The idea of the series of leaps is to rid himself of
the hook, and the man who has
Made the strike must be of iron or
decadent if his heart does not beat with an extra flutter when he
beholds such gorgeous fish, glittering in golden mail and shaking
itself like a stallion in each mid-air leap. 'Ware slack! If you
don't, on one of those leaps the hook will be flung out and twenty
feet away. No slack, and away he will go on another run,
culminating in another series of leaps. About this time one begins
to worry over the line, and to wish that he had had nine hundred
feet on the reel originally instead of six hundred. With careful
playing the line can be saved, and after an hour of keen excitement
the fish can be brought to gaff. One such dolphin I landed on the
Snark measured four feet and seven inches.
Hermann caught dolphins more prosaically. A hand-line and a chunk
of shark-meat were all he needed. His hand-line was very thick, but
on more than one occasion it parted and lost the fish. One day a
dolphin got away with a lure of Hermann's manufacture, to which were
lashed four O'Shaughnessy hooks. Within an hour the same dolphin
was landed with the rod, and on dissecting him the four hooks were
recovered. The dolphins, which remained with us over a month,
deserted us north of the line, and not one was seen during the
remainder of the traverse.
So the days passed. There was so much to be done that time never
dragged. Had there been little to do, time could not have dragged
with such wonderful seascapes and cloudscapes - dawns that were like
burning imperial cities under rainbows that arched nearly to the
zenith; sunsets that bathed the purple sea in rivers of rose-
coloured light, flowing from a sun whose diverging, heaven-climbing
rays were of the purest blue. Overside, in the heat of the day, the
sea was an azure satiny fabric, in the depths of which the sunshine
focussed in funnels of light. Astern, deep down, when there was a
breeze, bubbled a procession of milky-turquoise ghosts - the foam
flung down by the hull of the Snark each time she floundered against
a sea. At night the wake was phosphorescent fire, where the medusa
slime resented our passing bulk, while far down could be observed
the unceasing flight of comets, with long, undulating, nebulous
tails - caused by the passage of the bonitas through the resentful
medusa slime. And now and again, from out of the darkness on either
hand, just under the surface, larger phosphorescent organisms
flashed up like electric lights, marking collisions with the
careless bonitas skurrying ahead to the good hunting just beyond our
bowsprit.
We made our easting, worked down through the doldrums, and caught a
fresh breeze out of south-by-west. Hauled up by the wind, on such a
slant, we would fetch past the Marquesas far away to the westward.
But the next day, on Tuesday, November 26, in the thick of a heavy
squall, the wind shifted suddenly to the southeast. It was the
trade at last. There were no more squalls, naught but fine weather,
a fair wind, and a whirling log, with sheets slacked off and with
spinnaker and mainsail swaying and bellying on either side. The
trade backed more and more, until it blew out of the northeast,
while we steered a steady course to the southwest. Ten days of
this, and on the morning of December 6, at five o'clock, we sighted
land "just where it ought to have been," dead ahead. We passed to
leeward of Ua-huka, skirted the southern edge of Nuka-hiva, and that
night, in driving squalls and inky darkness, fought our way in to an
anchorage in the narrow bay of Taiohae. The anchor rumbled down to
the blatting of wild goats on the cliffs, and the air we breathed
was heavy with the perfume of flowers. 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. How often we had pored over
the chart and centred always on that midmost bight and on the valley
it opened - the Valley of Typee. "Taipi" the chart spelled it, and
spelled it correctly, but I prefer "Typee," and I shall always spell
it "Typee." When I was a little boy, I read a book spelled in that
manner - Herman Melville's "Typee"; and many long hours I dreamed
over its pages. Nor was it all dreaming. I resolved there and
then, mightily, come what would, that when I had gained strength and
years, I, too, would voyage to Typee. For the wonder of the world
was penetrating to my tiny consciousness - the wonder that was to
lead me to many lands, and that leads and never pails.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 39 of 80
Words from 38572 to 39575
of 80724
