The Cruise of the Snark (38 page)

Thursday, May 9, 1907.
—Jack and Mrs. London swear they saw three flying fish to-day; we think they are mistaken. Jack has had a spoon-hook out ever since we left, but has not even had a nibble. Tochigi washed out some clothing to-day—I made a picture of him at it. Lat. 21°—42'—14'', Long. 139°—22' 15''. If only I could get some sleep! But the sea is so rough that I just roll from one side of the bunk to the other. We have all kinds of music. Jack has a big talking-machine, with over five hundred records; some of them are of the finest opera music, vocal and instrumental. How strange it would be, if one could stand off a hundred yards and watch the little
Snark
go by on the crested waves, while the voice of Caruso, say, sang from our companionway. I think one would rub his eyes, and think it something visionary, unreal. We have awnings on deck which help to keep off the heat of the sun. And oh, yes, besides the talking-machine and the musical records, we have an Edison language-machine, with Italian, German, Spanish, and French records, and a text-book for each language.

Friday, May 10, 1907.
—Sea rough to-day. Everybody needing sleep. Saw some flying fish, but couldn't catch any. Been threatening rain; wind from northeast, course southwest. It's mighty hard to cook, for nothing will stay on the stove. What does slops out. I am thrown around all the time. Water still sopping around in galley. It is a good thing we are prepared for the wet—we have rubber hip-boots, oil-skin coats, rubber sou'-westers. Then, for work, there are blue flannel shirts, blue calico shirts; and for dress, silk shirts. We have also brought pajamas, for use in very warm weather. How the boat rocks and pitches! What wouldn't I give to stand still for only a minute? Tochigi is relapsing into seasickness again.

 

The next day found us in a fierce sea. We were all soaked with water. Indeed, it was impossible to step on deck without getting wet. Great waves, many times higher than the
Snark,
kept sweeping down as if to swamp us, but always we slid along the top of them, seeing for miles around; then would come the dive down into the slough, where everything was blotted from view but a wild swirl of waters. It was next to impossible to cook. Dishes defied all laws of gravitation, and skimmed like birds through the air; and the stove was a sight, what of the things that slopped over it. We were covered with bruises from being thrown up against the vessel. Mrs. London made another aerial descent of the companionway that night, but was only slightly bruised. Captain Eames scraped the skin off his head in the course of one tumble. I got my punishment in burns from the stove. Far above, in the tropic sky, the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled. Lightning had an awful significance to the crew of the
Snark.
We were far out at sea; the copper and other metals would tend to draw the current, and had a spark ever reached us, and ignited the eleven hundred gallons of gasolene on board, there wouldn't have been a splinter left to tell the tale.

Like all sailors, we did not love the sea. It was the eternal menace. Looking upon its placid surface in moments of calm, we could almost forget that it was forever yawning, and that into its maw had gone many a brave ship, of greater tonnage than ours. But in raging storms, with the lightning shooting in fiery lines across the sky, and the artillery of heaven rumbling and banging overhead and echoing on the storm-lashed waves, we came to appreciate the true meaning of things, and to assign to earth and sky and sea the proper values. At such moments, I repeat, we did not love the sea; but we did love the
Snark.
Its ten tons of wood and metal stood between us and destruction. It made life possible to us. It was in such reflections as these, miles and miles from any land, that the words of Jack London rang again in my ears: “Life that lives is life successful. The achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment to a sternly exacting environment.” Well, we strove to accomplish, and our environment was savage. Supreme courage and unwavering vigilance alone could enable us to adjust ourselves, and come alive out of the welter of foam and frothing waves that assailed the little
Snark,
the greater part of her perilous voyage to Hawaii.

There is a little more to tell. We did not dream that these were our last hours of travel on the
Snark.
The three weeks at Pennduffryn we put in busily despite illness. Days were spent in the shady grove of piles under the buildings, sorting, labelling and packing in great cases our vast accumulation of Melanesian curios for shipment. Jack wrote daily, except when the violence of fever attacks laid him low. His various ailments grew steadily worse. His hands alone were enough to drive a man wild—eleven skins peeling off simultaneously, one above another. Out of my own fever, and the anæmic and neurasthenic condition I had fallen into, augmented by worry over Jack, came moods of despondency, most unlike my happy-go-lucky wont. And instead of inviting repose, I foolishly worked harder than ever, and developed a siege of insomnia.

The life of the plantation at this stage in its downfall would make a romantic story in itself. The little Spanish Baroness Eugénie, Mrs. Harding, who had returned from Sydney, hid under forced gaiety, innate charm and loveableness, and the most enchanting of wardrobes, the tragedy of the disappearance of her own fortune as well as her husband's and Darbishire's. When she married Harding, in South America, she forfeited all but her title, the baronial jewels, and a mere modicum of her rightful fortune; and the latter had melted away in the failing plantation.

“I will show you my coronet and jewels some day,” she mused, in a confidential moment, her incredibly large black eyes very wide. “They are in the Bank—and I cannot sell them, alas!”

The entertainment was lavish—perhaps this sort of thing was at the bottom of the failure to make things go; but they died game and gay, all of them. Two dining-rooms ran full blast. The house was packed, among the guests being three men of different nationalities, taking moving pictures for Pathé Frères, and at many a meal eight languages were spoken—all of which Mrs. Harding understood, even to Swedish, and nothing could be passed about and escape her quick ear and brain. There were fancy dress and masquerade evenings, horseback rides, musicales, all night poker, billiards—anything and everything that two women and a dozen men could devise to enliven a house party, and make every one forget that the establishment was in its last days. It was admirable, and very pathetic. And splendidly English.

The schooner
Eugénie
had been chartered for Bellona and Rennel by some nitrate people, and had never returned to the
Minota
at Malu. The mate of the
Minota,
who had now left her, told us the ketch had got safely away for Tulagi for stores, thence to Meringe; and he further reported that Captain Jansen had been “wild” when he discovered Peggy's loss, but had been pacified when he read my letter. When he came to Pennduffryn, before we sailed for Sydney, he formally presented me with what he could see was entirely mine own, saying, with a twinkle in his Dutch blue eyes:

“She's spoiled for a nigger chaser anyway, now. My word! I couldn't make anything out of such a lady's-dog!”

Peggy helped me wondrously through all those feverish, sick days in the hot northwest season. Never a night, no matter how late, did I leave the drawing-room, but the little velvet form, outside on the porch, was pressing against me, seeing me to my netted cot in the grass bathroom on stilts. No awkward age was ever hers; she was a thing with the grace of God in her, mentally and materially. And she gave all her big and gallant soul in love.

With Captain Jansen, on the
Minota,
came Wada, landed back upon us despite his wishes or ours, by the very law of the land. He could not stay in the islands because no one would be responsible for him; he could not leave, because there was no one to put up the hundred pounds bond required in Australia on any dark skin. Mr. Schroeder, to save the boy's life when he was very low with fever in a native hut, took him in, and when he was better, had him cook, without wages, until the first chance to get him away from Ysabel, which was on the
Minota,
where in the galley he worked his passage. Meekly he came aboard the
Snark
to cook without wages until such time as we should return from Sydney, and sail to some port where he could take leave freely.

How blindly we plan. How little we thought, that starry, musky night under the Southern Cross, when we paid our farewell call on the
Snark
—now in charge of the
Minota's
mate—that this would be the last time we should ever descend her teak gangway ladder in these waters.

Martin as well as Nakata took steamer for Sydney, as there was purchasing for him to attend to, and he wanted to see doctors himself. Jack and I, in Captain Mortimer's roomy quarters, actually loafed on the twelve days of the
Makambo's
stormy voyage to Sydney, both of us suffering greatly and additionally from a prickly heat that boiled up in a fiery rash which in turn burst into water.

During the five weeks when Jack lay in a private hospital in North Sydney after an operation for, not one fistula, but two, his surgeon, Dr. Clarence Read, flanked by several skin specialists, puzzled and studied and theorised over his pitiful hands, the like of which they had never seen nor even heard. All agreed that the trouble was non-parasitic, and therefore concluded that it was entirely of nervous origin. And a different skin malady showed on his elbows, which they recognised as psoriasis, truly and actually the leprosy of the Bible, the “silvery skin,” cures of which occur spontaneously, but of which no other cure is known.

One day, during my reading aloud to the convalescent, I said tentatively—and it had taken much thought and self-abnegation to come to it:

“If you think we'd better give up the
Snark
voyage . . .”

“Oh, nothing like that,” Jack answered brightly. “We're going around the world in the
Snark,
you know.”

But the unhealing weeks went by, and one day Jack gave me the result of his consideration of his case: that the one thing that would set him straight would be to return once more to his own habitat, to California, where his nerve equilibrium had always been stable. This, of course, meant the ending of our voyage. Although I had not ceased from thinking along these lines, the actual facing of the issue was too much in the low state of my nerves, and I broke down and sobbed unrestrainedly. This precipitated fever, and for days I lay in a little bed in the same room with Jack.

In short, Martin was sent back to the Solomons, accompanied by an old skipper, Captain Reed, to bring the yacht to Sydney, where she would be put up for sale.

In the meantime, we rented an apartment in Sydney, and worked and played as best we might, among other trips taking in the wonderful Jenolan Caves. But it was not all pleasure, for Jack's hands did not improve, but went on swelling and peeling prodigiously. The only relief was in massage, which caused them to break into wringing perspiration. His toe-nails became affected, growing as thick as their length in twenty-four hours, when he would file them down, only to have a recurrence.

We tried Tasmania, visited Hobart Town, and spent a month in a cool hotel resort at Brown's River, where the country was very like California, and our general tone was better for the time being.

We had been back in Sydney for some time when the
Snark
arrived, all hands alive and well, except . . .

Neither Martin nor Captain Reed had the courage or heart to bring the tidings, so the little old skipper wrote:

“I am very sorry to report that your little dog Peggy died off Bellona and Rennel, three days out from the Solomons.”

I do not think Jack is ashamed of the tears he shed with me that night. She was too good to be true, Peggy, dear heart, dear heart. I cannot, must not say much . . . only . . . the day before she died, wan and weak she came and sat before Martin, as she had sat before me that last day going back to Pennduffryn, and looked long and questioningly into his face with her dolorous eyes. I know, Jack knows . . . she was asking for him, for me, some word, some message, trying, at the end of her blameless days, to pass across all space and difference of kind, her deathless faith. I have claimed much for Peggy . . . not too much, I swear, for those few who have known such a creature—if there could be another—and who will understand, quite.

 

It was a terrible strain, going daily to the
Snark
on a little ferry boat, to oversee the packing of gear that we were sending home. I know I shed tears during each return trip. I blush to think how little of help I was to Jack in the matter of cheer; but he says that out of it all he gathered the greatest proof of the success of the
Snark
adventure, that the one small woman, frail out of all proportion to the husky men, should be so broken at the abandonment of the voyage.

Martin continued on around the world by devious ways. Wada sailed as cook on some outgoing steamer. Henry and Tehei returned to the Society Islands; but Nakata went with Jack and me from Newcastle, N.S.W., one fine day, on an English tramp, the
Tymeric,
Captain MacIlwaine, bound with “coals from Newcastle” to Guayaquil, Ecuador. We were glad her orders were changed at the last moment and that we were to have a final flare of adventure in a new country before reaching home. Jack's general health benefited by the voyage, and he was able to box lustily with the three sturdy young English officers. But I fell from one fever fit into another, during a many days' gale early in the passage, and this weakened me sadly. However, the forty-three days in the tramp were an experience worth having.