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Updated: May 25, 2025
Immediately after anchoring, the captain hastened to inform me of the misfortune, and found me saying mass. It was one of the few times he had ever been in the sacred edifice." Père Simeon smiled, and held up one finger to emphasize my attention. "As soon as mass was finished, Capriata told me of what had happened, and his certainty that the mare was drowned.
My ruse passed for the moment, but was exposed by a flock or swarm of cockroaches, which, scenting a favorite food, suddenly sprang upon the table and upon us, leaping and flying into the plates and drawing Corsican curses from Capriata and Norwegian maledictions from Lee.
"Right there, just as Capriata swung his vessel to head for the sea, the mare broke loose from her halter, and in a bound reached the rail of the schooner and leaped into the waves. Capriata could do nothing. The schooner was in peril, and he, with his hand upon the wheel and his men at the sails, could only utter an oath.
Capriata, the old Corsican, stood on his deck watching us go. I walked aft and took my last view of the Marquesas. The tops of the mountains were jagged shadows against the sky, dark and mournful. The arc-light swung to shine upon the mouth of the bay, and the Land of the War Fleet was blotted out in the black night.
I will not say that it was a miracle, but it was a very striking triumph for Joan. "That for the human; now for the beast. A month before the fête I commissioned Captain Capriata to bring the mare to Tai-o-hae in his schooner. The animal came safely to the harbor. She was still on deck when a storm arose, and Capriata thought it best for him to lift his anchor and go to the open sea.
I pulled myself aboard by a topping-lift, climbed upon the low cabin-house, and jumped down to the tiny poop where Jerome Capriata held the helm.
It tastes like a sour, acid custard. Yet white men learn to eat it, even to yearn for it. Captain Capriata, of the schooner Roberta, which occasionally made port in Atuona Bay, could digest little else. Give him a bowl of popoi and a stewed or roasted cat, and his Corsican heart warmed to the giver. As bread or meat are to us, so was popoi to my tawny friends.
The Roberta's cabin was a dark and noisome hole, filled with demijohns and merchandise, with two or three untidy bunks in corners, the air soaked with the smells of thirty years of bilge-water, sealskins, copra, and the cargoes of island traffic. Capriata, Harry Lee, and I sat on boxes at a rough table, which we clutched as the Roberta pitched and rolled.
To sleep or eat among them was not possible to me, and the voyage was a nightmare not relieved by an incident of the second night. Capriata, whose feet were calloused from going bare for years, awoke from a deep slumber that had been aided by rum, to find that the cockroaches in his berth had eaten through the half inch or more of hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh.
Only the bones of La Corse, the schooner Jerome Capriata had sailed many years, lay rotting under a grotesque and dark banian, never more to feel the foot of man upon the deck or to toss upon the sea. A consoling wave lapped the empty pintles and gave the decaying craft a caress by the element whose mistress she so long had been.
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