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. The years
passed, but Typee was not forgotten. Returned to San Francisco from
a seven months' cruise in the North Pacific, I decided the time had
come. The brig Galilee was sailing for the Marquesas, but her crew
was complete and I, who was an able-seaman before the mast and young
enough to be overweeningly proud of it, was willing to condescend to
ship as cabin-boy in order to make the pilgrimage to Typee.
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