I noticed this same accident occur several times
among the near-by canoes, but in each instance the thrower followed
the stone and brought it back.
The reef ends of our lines accelerated, the shore ends lagged, all
under the watchful supervision of the leader, until at the reef the
two lines joined, forming the circle. Then the contraction of the
circle began, the poor frightened fish harried shoreward by the
streaks of concussion that smote the water. In the same fashion
elephants are driven through the jungle by motes of men who crouch
in the long grasses or behind trees and make strange noises.
Already the palisade of legs had been built. We could see the heads
of the women, in a long line, dotting the placid surface of the
lagoon. The tallest women went farthest out, thus, with the
exception of those close inshore, nearly all were up to their necks
in the water.
Still the circle narrowed, till canoes were almost touching. There
was a pause. A long canoe shot out from shore, following the line
of the circle. It went as fast as paddles could drive. In the
stern a man threw overboard the long, continuous screen of cocoanut
leaves. The canoes were no longer needed, and overboard went the
men to reinforce the palisade with their legs. For the screen was
only a screen, and not a net, and the fish could dash through it if
they tried. Hence the need for legs that ever agitated the screen,
and for hands that splashed and throats that yelled. Pandemonium
reigned as the trap tightened.
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. The truth was not in him, common honesty was not in him,
and he was as far away from fair play and square-dealing as he was
from his proper course when he nearly wrecked the Snark on the Ring-
gold Isles.
It was at Suva, in the Fijis, that I discharged my third and last
captain and took up gain the role of amateur navigator. I had
essayed it once before, under my first captain, who, out of San
Francisco, jumped the Snark so amazingly over the chart that I
really had to find out what was doing. It was fairly easy to find
out, for we had a run of twenty-one hundred miles before us. I knew
nothing of navigation; but, after several hours of reading up and
half an hour's practice with the sextant, I was able to find the
Snark's latitude by meridian observation and her longitude by the
simple method known as "equal altitudes." This is not a correct
method. It is not even a safe method, but my captain was attempting
to navigate by it, and he was the only one on board who should have
been able to tell me that it was a method to be eschewed.
