Читать книгу In the Track of the Trades - Lewis R. Freeman - Страница 4

For the Southeast lands are dread lands

To the sailor in the shrouds,

When the low clouds loom like headlands,

And the headlands blur like clouds;

choosing the time of the mate's watch to come out upon the quarter deck and practise it. Wolfe, blushing furiously, retreated to the lee of the foresail for shelter, not to reappear until the watch was called at noon. He could never see a white cloud near the horizon after that without looking ashamed, which was very awkward in the tropics where it was cloudy all the time; yet our real landfall came in form so similar to the cloud island which had so completely deceived that functionary a week previously that every one—including the Commodore—gazed, silent and mistrustful, and waited for some one else to shout the news. Our Dead-reckoning showed us to be a hundred miles off shore at daybreak, and it seemed impossible that even the mountain tops could show so clearly at so great a distance. But as the morning sun gained strength the opaque sheets of strati along the horizon began to thin, and gradually out of the dissolving mists, clear as cut alabaster against the brilliant turquoise of the tropic sky, the funicular cone of a great snow-capped volcano took unmistakable shape, and we knew it for the mighty Mauna Kea, famous as one of the loftiest island mountain peaks in the world.

"Could we make Hilo by dark?" was now the question. The mate answered in the negative and advised proceeding under half sail and standing off-and-on till daybreak. But the Commodore, noting the strengthening breeze which since midnight had been working back into the east where it belonged, deemed the effort worth making, and accordingly ordered the sheets slacked off and more sail set. Up fluttered the big main topmast staysail, up the jib topsail and the flying jib, and up the main and fore gaff-topsails, every one of them drawing beautifully in the steady breeze that came gushing over the starboard quarter, and each after the other, as it was hoisted and filled, doing its full measure of work in forcing the yacht's lee rail deeper into the yeasty run of foam churned up by her lunging bows and driving her faster toward her goal.

When the great turtle-backed Mauna Loa, lying to the south of and beyond Mauna Kea, was sighted at noon we had been bowling along for three hours at a gait that had brought the black lava belts under the snowline above the horizon, and below these, still dim and indistinct as the figures on ancient tapestry, the perspectives of the gently undulating lower reaches of the windward slope of the largest of the Hawaiian Islands.

All through the afternoon watch the wind freshened until, from an average of ten knots in the morning, we increased to eleven in each of the hours from twelve to two, ran just over twelve knots from two to three, and but slightly under thirteen from three to four. Fortunately such sea as was running was with us, and though there was a constant smoke of spray about the bows, and though the sails, filled hard as sand bags, strained on the masts till the backstays sang like over-strung fiddles, no green water came aboard and nothing carried away.

At four-thirty the masts of ships were sighted a couple of points off the port bow, and taking in the light sails we headed up for what we knew must be Hilo harbour. Ten minutes after the course was altered a black squall which had been chasing the yacht passed astern of her and broke upon the land, its course being as clearly traceable across the velvet verdance of the rippling cane fields as across the heavens. Down the coast it raced us, gradually passing inland and leaving behind it a wake of freshness that glistened like a green satin ribbon in the last rays of the sun that was setting behind a shoulder of the towering Mauna Kea. There are several experiences in life that mark with indelible impression the pages of memory, but none to compare with the sensations that throng upon one at his first close-in sight of a tropical island.

Waiohae Beach, Island of Hawaii

Hula dancer with Eukalele

As the yacht stood into the entrance of Hilo harbour, which is little more than an open roadstead partially protected by the submerged Broom Reef, the wind hauled to the south and several short tacks were necessary to make a favourable anchorage that offered a couple of cables' length to the landward of a big 12,000-ton steamer of the American-Hawaiian fleet which was loading sugar. The anchor was let go in seven fathoms of water at a few minutes before six o'clock, the log, which had been taken in at the entrance of the harbour, registering 2,430 miles from San Pedro breakwater.

The praises of Hilo itself, of its kind and hospitable people, its unique and picturesque Japanese quarter, its avenues of palms and mangoes and its streams and waterfalls, have been sung so often and so well that I reluctantly forego more than the briefest mention here. Further along on the cruise there were occasions when we met with more sumptuous entertainment, saw harbours more picturesque and better protected, and mountains clothed in an even more reckless riot of tropical vegetation; but we found no place that ever seriously rivalled Hilo for first place in our hearts. It was our first love; our first tropical experience; the gateway to those mystical latitudes of enchantment, the South Pacific. During the ten days which Lurline lay in Hilo Bay visits were made to Kilauea, the largest active volcano in the world, to the peerless Onomea Gulch and to several interesting sugar mills and plantations. Our stay was a continuous round of luaus or native feasts, luncheons, dinners, teas and drives. On the yacht we entertained with several small dinners, an evening of fireworks and music, and an afternoon sail, the latter event being recorded in the irreverent "Ladies' Log" as a "Mal de Mer Party."

Early in the afternoon of the 26th two of the sailors, pulling ashore to bring off some visitors, ran into a nasty combination of surf and tide rip at the bar of the Wiluki River and upset. One of the men was caught under the boat, and but for the timely assistance of a Japanese who had been fishing from his sampan nearby, would undoubtedly have been drowned. While the plucky Jap was endeavouring to secure the painter of the overturned boat, his sampan drifted inside the breakers and was on the verge of being itself upset when rescued by a tug sent out from the landing stage.

At four A. M. of March 2nd anchor was tripped and sail made for the run to Honolulu. The wind at first was light and baffling, as a result of which but twenty-one miles up the coast of the island were run off by noon. After passing Alea Point, however, the change of course made it possible to slack off the sheets, and under all plain lower sail the yacht bowled along at a nine-knot gait until well after dark. For the next three or four hours heavy squalls were encountered, but midnight showed a clear sky, with the opaque mass of Maui, looming darkly, abeam to starboard. This big island, the second in size of the Hawaiian group, is famous for its extinct volcano of Haleakala, the crater of which, ten miles in diameter and with rims that rise in places to an altitude of 10,000 feet, is believed to be the largest that has existed in any era of the world's geological history.

Morning of the 3rd showed the gaunt, forbidding cliffs of Molokai on the port beam, and our glasses readily located the spot where, shut in by unscalable rock walls behind and cut off by cordons of breakers in front, the unfortunate inhabitants of the leper settlement of Kalaupapa drag out their sad existences.

The island of Oahu was sighted at nine, and shortly afterward we headed into Molokai Channel, said to be one of the deepest places in the Pacific Ocean, and, in the matter of baffling winds and waves and currents, undoubtedly one of the most treacherous and uncertain, as we were to learn on the return voyage. A strong breeze increased to a half gale by noon, and under double-reefed main and foresails the yacht made not any too good weather of it in the vicious cross tumble of waters that assailed her. About noon the smooth, round summit of Coco Head began to peer above the foam-tipped crests of the in-racing seas, and an hour later the sharp, incisive outline of Diamond Head showed clear against the northeastern skyline. As we brought its tall lighthouse abeam the beach and reef of Waikiki, with rows of white hotels and bungalows, and the odd looking crater of the Punchbowl tilted above Honolulu in the background, began to open up beyond. The Jack at the fore brought the pilot boat, rowed by a crew of stalwart, bare-chested Kanakas, out from the Head through a tortuous passage in the Reef, and, watching his chance, the pilot leapt to a footing on the ladder and clambered aboard without absorbing so much as a drop of the swinging comber which at the same instant swept and half swamped his plunging cutter.

Our next three miles to the entrance of Honolulu Harbour was over the regular track of the transpacific liners, and the unfolding panorama, like the unrolling of an ever-changing piece of rich Oriental brocade, has furnished the inspiration for descriptions,—good, bad and indifferent,—by every traveller not abashed by its beauty and grandeur who has sailed that way since the time of Cook. I throw up my hands and admit the futility of adequate description at the outset; but none the less eagerly love to turn back the pages of memory to a picture—blurred and impressionistic in detail, but unfading in the brilliancy of its colours—of that leeward stretch of Oahu between Diamond Head and Honolulu as it appeared on that gusty afternoon of our first arrival, a harmony in blues and greens—the sombre indigo of the cloud-shadowed sea, the lapis-lazuli above the coils of the hidden reefs, the sheeny verdancy of the palms and bananas along the foreshore, the verte emaraude of the slope up to where Tantalus and the Pali were lost in their crowns of cumulus and nimbus; and above all the transparent azure of the tropic sky.

The pilot took Lurline in through the narrow reef which constitutes the entrance to Honolulu Harbour under foresail and jib, handling her with consummate skill in the maze of cross currents and eddies which make the passage a dangerous one even for steamers. Immediately on gaining still water we were boarded by the harbour-master, who moored us neatly and expeditiously in a natural slip in the reef called "Rotten Row," scarce a cable's length from the docks of the Pacific Mail and the Australian liners. Here the yacht lay for three weeks, provisioning and refitting for the arduous months ahead in some of the almost unsailed corners of the South Pacific, while we—the Mater, Claribel, the Commodore and myself—lived ashore, enjoying to our utmost the hospitality of the gayest, richest, loveliest and most fascinating of all the Pacific island capitals.