The Greatest Adventures Boxed Set: Jack London Edition. Jack London
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quickly grew to man’s size, but did not stop there. It merely blew hard, and harder, and kept on blowing harder, advertising each increase by lulls followed by fierce, freshening gusts. Ever it grew, until the Uncle Toby’s rail was more often pressed under than not, while her waist boiled with foaming water which the scuppers could not carry off. Grief studied the barometer, still steadily falling.
“The centre is to the southward,” he told Snow, “and we’re running across its path and into it. Now we’ll turn about and run the other way. That ought to bring the glass up. Take in the foresail—it’s more than she can carry already—and stand by to wear her around.”
The maneuver was accomplished, and through the gloom that was almost that of the first darkness of evening the Uncle Toby turned and raced madly north across the face of the storm.
“It’s nip and tuck,” Grief confided to the mate a couple of hours later. “The storm’s swinging a big curve—there’s no calculating that curve—and we may win across or the centre may catch us. Thank the Lord, the glass is holding its own. It all depends on how big the curve is. The sea’s too big for us to keep on. Heave her to! She’ll keep working along out anyway.”
“I thought I knew what wind was,” Snow shouted in his owner’s ear next morning. “This isn’t wind. It’s something unthinkable. It’s impossible. It must reach ninety or a hundred miles an hour in the gusts. That don’t mean anything. How could I ever tell it to anybody? I couldn’t. And look at that sea! I’ve run my Easting down, but I never saw anything like that.”
Day had come, and the sun should have been up an hour, yet the best it could produce was a sombre semi-twilight. The ocean was a stately procession of moving mountains. A third of a mile across yawned the valleys between the great waves. Their long slopes, shielded somewhat from the full fury of the wind, were broken by systems of smaller whitecapping waves, but from the high crests of the big waves themselves the wind tore the whitecaps in the forming. This spume drove masthead high, and higher, horizontally, above the surface of the sea.
“We’re through the worst,” was Grief’s judgment. “The glass is coming along all the time. The sea will get bigger as the wind eases down. I’m going to turn in. Watch for shifts in the wind. They’ll be sure to come. Call me at eight bells.”
By mid-afternoon, in a huge sea, with the wind after its last shift no more than a stiff breeze, the Tongan bosun sighted a schooner bottom up. The Uncle Toby’s drift took them across the bow and they could not make out the name; but before night they picked up with a small, round-bottom, double-ender boat, swamped but with white lettering visible on its bow. Through the binoculars, Gray made out: Emily L No. 3.
“A sealing schooner,” Grief said. “But what a sealer’s doing in these waters is beyond me.”
“Treasure-hunters, maybe?” Snow speculated. “The Sophie Sutherland and the Herman were sealers, you remember, chartered out of San Francisco by the chaps with the maps who can always go right to the spot until they get there and don’t.”
III
After a giddy night of grand and lofty tumbling, in which, over a big and dying sea, without a breath of wind to steady her, the Uncle Toby rolled every person on board sick of soul, a light breeze sprang up and the reefs were shaken out. By midday, on a smooth ocean floor, the clouds thinned and cleared and sights of the sun were obtained. Two degrees and fifteen minutes south, the observation gave them. With a broken chronometer longitude was out of the question.
“We’re anywhere within five hundred and a thousand miles along that latitude line,” Grief remarked, as he and the mate bent over the chart.
“Leu-Leu is to the south’ard somewhere, and this section of ocean is all blank. There is neither an island nor a reef by which we can regulate the chronometer. The only thing to do—”
“Land ho, skipper!” the Tongan called down the companionway.
Grief took a quick glance at the empty blank of the chart, whistled his surprise, and sank back feebly in a chair.
“It gets me,” he said. “There can’t be land around here. We never drifted or ran like that. The whole voyage has been crazy. Will you kindly go up, Mr. Snow, and see what’s ailing Jackie.”
“It’s land all right,” the mate called down a minute afterward. “You can see it from the deck—tops of cocoanuts—an atoll of some sort. Maybe it’s Leu-Leu after all.”
Grief shook his head positively as he gazed at the fringe of palms, only the tops visible, apparently rising out of the sea.
“Haul up on the wind, Mr. Snow, close-and-by, and we’ll take a look. We can just reach past to the south, and if it spreads off in that direction we’ll hit the southwest corner.”
Very near must palms be to be seen from the low deck of a schooner, and, slowly as the Uncle Toby sailed, she quickly raised the low land above the sea, while more palms increased the definition of the atoll circle.
“She’s a beauty,” the mate remarked. “A perfect circle.... Looks as if it might be eight or nine miles across.... Wonder if there’s an entrance to the lagoon.... Who knows? Maybe it’s a brand new find.”
They coasted up the west side of the atoll, making short tacks in to the surf-pounded coral rock and out again. From the masthead, across the palm-fringe, a Kanaka announced the lagoon and a small island in the middle.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Grief said to his mate.
Snow, who had been muttering and shaking his head, looked up with quick and challenging incredulity.
“You’re thinking the entrance will be on the northwest.” Grief went on, as if reciting.
“Two cable lengths wide, marked on the north by three separated cocoanuts, and on the south by pandanus trees. Eight miles in diameter, a perfect circle, with an island in the dead centre.”
“I was thinking that,” Snow acknowledged.
“And there’s the entrance opening up just where it ought to be——”
“And the three palms,” Snow almost whispered, “and the pandanus trees. If there’s a windmill on the island, it’s it—Swithin Hall’s island. But it can’t be. Everybody’s been looking for it for the last ten years.”
“Hall played you a dirty trick once, didn’t he?” Grief queried.
Snow nodded. “That’s why I’m working for you. He broke me flat. It was downright robbery. I bought the wreck of the Cascade, down in Sydney, out of a first instalment of a legacy from home.”
“She went on Christmas Island, didn’t she?”
“Yes, full tilt, high and dry, in the night. They saved the passengers and mails. Then I bought a little island schooner, which took the rest of my money, and I had to wait the final payment by the executors to fit her out. What did Swithin Hall do—he was at Honolulu at the time—but make a straightaway run for Christmas Island. Neither right nor title did he have. When I got there, the hull and engines were all that was left of the Cascade. She had had a fair shipment of silk on board, too. And it wasn’t even damaged. I got it afterward pretty straight from his supercargo. He cleared something like sixty thousand dollars.”
Snow shrugged his shoulders and gazed bleakly at the smooth surface of the lagoon, where tiny wavelets danced in the afternoon sun.
“The wreck was mine. I bought her at public auction. I’d gambled big, and I’d lost. When I got back to Sydney, the crew, and some of the tradesmen who’d extended me credit, libelled the schooner. I pawned my watch and sextant, and shovelled coal one spell, and finally got a billet in the New Hebrides on