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The hundred and sixtieth meridian of east longitude bisects the island of Guadalcanal. The same meridian, nearly a thousand miles to the north, narrowly misses Ponapé, in the Caroline Group. Truk lies west of Ponapé, Kusaie east-southeast. Six hundred miles to the southeast and below the line is Nauru. Seven hundred miles west of Nauru, but above the Equator, is a tiny island with a formidable name: Kapingamarangi. From the point where the hundred and sixtieth meridian crosses the Line, no island closer than three hundred miles is laid down on modern charts.
The islands of this distant sea, with their wild inhabitants and outlandish names, were only less familiar than the New Bedford waterfront to the American whalers of a century ago. In the great days of sperm whaling, shortly before the Civil War, this region was a part of the Line Grounds, resorted to by schools of cachalots at certain times of the year. Here the beamy old vessels from New Bedford and Nantucket filled their barrels with oil and spermaceti, some to be carried home in their own bottoms, some to be transshipped from Russell, New Zealand. On the rich volcanic islands, where a runaway sailor stood no chance of escape and hogs, fruit, and vegetables abounded, the skippers would give their men a run ashore, and fill their ships for a week or two with Micronesian girls. The Yankees were the great explorers of these out-of-the-way corners of the Pacific; they were on the lookout for whales and bound nowhere in particular. At night they hove-to, like old East Indiamen; at daybreak they made sail once more, with men aloft, on the watch for the bushy, forward-slanting spouts of their prey.
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“In the old days of sail they had a system like that when a ship was short of water. They kept a musket barrel in the main-top. When a man wanted a drink he had to climb-up there for the musket barrel, come down with it to the scuttlebutt outside the galley, suck up his drink, and carry the gun barrel to the main-top again. A seaman wouldn’t take the trouble unless he was really thirsty. . . . Everything okay below?”
Mauriac nodded, soberly.
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