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And every squall was to be regarded as a bludgeon capable of crushing the Snark. We were struck sometimes by the centres and sometimes by the sides of these squalls, and we never knew just where or how we were to be hit.
The Snark had not abated her six-knot gait, and she had not struck Futuna yet. At half-past five I was again on deck. Wada, at the wheel, had seen no land. I sat on the cockpit rail, a prey to morbid doubt for a quarter of an hour. Then I saw land, a small, high piece of land, just where it ought to be, rising from the water on the weather-bow.
And then And then the inconceivable and monstrous happened once more. Before Roscoe could arrive there arrived another man. He was a United States marshal. He tacked a notice on the Snark's brave mast so that all on the wharf could read that the Snark had been libelled for debt. The marshal left a little old man in charge of the Snark, and himself went away.
There are dozens and dozens of methods of finding one's location on the deep, and one can work years before he masters it all in all its fineness. Even in the little we did learn there were slips that accounted for the apparently antic behaviour of the Snark. On Thursday, May 16, for instance, the trade wind failed us.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice, What I tell you three times is true," which kept repeating themselves over and over in my brain with feverish insistence. Even the medical students had stopped their chaffing, and were studying the surroundings gravely. "There is one thing certain," said Fargeau, "anything might have happened here without the slightest chance of discovery.
We had naught but a compass bearing with which to orientate ourselves, and if we missed Sentinel Rock, we missed Taiohae Bay, and we would have to throw the Snark up to the wind and lie off and on the whole night no pleasant prospect for voyagers weary from a sixty days' traverse of the vast Pacific solitude, and land-hungry, and fruit- hungry, and hungry with an appetite of years for the sweet vale of Typee.
Three times they circled the Snark before coming alongside to take Charmian and me on board. Then it was away for the fishing-grounds, a five-mile paddle dead to windward. "Everybody is jolly in Bora Bora," is the saying throughout the Society Islands, and we certainly found everybody jolly.
I doubt very much if the holiday task, which I see in your hand, is the cause of this gloom." "Oh dear, no! I was thinking what shall I do with myself when I leave school at Midsummer; it will be so very hard to read by myself." "My good child, do attend to what you are doing; you are just like the man in the 'Snark, who had "'luncheon at five o'clock tea, And dined on the following day.
And yet, not yet. My standard compass was amidships on the companionway. My steering compass was aft, in the cockpit, near the wheel. I kept the Snark up till she was heading west-by-south-three-quarters- south on the standard compass, which gave, on the steering compass, south-west-by-west. The foregoing operations constitute the simple little matter of setting a course.
Out of my brief experience with boats I know I never did. And I stood on deck and looked on the naked face of the inconceivable and monstrous the Snark that wouldn't heave to. A stormy night with broken moonlight had come on.
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