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Updated: May 3, 2025
"My two men don't understand the ways of these Apamama people, and they'll be quarrelling presently." "Why, certainly, Jim," he said, with such oily effusiveness that I longed to kick him over the side; "but there ain't no need for your men to be scared. * Whalemen's parlance for gossip.
At dawn when I was awakened, after a good four hours' sleep, Apamama was thirty miles astern of us, and we were running free before a nice cool breeze, steering N.W. for Kusaie Island, the eastern outlier of the Carolines, eight hundred miles away. The two women had not heard me move, and were both sound asleep, their faces close together and their arms intertwined.
"This is a bad start for us, Lucia," I said cheerfully; "we can't dodge about here under the lee of the land with such a sea running. I am afraid that there is no help for us but to make a run for it for Apamama. What do you think, Niâbon?" She looked at me with a smiling face, and rising to her feet steadied herself by placing her hands on the after-coaming of the hatch.
"Thou art the captain, Simi," she said in Samoan, "and thou alone canst guide us on the sea. And I think, as thou dost, that we must sail before the storm to Apamama; for when the wind comes suddenly and strong from the north, as it has done now, it sometimes lasteth for five days, and the sea becomes very great."
At the same time Denison was touched by the allusion to passage money and expenses, and felt that making entries about the birth of clutches of chickens and ducklings, and the number of eggs sold, would be simple enough much easier than the heartbreaking work of a supercargo, when such customers as Flash Harry of Apia or Fiji Bill of Apamama would challenge the correctness of their grog bills, and offer to fight him instead of paying.
"It is one of Apinoka's boats, Simi," said Niâbon, "for there is no trader in Apamama; the king will let no one trade here." "Well, we can't help ourselves," I said, as I looked at the boat through my glasses; "she is beating up for us there is no doubt about that. I daresay we shall get rid of them when they find out who we are."
The ruler of Apamama, King Apinoka, was, although quite a young man, the most powerful and most dreaded of all the chiefs of the islands of the mid-Pacific, and he boasted that in time he would crush out and utterly exterminate the inhabitants of the surrounding islands unless they submitted to him, and for years past had been steadily buying arms of the best quality.
No, if the gale did not moderate, there was but one course open to me to run before it for Apamama, a hundred and thirty miles to the S.S.E., which meant two hundred and sixty miles of sailing before we laid a course for the N.W. And then the delay. We might be tied up by the nose in Apamama Lagoon for a week or more before we could make another start.
See, the wind is falling, and rain much rain is close to from the east, and the rain killeth the wind. And this is a heavy boat to move with oars." He was quite right, for, as Tully had said was likely, the wind was not only falling, but was going round to the eastward. The sooner we got out of Apamama Lagoon the better. "We'll loose the mainsail then," I said to Niâbon, "and we'll get away.
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