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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Thirty years I know ships, but never like 'this. On Raiatea we call her Fanauao." "The Dayborn," Grief translated the love-phrase. "Who named her so?" About to answer, Taute peered ahead with sudden intensity. Grief joined him in the gaze. "Land," said Taute. "Yes; Fuatino," Grief agreed, his eyes still fixed on the spot where the star-luminous horizon was gouged by a blot of blackness.
"They're certainly a romantic lot," Brown, the mate, said. "As romantic as we whites." "As romantic as Pilsach," Grief laughed, "and that is going some. How long ago was it, Captain, that he jumped you?" "Eleven years," Captain Glass grunted resentfully. "Tell me about it," Brown pleaded. "They say he's never left Fuatino since. Is that right?" "Right O," the captain rumbled.
With a whaleboat towing for steerage and as a precaution against back-draughts from the cliff, and taking advantage of a fan of breeze, he shook the Rattler full into it and glided by the big coral patch without warping. As it was, he just scraped, but so softly as not to start the copper. The harbour of Fuatino opened before him.
On the beach, on even keel, rested the strange schooner. Nothing moved on board of her or around her. Not until the beach lay fifty yards away did Grief let go the anchor in forty fathoms. Out in the middle, long years before, he had sounded three hundred fathoms without reaching bottom, which was to be expected of a healthy crater-pit like Fuatino.
"The poor old Rattler," Captain Glass lamented. "Nothing of the sort," Grief answered. "In a week we'll have her raised, new timbers amidships, and we'll be on our way." And to the Queen, "How is it with you, Sister?" "Naumoo is gone, and Motauri, Brother, but Fuatino is ours again. The day is young. Word shall be sent to all my people in the high places with the goats.
The schooner, moving slowly, jerk by jerk, as the men pulled in the whaleboat, was almost directly beneath. The rowers, without ceasing, slacked on their oars, and were immediately threatened with the rifle of the man who stood for'ard. "Throw, Big Brother!" Naumoo called up in the Fuatino tongue. "I am filled with sorrow and am willed to die.
"Mauriri, Big Brother," said Mauriri. And thereafter, in the custom of men who have pledged blood brotherhood, each called the other, not by the other's name, but by his own. Also, they talked in the Polynesian tongue of Fuatino, and Brown could only sit and guess. "A long swim to say talofa," Grief said, as the other sat and streamed water on the deck.
Also, it guarded the passage to open sea. The two schooners, Raoul Van Asveld, and his cutthroat following were bottled up. Grief, with the ton of dynamite, which he had removed higher up the rock, was master. This he demonstrated, one morning, when the schooners attempted to put to sea. The Valetta led, the whaleboat towing her manned by captured Fuatino men.
The western portion, broken and crumbled to sea level, was the entrance to the crater itself, which constituted the harbour. Thus, Fuatino was like a rugged horseshoe, the heel pointing to the west. And into the opening at the heel the Rattler steered.
The same whisper of a breeze held, and the Rattler slid through the smooth sea at a rate that would have been eminently proper for an island schooner had the breeze been thrice as strong. Fuatino was nothing else than an ancient crater, thrust upward from the sea-bottom by some primordial cataclysm.
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