trade, was making a good
race of it. Cape Martin, the southeasternmost point of Nuku-hiva,
was abeam, and Comptroller Bay was opening up as we fled past its
wide entrance, where Sail Rock, for all the world like the spritsail
of a Columbia River salmon-boat, was making brave weather of it in
the smashing southeast swell.
"What do you make that out to be?" I asked Hermann, at the wheel.
"A fishing-boat, sir," he answered after careful scrutiny.
Yet on the chart it was plainly marked, "Sail Rock."
But we were more interested in the recesses of Comptroller Bay,
where our eyes eagerly sought out the three bights of land and
centred on the midmost one, where the gathering twilight showed the
dim walls of a valley extending inland.
