James Norman Hall - The Hurricane (Charles Bernard Nordhoff, James Norman Hall) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

Transscribed and Published by Jacson Keating (editor)

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Scattered over a thousand miles of ocean in the eastern tropical Pacific, below the Equator, lies a vast collection of coral islands extending in a general northwesterly, southeasterly direction across ten degrees of latitude. Seventy-eight atolls, surf-battered dykes of coral, enclosing lagoons, make up this barrier to the steady westward roll of the sea. Some of the lagoons are scarcely more than salt-water ponds; others, like those of Rangiroa and Fakarava, are as much as fifty miles long by twenty or thirty across. The motu, or islets, composing the land, are threaded at wide intervals on the encircling reef. The smaller ones are frequented by sea fowl which nest in the pandanus trees and among the fronds of scattered coconut palms. Others, enchantingly green and restful to sea-weary eyes, follow the curve of the reef for many miles, sloping away over the arc of the world until they are lost to view. But whatever their extent, one feature is common to all: they are mere fringes of land seldom more than a quarter of a mile in width, and rising only a few feet above the sea which seems always on the point of overwhelming them.

There is no other group of islands so remote from any continent. The inhabitants, few in number, are Polynesians, with the cheerful dignity of their race; but the loneliness, the enforced simplicity, and the precariousness of life faced with the perpetual menace of the sea have made them sturdy and resourceful, and have implanted in them an abiding sense of the tragic nature of man’s fate. They have both the hardihood and the enduring fear of those whose mother, the Sea, is ever at their doorsteps. None know so well the peace and beauty of her kindly moods. To none is her unescapable and mindless majesty revealed, at times, with more awe-inspiring grandeur.

Their own collective name for their half-drowned homelands is Tuamotu: Islands of the Distant Sea. Geographers, and the few white men who visit them, call them the Low, or Dangerous, Archipelago.

Late on an afternoon in October, a two-masted schooner entered the pass at the western end of the island of Manukura. She was a broad-beamed vessel of ninety tons, with a native crew, and the manner in which she was conned through the coral shoals within the lagoon revealed that her captain, himself a Polynesian, was no stranger to the place. The sails had been lowered at the entrance, and the ship proceeded with her engine at half-speed toward an islet that extended eastward from the passage for a distance of two miles or more. A quarter of an hour later the engine was reversed, and the vessel, losing way, was brought to anchor near the end of a ruined pier of coral slabs.

The breeze, which had become lighter with the descending sun, died away completely. Night had now fallen and the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere sparkled in a cloudless sky. In the starlight, the fringe of near-by land was a narrow ribbon of black, dividing two immensities. No sound came from the beach, nor was there any sign along the whole extent of it of human habitation. To the east and south, Manukura Lagoon seemed to stretch away to infinity, to be metamorphosed at last into sound: a faint, unceasing thunder, without beginning or end, as though somewhere, at a vast distance, the stream of Time itself were pouring over the brink of an abyss.

The vessel lay motionless; no creak of block or rudder could be heard. Two men, seated at a table on the afterdeck, their faces thrown into clear relief by the light of a lantern hanging from the boom, seemed awed and hushed by a silence so profound. They had finished dinner, and now, with their chairs pushed back, they were gazing out over the starlit water, each engaged in his own reflections. Dr. Kersaint had been medical officer of the Tuamotu Group for more than fifteen years. He was a Breton, in late middle life, short, stout and active, with a closely clipped gray beard. His bald head glimmered in the lamplight, and his blue eyes, behind gold-rimmed spectacles, were kindly and shrewd. His companion, Vernier, was a younger man, about thirty; lean, sallow of complexion, with a sensitive, rather melancholy face.

Presently the silence was shattered by the shrill complaining of blocks as one of the ship’s boats was lowered from its davits, and a moment later the captain, clad only in a waistcloth, appeared within the circle of lamplight and spoke to the doctor, in the native tongue. Kersaint turned to his companion.

“They’re going to Motu Tonga, across the lagoon, for a night of fishing,” he said. “They will return about dawn. Would you care to join them?”

Vernier shook his head. “Not to-night, Doctor. Thank him for me, will you? I’m much too comfortable to move.”

Kersaint turned to the captain and they spoke together for a moment; then the latter, with a nod to his passengers, went forward, climbed down into the boat, and took the long steering sweep, while four of his men ran out their oars. The boat moved off, shadowy in the starlight, the two men gazing after it in silence until the creaking of the oarlocks died away.

“A striking-looking fellow, this captain of ours,” Vernier remarked, at length. “There must be good blood in his veins. I’ve been interested in the way he handles his vessel; his men, too, for that matter. They seem to know by instinct what he wants done.”

“You will discover, when you know these people better, that they can converse without words, conveying their meaning in a glance, a slight movement of the head, or a lifting and lowering of the eyebrows.”

“Have you known him long?”

“The captain? A good many years, now.”

“Does he understand navigation? I’ve not seen him take a sight since we left the Marquesas.”

“Oh, yes. He passed an excellent examination for his certificate. But he knows this part of the Pacific as well as the sea birds themselves. You observed how precisely he made his landfall?”

Vernier nodded. “You like these people, Doctor; that’s plain,” he remarked.

“I do, though I’m not blind to their failings. Five years hence you shall tell me what you think of them. I predict that, comparing them with all the races you’ve known, it will not be the Polynesians who suffer in the final estimate.”

“Five years hence! God forbid that I should be buried here as long as that!”

Kersaint smiled. “You say that feelingly,” he replied.

The cabin boy came aft to clear the table; the two men rose to resume their steamer chairs by the rail, and to light their pipes. Vernier stood for a moment, gazing toward the near-by land.