[Gutenberg 62697] • Atolls of the Sun

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Perilous navigation?Curious green sky?Arrival at Anaa?Religion and the movies?Character of Paumotuans. A CURRENT set against us all night. Now I understood fully the alarms and misgivings that had caused the first and following discoverers of the Pernicious Islands to curse them by the titles they gave them. Our current was of the mischievous sort that upset logarithms and dead reckoning, and put ships ashore. This group is a graveyard of vessels, said Mc- Henry, and there 'd be ten times as many wrecked, if they come here. Wait till you see the County of Roxburgh at Takaroa! I 've been cruisin' round here more 'n twenty years, and I never saw the current the same. The Frog Government at Papeete is always talkin' about puttin' lighthouses on a half-dozen of these atolls, Jbut does nothin'. Maybe the chief or a trader hangs a lantern on top of his house when he expects a cargo for him, but you can't trust those lights, and you can't see them in time to keep from hittin' the reef. There's no leeway to run from a wind past beating. It's lee shore in some bloody direction all the time. There 's a foot or two between high and low, and it's low in the lagoon when the moon is full. It's high when the moon rises and when it sets. In atolls where there 's a pass into the lagoon, there's a hellof a current in the lagoon at the lowerin' tide, and in the sea near the lagoon when the tide is risin'. We're goin' to beat those tides with engines. In five years every schooner in the group will have an auxiliary. There's only one now, the Fetia Taiao, and she 's brand new. It used to be canoes, and then whale- boats, and then cutters here, and purty soon it '11 be gasolene schooners. Then will the cry arise that romance has perished of artificiality. But the heart...