I HAULED SOUTHWARD down the coast, skirting the wide, heavily toothed open reef, at 200 yards. The small island was a bare mile and a half away, across the reef and across the lagoon. Though I had been through the New Hebrides during the war, I couldn’t tag the island.
It was about seven miles long, and looked seven or eight hundred feet high. It was volcanic, capped by a craterlike summit. Along the shore the malformed lava cliffs jumped up twenty or thirty feet, deeply underwashed by the sea. Here and there a flat depression ended in a white sandy beach, grown to mangrove and coconut trees.
My plan was to locate the opening in the reef and shoot into the lagoon to anchor before a village, or beach my boat on one of the sandy shores. I was racing against time. Pagan hadn’t been pumped in four hours; water was rising. I was saving my strength for the bout with the short, clumsy tiller, and the struggle to get ashore.
Down the full length of the coast I ran, till I neared the southeast corner, and still I found no opening in the reef. As I closed with the point I realized the danger of going around it.
I dared not pass to leeward of the protruding fist of land. Once by, I could never work back: I remembered my failure at the recent unidentified island. Nor could I turn back and reach up the long coast. My course had thrown me in hard by the reef. I hadn’t room to maneuver or the strength to do it. For one thing, the bulky mast, strapped as it was angularly across the deck, was an impediment. It dragged in the sea whenever the decks sloped, and made Pagan difficult to maneuver. I thought of going forward to cut its lashings, but I knew I hadn’t the strength to roll it off. My strength was gone; I was unable to pump out. The water in the hold was rising. The point was a hundred yards off. I had to act . . . now. A dread decision with regard to my boat was in the balance—and it had to be made.
I suddenly realized that my battered little craft was a coffin. Kim Powell in Panama had said, “She’ll go as far as you can stay with her.” The prophecy was true. I was finished, but my sporty little cutter was still game for the fight.
I had no alternative but to wreck her to save my life . . . what is worse, I had no time to weigh the pros and cons of the predicament.
Rather than turn that corner to sure death, rather than go about and fight hopelessly—and vainly—up the uninviting coast, I kicked the helm hard down and raced bow-on toward the exposed reef: my last official decision as Pagan’s captain, for now she was heading into an alley from which she would never return.
I was dressed in army khaki. Earlier, when I sighted the island, I had a quick sponge bath sitting at the rail; I combed the salt from my beard and arranged my bothersome hair, now long as a woman’s, into a knot and covered it with a cap. My feet were too swollen for anything but stockings. My bulbous knee I wrapped in blanket stripping.
I had grabbed a few last things and crammed them in my pockets. Hand on the tiller, I awaited the shock.
The keel passed over several coral heads, about six fathoms down. Farther on the reef began to shoal quickly, and the sea floor was only four fathoms. I can anchor in this, I suddenly realized. At a slow-motion gait I limped forward to the anchor and made to put it over.
Partly because of my boil-like knee, but mostly because I had no strength, I couldn’t begin to budge the anchor. I was nearing the reef; the sea was pounding like thunder on it. I sat down, put my feet against the flukes, and pushed with all my might; but I was helpless to move it. The din was closer. I was caught in the grip of the current, and I was being swept in to the reef. I got up, took the fluke in my hands, and strained at it. It raised a foot. I lost my balance and stumbled.
Pagan caught the swell of a roller, rode in on its back, and crashed stem-to against the coral wall. She shivered as though struck by shell fire. I was sitting near the port rail. One of her planks sprung, pointing away from the stem. I could see the water gush through it. In a moment she settled by the bow, the deck was awash, the fore scuttle covered. In no time I was sitting to my pockets in water. I could only sit and watch—the decks were lurching too much to permit me to stand.
I could hear a horrible noise as Pagan pounded against the reef at the beam. Only the watertight stern section was buoyant. The bow was still going down. Water was up to my waist. The next two rollers lifted the stern on the reef. I could feel the dull thud of the lead-shod keel against the iron-hard coral. The next sea combed across the bows, sweeping me against the deckhouse, where I clung to the mast. Each successive sea worked her higher on the reef, turning her broadside to the destructive waves and tilting her at a crazy angle. The next impact shook me from my hold. I slipped down the abrupt incline and fell free of the boat onto the coral, only to be overwhelmed by a sea that twisted me in a somersault and threw me back onto shallower coral ground. I gathered myself up, shook free of the grasping water, and somehow moved a few feet to where it was safe.
I had backed away from my battered boat onto the dry coral and sat cursing the bullying sea. Pagan was thrown up to where the water was knee-deep. Each time a roller broke over her she shuddered and ground her planks on the sharp coral.
Behind me the jagged reef ran for two hundred yards. I turned and staggered in the stiff-legged way of the gaunt and hungry to the brink of the reef. There the lagoon dropped to a depth of nine fathoms, where a garden land of coral formations grew. Tiny fish were as visible in fifty feet of water as in fifty feet of clear air. I shunned the water like poison, knowing that if I should fall in, I would sink like a weight.
I lay down on the coral to rest and dropped instantly and helplessly asleep. Hours later the rising tide, marching across the reef, lapped against me. With the feel of water I jerked awake, thinking it was time to pump the bilges. Seeing myself on the crusty reef I was startled, then shocked. Then I remembered. The tide was coming in. The reef was covered. Two hundred yards away Pagan was taking an unmerciful pounding from the growing rollers.
I decided to struggle back to the boat and get the life raft.
I wobbled back to her, keeping in the less disturbed waters of her lee. She was thigh-deep in water, and had been bowled over several times. The little rubber life raft had been caught beneath the boat and ground into the coral spikes. After trailing astern for over a thousand miles of the Pacific since the hurricane, it ended on the coral needles.
I waded to the sloping deck and climbed uncertainly aboard, looking for something on which to float across the deep lagoon. Pagan was on her beam, teetering either way, likely to lob over again. Knife in hand I hacked away the stout lashings holding the thirty-five-foot mast to the deck. I jumped off and sloshed to where water was knee-deep, and looked back.
This rising sea was whamming Pagan and threatening to bowl her over. Suddenly Pagan jammed her beam into the coral and clumped over from her beam onto her decks. The hull, pointing skyward, was ghastly with barnacles and scars and loose planking.
I felt drowsy but there was no place to lie down. The growing waves were pushing me back away from the boat. Then the mast worked loose and I took hold of it. I held to it as the sea drove it slowly across the reef. When I reached the lagoon, I climbed on its heaviest part, straddling it, floating on it.
My arms and legs were dangling in the water, my head and chest resting on the hard curved surface. For a long time I lay watching the island as I floated off onto the lagoon. Finally I drifted off to a sleeplike drowse.
I awakened when the mast scraped on the soft shore. I was in a small alcove fronted with bright sand, overtowered by a beetling wall of volcanic rock. I plodded out of the water onto the white sand. I slumped into the inviting warmth and fell asleep.
The incoming tide, washing my feet sometime later, awakened me as it marched up the beach. I crawled higher on the sloping beach to the base of the twenty-foot cliff face, where I hoped the water wouldn’t reach, and dropped off again in a slumber. In a while I was disturbed again. The rising tide. Looking on the rocks I could see a high-water mark shoulder high.
The miniature cove, soon to be filled with wind-driven water, was no place to be at high tide. I could imagine the havoc of swirling waters in the bowl pushed there by the crushing tide.
Had I not been weak or my knee tender, I could easily have scaled the cliff. There were footholds and handholds aplenty. It was only a matter of simple climbing, but my arms and legs and hands were powerless.
Looking back now, I can’t explain, even to myself, how I climbed those rocks. They were twenty feet high. They were sharp—no man could say they were terribly difficult to climb, I admit. At the same time I was weak—too weak to budge a fifty-pound anchor before I wrecked—yet I managed to push and pull my eighty or ninety pounds up the twenty feet of lava formation.
The first thing I did when I got to the top was to lie down for a sleep. It was a nap that lasted the rest of the afternoon and all that night. For the first time in forty-eight days I didn’t have to pull myself up at disjointed hours of the night to pump the bilges. But I awakened several times from force of habit. My ears were long tuned to the creaking of Pagan’s timbers and the myriad sounds from her watered bilges, and from wind in her sails and rigging. The absence of those sounds was as significant as those sounds themselves, and when I couldn’t hear them, I could only sleep patchily.
When day broke I labored to a sitting position, feeling fresh enough to think of food and water. I was sitting in a patch of misshapen lava surrounded by thick, recklessly grown jungle, creepers, and tight trees. A mile across the lagoon I could see the remains of my intrepid Pagan high and dry on the shining reef. She looked frowzy and tortured. Her standing rigging was smashed away; her deckhouse gone; she lay on her beam, halfway across the long reef, pointing her naked decks to the sky.
Below me the beach of the alcove was strewn with driftage from Pagan—bits of chewed planking, articles of clothing, bedding, sailcloth, water kegs, spars, and shroud wires.
I searched into the entangled jungle from my seat, looking for signs of tropical foods. I had expected to find bananas, coconuts, bird rookeries, and water easily. I saw nothing encouraging—only the dense patchwork of illimitable undergrowth topped by towering oaklike trees. From near by I selected several varieties of leaves and chewed at them. They were tasteless and more dry than otherwise.
I remembered having seen coconut palms on the shore when I was skirting the reef with Pagan. It was my hope now to find them and eat of them till someone came along or my strength returned to where I could manage a search inland or along the coast for a village. I decided to go south and at the same time to seek for the lee side of the isle. I wondered how far I would have to go; and I wondered how far I could go.
I figured I’d better get an early start, so I wobbled to my feet. To southward, around the beckoning point that I had nearly sailed past, appeared the shortest way to the island’s leeward shores. If the island was inhabited there would be a village there.
I took a stout limb for support and started on an uncertain quest over the pocked spiny lava. I ate leaves as I trudged along, and sucked the ends of broken branches for sap. A small land crab, jumping from rock to rock, darted in front of me, and I pinioned him with my stick. Taking him up, I tore him apart and sucked his bitter-tasting insides out. I chewed his plated legs, sucked the shelly mass dry, and spit it up. It gave me fresh strength and hope.
Farther along I found another crab. He too I sucked from his shell. I had come now some fifteen or twenty yards in a couple of hours. My walking was unbearably slow. I wanted to go faster. But the rocks! They were rocks such as I had never seen before. They were like an eagle’s claws inverted. The island is volcanic in origin, and evidently centuries of rain, pelting upon the wearable lava, has fined it down to innumerable stalagmite-looking points sticking up at heights from three inches to three feet. They crowd upon themselves in their formation like a close forest, making a flat space—even the width of a bare foot—something to remember. I teetered among them, placing my feet carefully on the least sharp of the points and using my hands on the higher lava spires to brace myself and push myself along.
My legs were weakening and my bad knee beginning to ache. My swollen heavy feet were too much of a load to be carried much farther. Their weight was such that often I had to lift them from behind the knees over the higher rocks. I lay down among the rocks to rest. It was easy to sleep. I could have slept forever. Sleep was as effortless as thinking to an active mind. My body cried for twenty-four hours of sleep, but my judgment complained at the little distance I had traveled. I forced myself to move on.
In an hour I wended through another ten yards of rock semi-jungle. I was so tired I trembled; I was ready to quit. I looked for a spot to lie down. From out of the rocks a coral snake glided toward me, weaving in such a way that I knew he didn’t see me. My parched throat watered at the sight of him. Instantly I thought of his meat and blood—food! When he was close enough I trapped him with my stick, holding it into the center of his body, pressing hard, trying to break his back. He writhed madly. I was hoping he would soon succumb. My hunger juices, whetted by the crabs and leaves, were yearning. I wondered how one went about eating a snake. I pushed against the stick the harder.
My strength began to give out; my arms trembled so that the stick moved, losing its purchase, and the snake darted into the rocks. The exertion tired me so I sat down, napping where I sat, but not for long: I felt a compulsion driving me to round the point while I had strength to walk.
Later in the afternoon, another twenty yards along, I came upon a lone coconut tree. It was short, not reaching higher than twenty-five feet, and a dozen green nuts, most delicious for drinking, were nestled in its fronds. Slapping the tree I shouted happily, and kissed it. Here I could stay eating the nuts till I grew strong again.
In a short time my joy faded to ironic discouragement. Though the life-giving coconuts were a scant twenty feet overhead, I was powerless to reach them. I knew that I was powerless to climb the tree. I threw my hiking stick at them. The shoulder muscles were so weak that my arm came out of socket, and fell limp at my side till I pressed it in again. I gave up and slept on the mound of earth at the base of the tree.
When I arose in a few hours, I searched about and found a weazened old nut. My knife, though rusted, was suitably sharp. But not the world’s sharpest knife could have availed me much then. I was too weak to use it.
Nevertheless I set to work hewing at the end of the nut. After what seemed hours I had hacked through a bare inch of the outer fibrous husk. My fingers, hands, and arms ached from the clumsy work. There was an inch to go to the inner nut. But I was so weak and tired I doddered. Even as I stared uselessly at the nut I dozed. I dropped it and fell back. I slept as I had wanted to sleep, uninhibited and without moving, the rest of the afternoon, and the whole of the night.
I awakened next morning weaker than when I had fallen asleep. Beside me lay the wrinkled nut, and near by the knife. I took them up and struck one against the other with chopping, half-strength cuts. Within minutes I was tired. My hands cramped up and refused to open or close. I had only to cut through an inch of husk to find three small depressions. By punching one of them, I could reach the inside cool milk. I picked the nut up and beat it against the sharp rocks. I pounded it till my breath came in gasps, then dropped it in despair and lay back in a heap.
The third day ashore and I had seen nothing but a tortuous floor of projecting crags and confused growth. My tongue was puffed and sticky. The bad knee was turning black. Coral poisoning, picked up out on the reef, which I had been unaware of up to this point, was festering in a dozen places on my feet and legs.
I lay about a hundred paces inland. Hard by I could hear the sea pounding into the under-washed caverns along the shore. I knew I was on my last legs—and my only chance for life lay in getting back to where I could watch the water and intercept a chance passer. I struggled to a shaky stance and trudged toilsomely in the direction of the sea, stumbling and falling, oblivious of everything, intent only on reaching the dull noise of the pounding surf.
I came out upon a small alcove making an irregular half circle around a sandspit some twenty feet below me. A strong wind—sufficient, if I had been out in it under sail, to necessitate tucking in a reef—was whirling the sand in eddies along the strand. The tide was well out, revealing a bottom heavy with rocks and ledges of coral. Out on the reef, I could see no sign of Pagan. The sea and coral had triumphed over her. Around the shore were indications of her presence. I lay down and slept.
Sometime later I heard sounds that weren’t exactly the sea. Looking from my perch I saw three small native children racing excitedly about the beach. They were bushy haired and black skinned. They shouted and screamed in high glee over the fabulous findings they were making. They were directly below me.
I leaned over the ledge, intending to shout, “Hey Joe, come here.” Instead, a weird, uncontrollable gurgle rattled forth. The boys looked around, then up. What they saw was mirrored in their faces. Their eyes grew saucerlike with terror; in one motion they dropped all they had collected and ran screaming for their lives.
I was so suddenly left alone that I was afraid I had imagined what I saw. But the footprints were there—they spoke volumes in relief and peace of mind. At least someone knew that a stranger was on the island.
I lay back and slept, waking to stare at the watery point around which they had gone, as long and as often as possible. Heavy hours dragged by. The tide worked up the beach to full. Driven by the flush wind it thundered into the worn cliff base, throwing dollops of water well back into the matted brush and vine.
Finally I heard loud shouts and watched the mouth of the alcove. An outrigger broke into view carrying six young boys. They were punting her along in the shallow water. I hailed them. They dropped on one knee, the better to see me, and stared incredulously. They were a scant thirty yards away.
I could tell that they had seen few white men before. And it was apparent that the frightened children hadn’t been taken seriously in their village. The gullible teen-agers had come to investigate.
I motioned them into the cove so I could be dragged from my perch in the rocks. They tried valiantly to poke the delicate-hulled outrigger into the precarious opening, but were forced to give up. The zesty wind blowing, the tide coming in, the heavy rollers breaking into the rock-ribbed cove, baffled their seamanship. Rightfully they gave up.
They smiled gamely, indicating that it was impossible to come in. They indicated that I should move out to the ledge at the fringe of the cove mouth, about forty feet from me; from there they could possibly catch me as I jumped over. If I could but win to that point, I was safe. I tried to stand, but there wasn’t enough push in my arms and legs to get me off my back, and I showed them how helpless I was.
They motioned that they were returning to their village, that they would come again. I communicated to them that I was foodless, waterless—I fell back in a fainting gesture to imply that if they didn’t come for me soon, it wouldn’t matter if they never came. Lying back was so peaceful. I forgot they were there and soon found myself dozing.
I was shocked awake by water splashing over me. It was dark. I thought I was aboard Pagan in the tight cold cabin. I was saying to myself, “It’s time to pump the bilges.” I felt around for the tea. Just a pinch to chew while I heaved at the pump. My hand scraped across the rocks; then I remembered and looked out onto the black lagoon.
The sea was pounding against the cliffs. The tide was coming up again. A high wind was blowing and salt water was bombarding the jungle.
I supposed the natives had come looking for me, and missed me. I was too weak to sit up for long. I propped myself on my side so that I could squint through a crevice in the rocks at the sea.
The wind and water were cold, my clothes were sticking to me. I was getting properly miserable. Then I saw lights on the water. They were well off from the shore. I knew it was the outrigger come for me. Then I made it to be two outriggers, maybe three. When they pulled up even with me they stopped, and evidently anchored to study the situation.
The torches burned fiercely in the wind as the boats huddled offshore. Occasionally, when the sea and wind were momentarily slack, I yelled gutturally. They heard me, and shouted back encouragement above the brewing storm.
It was understandable that they didn’t hazard their delicate outriggers in the obstreperous surf. The surge of sea over the rocky bottom would have smashed the hulls out of them. I called to them at every favorable opportunity, and when they heard, they answered reassuringly.
Hours dragged, the torches one by one were put out, and finally only one torch shone in the water. I grew panicky, thinking I’d never be rescued. The natives were evidently waiting for daylight. I was cold, wet, and miserable. Surely they were cunning enough to devise some means of getting me out before then.
I set up such a caterwaul of despondent calls that soon the boats sprang audibly and visibly to life. Several torches flared up, voices sang out, and one of the craft detached itself and moved slowly away to the north. Something was afoot.
The other boats moved in to around fifty feet off the rocks. I could see naked shoulders and bushy heads under the fires. They called good-naturedly and pointed to the north.
I called to them in Spanish, then in French, but they gave the same friendly answers, and waved their flares to the north.
Sometime later I heard brush rustling in the jungle and the snap of limbs underfoot. I threw myself down out of sight and listened. A voice called in a strange tongue and I sat up and answered. Those on the water joined in and an excited three-way interchange cropped up.
A torch suddenly swayed in view from the dark, and stopped in the air above me. An exclamation of disbelief came from behind the sputtering light. The bearer was panting heavily from his struggle with the rocks and bramble. All I could say was, “Hello Joe.” I could not sit up any longer; I could only extend a hand.
I made out massive shoulders and arms beneath the light, and a bushy head. He was a tall man. His voice, husky and full of understanding, spoke soothing words, and shouted instructions to the boats. The light disappeared, and the powerful arms closed about me, wafting me into the air.
My Good Samaritan hustled me in a jiffy over the forty feet to the overhanging ledge, where the boys earlier could have saved me. I was held in hard-muscled arms while one of the boats, heavily manned with oarsmen and punters, worked up to the battered rock face. I could hear oars slapping the water furiously and the punting poles pounding at the black, shapeless cliff face to fend the boat off. Instructions were loudly bandied. The craft, flooded with torchlight, was directly below, heaving to the surging seas. More words passed from mouth to mouth. This time they were desperate instructions. The prow was scraping over the charred rock. My benefactor twisted me upside down, and handed me down at the ankles. Upreaching arms folded me in and exclaimed when they felt my small girth. When I was safe aboard a yell of triumph went up from all throats. The other boats answered.
A moment later an audible crash shook the small craft. It was my benefactor, who had jumped aboard from his perch. It’s a wonder he hadn’t broken a leg or stove the light deck in.
I was laid on the stern of the open boat. The stanch oarsmen worked the boat off the cliffy shore. My friend came to me and covered me over with a sheet of tapa cloth. When I clamored for food and drink he offered me a baked kumala, a kind of sweet potato, which I took and nibbled a morsel from. The long days and nights of quiet desperation were over. The fact of food in my hands and a pot of native tea being offered me overwhelmed me. Suddenly I lost all caution. I bit viciously into the kumala. I chewed it voraciously and swallowed it in great gulps, washing it down with volumes of the hot tea.
I sighed and exclaimed over the food with pleasure, much to the delight of my friend, who egged me on generously, giggling happily as I bolted great mouthfuls. I knew I shouldn’t be gobbling as I was; but though I tried mightily, judgment went glimmering after the first taste.
When I was gorged I lay back and fell asleep to the tune of oar beats and punting poles and the lilt of a strange language.