02 South Sea Adventure (17 page)

With the other three flippers going and this one quiet, the turtle could not help going around to the right. Roger held on until headed back towards the beach, then let go. He could dimly see Hal and Omo on the beach. ‘I’m bringing home the bacon,’ he called to them. But the turtle had ideas of its own. It began to swing one way and then the other and Roger was kept busy seizing the right or the left hind flipper to keep his course straight for the beach. When he forgot to hold back on the front edge of the shell the creature promptly sounded and Roger was carried a fathom or so under water before he could collect his wits and bring his submarine back to the surface. Hal and Omo waded into the water and helped him get his mount ashore. The big turtle snapped its jaws together and nearly nipped a piece out of Hal’s leg. ‘We’ll soon stop that.’ said Hal, and took out his knife. The turtle raised its head menacingly. Its leathery skin and appearance of great age made it look like an angry old man.

‘Don’t murder grandpa!’ cried Roger. ‘I’ve a better idea. Let’s take him along with us on the raft - alive. Then we’ll have fresh food when we need it.’

‘Good idea,’ said Omo. He was digging in the sand with a stick. ‘But it’s grandma, not grandpa. Here are the eggs she was laying.’

In a pit a foot deep the turtle had buried more than a hundred eggs.

Roger was surprised, upon picking one up, to find that it was soft like a rubber ball. It did not have a brittle shell like a hen’s egg.

‘How do you eat it?’

‘You bite a hole in the skin, then squeeze the insides into your mouth. They’re good food. We’ll boil them and take them along.’

Grandma was tethered to a stump and the boys turned in. At dawn they were stirring.

They agreed that they had enough supplies. Today they would take off on their hazardous voyage.

They took down the sharkskin that had served them as a roof and cut it in two. It made two sections, each eight by ten feet. One would make the sail, the other the cabin.

A rough spar was lashed to the upper edge of the sail and it was then hoisted to the masthead by squid-leather halyards. To each of the lower corners of the sharkskin sail was attached a line by which it could be sheeted home.

The cabin was a simple affair. Three split bamboo canes were curved to form the framework, their ends fastened to the deck. Over them was laid the sharkskin with its two edges touching the deck and lashed fast to the logs.

The result was a shelter that looked something like half a barrel. It was precisely like the roof of a Chinese sampan except that it was made of sharkskin instead of matting.

‘It’s just like the toldo we had on our boat on the Amazon,’ Roger said.

It was, except that it was lower and snugger, which was a good thing in case of a Pacific storm. It was only three feet high and five feet wide. From front to back it measured eight feet. It was quite large enough to lie in and furnished protection from the tropical sun. Since the front and rear ends of it were open, the man at stem paddle could look straight through to the bow.

The turtle eggs were boiled and stored. Grandma was led on board and lashed to the mast.

Now that they were ready to go, they began to regret leaving the spot that had been home to them for two eventful weeks. They did not need to be told of the dangers of an ocean voyage on a raft.

They would be at the mercy of wind and wave. They would try to go south, but might just as easily be driven north, east, or west. Their paddles and crude sail would be of small consequence compared with the force of wind and current.

They tried to cover their fears by shouting and singing as they made preparations for casting off.

‘Let me christen her,’ cried Roger. Lacking a bottle of champagne, he smashed a turtle egg on the bow log and proclaimed, ‘I christen thee the good ship Hope!’

Then the three mariners rolled the craft into the lagoon and hopped aboard.

The momentum of the launching carried the raft across the bay of pearls. Hal and Omo studied its behaviour carefully. ‘It floats high and dry,’ Omo said. ‘And it holds its course well,’ Hal remarked. Thanks to the pointed bow, and the straightness and smoothness of the coconut logs, the vessel showed no tendency to yaw over to starboard or port. ‘How does she answer the helm?’ Omo at stern paddle put his weight on the blade and the vessel veered slowly to starboard. ‘It does pretty well for a raft.’

The wind was on the beam and Hal trimmed the great rectangle of sharkskin sail to take advantage of it. But to get through the pass it was necessary to go straight into the wind’s eye. Rather than trouble to lower the sail for the few moments necessary to make the passage, Roger sheeted it so that it was edge on into the wind.

Then the boys took to their paddles. It was a stiff job, but Hal had estimated correctly that the ebbing tide would help them escape from the lagoon in spite of the wind. After fifteen sweating minutes they were in the clear, and the home-made Hope rose and fell on the swells of the greatest of oceans.

The first two days of the voyage passed so smoothly that the mariners three almost forgot the anxiety with which they had begun the trip.

The wind held from the northeast and they sailed steadily south. If this kept up, they should reach Ponape, or, failing that, they would at least get into the shipping lane that runs from the Marshall Islands to Kusaie, Ponape, Truk, and Yap. There they might hail some schooner that would pick them up.

By day the sun was their compass and by night the stars. They roughly divided the twenty-four hours into twelve watches so that no man had to stick at the steering paddle for more than two hours at a time. Although they had no chronometer, they could compute time with a fair degree of accuracy by the angle of the sun or a star above the horizon.

Water sloshing up through the cracks between the logs kept them a bit wet all the time, but the dampness was cool and pleasant. When one began to suffer from the blows of the equatorial sun he had only to crawl into the cabin and lie in the cool shade of the sharkskin roof.

The bamboo tubes of drinking water nestling between the logs were kept cool by the water that splashed up from beneath. Hal was a trifle worried because the food seemed to be disappearing rather fast, but he hoped they would be able to catch some fish.

Brilliantly coloured dolphins played alongside. They were usually bright blue and green and their fins were golden yellow. But they could change colour like a chameleon and sometimes they shone like burnished copper. One flopped on board and as it died it lost its colour and became silver grey with black spots.

On the third day a big whale investigated the Hope. It came straight for the raft, blowing and puffing each time its great head reared up out of the water. It seemed strange to hear heavy breathing in these fishy wastes where breathing was not the fashion - except for the boys on the raft; and they almost stopped breathing at the thought of what a sixty-foot monster could do to a few logs.

‘Just one flick of that tail,’ worried Roger, ‘and we’d be in the drink.’

The whale circled the raft twice. Then he dived and upended his tail twenty feet into the air, carrying with it a huge quantity of water that fell like a heavy shower upon the voyagers.

The tail went down with a violent twist that sent a great wave of water across the raft from stem to stern, drenching its occupants.

‘Ring up the plumber!’ cried Roger, standing in water up Xo his knees.

But the raft had one great advantage over a boat. The water simply ran out through the floor.

The whale went under the raft and came up on the other side so close that another wave was rolled over the vessel. The beast’s shoulder crashed into the starboard logs and it seemed for a moment that the good ship Hope would be turning into kindling wood.

As if satisfied with the scare he had given these intruders in his domain, the whale sounded and was seen no more.

The outside log with its lashings torn loose was about to float away. The boys recovered it just in time and tied it fast.

During the morning the wind failed and the heavy sharkskin sail thudded idly against the mast. The swells lost their rough finish and seemed as smooth as oil. Without a breeze, the sun seemed ten times as hot.

Omo looked about. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘A sudden calm like this may mean trouble.’

But there was no cloud in the sky. The only thing visible was a dark column like a pillar far to the east. Presently, a few miles farther north, another appeared. ‘Waterspouts,’ Omo said. ‘There are more of them in this part of the Pacific than anywhere else in the world.’

‘Are they dangerous?’

‘Some are, some aren’t. Those two aren’t. They’re something like the dust whirls on land - you’ve seen them. They carry papers and leaves several hundred feet high. ‘Dust devils’, you call them. But —’ and he scanned the horizon anxiously, ‘those little fellows are often just a sign that a big one is coming. And a big one is like a tornado. In fact, that’s just what it is, a sea tornado.’ ‘But a land tornado can carry off houses!’ said Hal. ‘Exactly,’ replied Omo. ‘And I am afraid you are soon going to find out what a sea tornado can do.’ He was looking up at a point a little northeast of the zenith. The others followed his gaze.

A cloud formed before their eyes. It seemed to be about three thousand feet up. It became rapidly blacker and blacker and squirmed violently so that it looked like a living monster. A long tail dangled from it.

No wonder, thought Hal, that the Polynesians call it a sky beast and have many superstitions about it.

Greenish lights that one might imagine were eyes gleamed in the writhing blackness. ‘It can’t be as bad as the hurricane we had,’ Roger said. ‘It can be worse.’ Omo replied. ‘Of course it won’t last as long. And it isn’t as big. A hurricane can be six hundred miles across but these things are never more than two or three thousand feet. But it makes up in violence what it lacks in size. I’d choose a hurricane any day.’ Hal was itching to do something. ‘Can’t we get out of here? Do we just sit here and wait for it to grab us?’ He dug his paddle into the water.

‘You may as well save your strength,’ Omo said. ‘You can never tell which way the thing will go. We might paddle straight into it. The only thing we can do is to hold on and hope.’

The tail of the monster grew longer every moment. Now it looked like a long black tentacle groping towards the sea like the arm of an octopus.

The air had been breathlessly quiet, and still was around the raft. But from the cloud came a roaring or a rushing sound such as you hear when you paddle down a river towards a waterfall.

Now something was happening to the sea beneath that groping tentacle. The oily surface broke up into sharp ridges. Spurts of spray began to race round and round like elves in a wild dance.

The spinning became more intense. Now masses of water were joining the mad whirl, carried around by a screaming wind.

And yet there was not the breath of a breeze on the raft.

Hal knew that the land tornado acts in the same way. It may pick up one house and carry it away and not disturb another ten feet off. He had heard of a tornado that tore the roof from a house and yet did not budge a tin top resting on a churn outside the back door.

‘It may skip us,’ he said.

‘Perhaps,’ But Omo did not sound too hopeful.

‘Shall we take down the sail?’

‘If it wants the sail it will take it, no matter whether it is down or up.’

It was agonizing to know that you were completely at the mercy of the monster and there was not a thing you could do about it.

The spinning water had now become a great whirlpool. But instead of a hole in the centre of the whirlpool, there was a hill. There the sea was bulging upwards. It climbed higher and higher as if drawn from above. Now it rose to a conical point higher than the Hope’s masthead.

The whirling cone threw off spray and loose water that acted most strangely. Instead of falling to the sea it climbed into the sky, turning into a rapidly revolving ghost of mist.

The tentacle reached lower, the arm of the sea reached higher. They met and joined with a loud hiss.

Now it was truly something to see, that great spinning pillar three thousand feet high. At the top it spread out into the black cloud and at the bottom it spread again to take in the whirlpool. The whirlpool was a frightful thing to be hold, a crazy merry-go-round of wild horses racing to the shrill organ music of the wind. The swirling maelstrom covered more and more of the sea. Now the storm circle was two thousand feet across.

Within the circle the waves rose to points and crashed together as if determined to beat each other’s brains out.

‘Bet that wind is travelling two hundred miles an hour,’ shouted Hal. But the roar of wind and water was so great that he could not be heard.

The lofty column began to lean as if the upper end were being pushed. Hal breathed a sigh of relief as he saw that it was leaning away from the raft. Those upper winds were carrying the sky beast southwards and the Hope would escape its fury.

But the waterspout is a fickle giant and loves to tantalize its victims. The leaning tower changed direction, swayed one way and then another, writhed and twisted like a fabulous boa-constrictor hanging from a branch of heaven. A seagull drifting placidly through the quiet sunny air was suddenly snatched by the whirlwind and tossed upwards, spinning round and round, its wings beating helplessly, until it was swallowed by the sky beast above.

What made everything go up? Even at a moment of peril such as this, Hal’s scientific mind asked questions and figured out the answers.

The air rushed upwards to fill a low-pressure area above. It whirled, for the same reason that hurricanes whirl, for the same reason that ordinary winds are inclined to travel in circles, because of the rotation of the earth. The centrifugal force of this whirling made almost a vacuum inside the column and therefore the sea was sucked up. In a land tornado that vacuum around a house made the walls burst out because the air pressure was so much greater inside the house than outside. Corks pop out of bottles during a tornado for the same reason. And it suddenly occurred to him that if the storm caught the raft the plugs would pop out of the bamboo tubes and the water would be lost.