The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  “As I was saying, when we first battened down, I was surprised. It was a tight deck, yet it leaked smoke like a sieve. And we’ve caulked and caulked ever since. There must be tremendous pressure underneath to drive so much smoke through.”

  That afternoon the sky became overcast again, and squally, drizzly weather set in. The wind shifted back and forth between south-east and north-east, and at midnight the Pyrenees was caught aback by a sharp squall from the southwest, from which point the wind continued to blow intermittently.

  “We won’t make Hao until ten or eleven,” Captain Davenport complained at seven in the morning, when the fleeting promise of the sun had been erased by hazy cloud masses in the eastern sky. And the next moment he was plaintively demanding, “And what are the currents doing?”

  Look-outs at the mastheads could report no land, and the day passed in drizzling calms and violent squalls. By nightfall a heavy sea began to make from the west. The barometer had fallen to 29.50. There was no wind, and still the ominous sea continued to increase. Soon the Pyrenees was rolling madly in the huge waves that marched in an unending procession from out of the darkness of the west. Sail was shortened as fast as both watches could work, and when a tired crew had finished, its grumbling and complaining voices, peculiarly animal-like and menacing, could be heard in the darkness. Once the starboard watch was called aft to lash down and make secure, and the men openly advertised their sullenness and unwillingness. Every slow movement was a protest and a threat. The atmosphere was moist and sticky like mucilage, and in the absence of wind all hands seemed to pant and gasp for air. The sweat stood out on faces and bare arms, and Captain Davenport for one, his face more gaunt and careworn than ever, and his eyes troubled and staring, was oppressed by a feeling of impending calamity.

  “It’s off to the westward,” McCoy said encouragingly. “At worst, we’ll only be on the edge of it.”

  But Captain Davenport refused to be comforted, and by the light of a lantern read up the chapter in his Epitome that related to the strategy of shipmasters in cyclonic storms. From somewhere amidships the silence was broken by a low whimpering from the cabin-boy.

  “Oh, shut up!” Captain Davenport yelled suddenly and with such force as to startle every man on board and to frighten the offender into a wild wail of terror.

  “Mr. Konig,” the captain said in a voice that trembled with rage and nerves, “will you kindly step for’ and stop that brat’s mouth with a deck mop?”

  But I was McCoy who went forward, and in a few minutes had the boy comforted and asleep.

  Shortly before daybreak the first breath of air began to move from out the south-east, increasing swiftly to a stiff and stiffer breeze. All hands were on deck waiting for what might be behind it.

  “We’re all right now, captain,” said McCoy, standing close to his shoulder. “The hurricane is to the west’ard, and we are south of it. This breeze is the insuck. It won’t blow any harder. You can begin to put sail on her.”

  “But what’s the good? Where shall I sail? This is the second day without observations, and we should have sighted Hao Island yesterday morning. Which way does it bear, north, south, east, or what? Tell me that, and I’ll make sail in a jiffy.”

  “I am no navigator, captain,” McCoy said in his mild way.

  “I used to think I was one,” was the retort, “before I got into these Paumotus.”

  At midday the cry of “Breakers ahead!” was heard from the look-out. The Pyrenees was kept off and sail after sail was loosed and sheeted home. The Pyrenees was sliding through the water and fighting a current that threatened to set her down upon the breakers. Officers and men were working like mad, cook and cabin-boy, Captain Davenport himself, and McCoy all lending a hand. It was a close shave. It was a low shoal, a bleak and perilous place over which the seas broke unceasingly, where no man could live, and on which not even sea-birds could rest. The Pyrenees was swept within a hundred yards of it before the wind carried her clear, and at this moment the panting crew, its work done, burst out in a torrent of curses upon the head of McCoy—of McCoy who had come on board, and proposed the run to Mangareva, and lured them all away from the safety of Pitcairn Island to certain destruction in this baffling and terrible stretch of sea. But McCoy’s tranquil soul was undisturbed. He smiled at them with simple and gracious benevolence, and, somehow, the exalted goodness of him seemed to penetrate to their dark and sombre souls, shaming them, and from very shame stilling the curse vibrating in their throats.

  “Bad waters! bad waters!” Captain Davenport was murmuring as his ship forged clear; but he broke off abruptly to gaze at the shoal which should have been dead astern, but which was already on the Pyrenees’ weather-quarter and working up rapidly to windward.

  He sat down and buried his face in his hands. And the first mate saw, and McCoy saw, and the crew saw, what he had seen. South of the shoal an easterly current had set them down upon it; north of the shoal an equally swift westerly current had clutched the ship and was sweeping her away.

  “I’ve heard of these Paumotus before,” the captain groaned, lifting his blanched face from his hands. “Captain Moyendale told me about them after losing his ship on them. And I laughed at him behind his back. God forgive me, I laughed at him. What shoal is that?” he broke off to ask McCoy.

  “I don’t know, captain.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “Because I never saw it before, and because I never heard of it. I do know that it is not charted. These waters have never been thoroughly surveyed.”

  “Then you don’t know where we are?”

  “No more than you do,” McCoy said gently.

  At four in the afternoon coco-nut trees were sighted, apparently growing out of the water. A little later the low land of an atoll was raised above the sea.

  “I know where we are now, captain.” McCoy lowered the glasses from his eyes. “That’s Resolution Island. We are forty miles beyond Hao Island, and the wind is in our teeth.”

  “Get ready to beach her, then. Where’s the entrance?”

  “There’s only a canoe passage. But now that we know where we are, we can run for Barclay de Tolley. It is only one hundred and twenty miles from here, due nor’-nor’-west. With this breeze we can be there by nine o’clock to-morrow morning.”

  Captain Davenport consulted the chart and debated with himself.

  “If we wreck her here,” McCoy added, “we’d have to make the run to Barclay de Tolley in the boats just the same.”

  The captain gave his orders, and once more the Pyrenees swung off for another run across the inhospitable sea.

  And the middle of the next afternoon saw despair and mutiny on her smoking deck. The current had accelerated, the wind had slackened, and the Pyrenees had sagged off to the west. The look-out sighted Barclay de Tolley to the eastward, barely visible from the masthead, and vainly and for hours the Pyrenees tried to beat up to it. Ever, like a mirage, the coco-nut trees hovered on the horizon, visible only from the masthead. From the deck they were hidden by the bulge of the world.

  Again Captain Davenport consulted McCoy and the chart. Makemo lay seventy-five miles to the south-west. Its lagoon was thirty miles long, and its entrance was excellent. When Captain Davenport gave his orders, the crew refused duty. They announced that they had had enough of hell-fire under their feet. There was the land. What if the ship could not make it? They could make it in the boats. Let her burn, then. Their lives amounted to something to them. They had served faithfully the ship, now they were going to serve themselves.

  They sprang to the boats, brushing the second and third mates out of the way, and proceeded to swing the boats out and to prepare to lower away. Captain Davenport and the first mate, revolvers in hand, were advancing to the break of the poop, when McCoy, who had climbed on top of the cabin, began to speak.

  He spoke to the sailors, and at the first sound of his dovelike, cooing voice they paused to hear. He extended to them his own ineffable serenit
y and peace. His soft voice and simple thoughts flowed out to them in a magic stream, soothing them against their wills. Long-forgotten things came back to them, and some remembered lullaby songs of childhood and the content and rest of the mother’s arm at the end of the day. There was no more trouble, no more danger, no more irk, in all the world. Everything was as it should be, and it was only a matter of course that they should turn their backs upon the land and put to sea once more with hell-fire hot beneath their feet.

  McCoy spoke simply; but it was not what he spoke. It was his personality that spoke more eloquently than any word he could utter. It was an alchemy of soul occultly subtle and profoundly deep—a mysterious emanation of the spirit, seductive, sweetly humble, and terribly imperious. It was illumination in the dark crypts of their souls, a compulsion of purity and gentleness vastly greater than that which resided in the shining death-spitting revolvers of the officers.

  The men wavered reluctantly where they stood, and those who had loosed the turns made them fast again. Then one, and then another, and then all of them, began to sidle awkwardly away.

  McCoy’s face was beaming with childlike pleasure as he descended from the top of the cabin. There was no trouble. For that matter there had been no trouble averted. There never had been any trouble, for there was no place for such in the blissful world in which he lived.

  “You hypnotised ’em,” Mr. Konig grinned at him, speaking in a low voice.

  “Those boys are good,” was the answer. “Their hearts are good. They have had a hard time, and they have worked hard, and they will work hard to the end.”

  Mr. Konig had no time to reply. His voice was ringing out orders, the sailors were springing to obey, and the Pyrenees was paying slowly off from the wind until her bow should point in the direction of Makemo.

  The wind was very light, and after sun-down almost ceased. It was insufferably warm, and fore and aft men sought vainly to sleep. The deck was too hot to lie upon, the poisonous vapours, oozing through the seams, crept like evil spirits over the ship, stealing into the nostrils and windpipes of the unwary and causing fits of sneezing and coughing. The stars blinked lazily in the dim vault overhead; and the full moon, rising in the east, touched with its light the myriads of wisp and threads and spidery films of smoke that intertwined and writhed and twisted along the deck, over the rails, and up the masts and shrouds.

  “Tell me,” Captain Davenport said, rubbing his smarting eyes, “what happened with that Bounty crowd after they reached Pitcairn? The account I read said they burnt the Bounty, and that they were not discovered until many years later. But what happened in the meantime? I’ve always been curious to know. They were men with their necks in the rope. There were some native men, too. And then there were women. That made it look like trouble right from the jump.”

  “There was trouble,” McCoy answered. “They were bad men. They quarrelled about the women right away. One of the mutineers, Williams, lost his wife. All the women were Tahitian women. His wife fell from the cliffs when hunting sea-birds. Then he took the wife of one of the native men away from him. All the native men were made very angry by this, and they killed off nearly all the mutineers. Then the mutineers that escaped killed off all the native men. The women helped. And the natives killed each other. Everybody killed everybody. They were terrible men.

  “Timiti was killed by two other natives while they were combing his hair in friendship. The white men had sent them to do it. Then the white men killed them. The wife of Tullaloo killed him in a cave because she wanted a white man for husband. They were very wicked. God had hidden His face from them. At the end of two years all the native men were murdered, and all the white men except four. They were Young, John Adams, McCoy, who was my great-grandfather, and Quintal. He was a very bad man too. Once, just because his wife did not catch enough fish for him, he bit off her ear.”

  “They were a bad lot!” Mr. Konig exclaimed.

  “Yes, they were very bad,” McCoy agreed, and went on serenely cooing of the blood and lust of his iniquitous ancestry. “My great-grandfather escaped murder in order to die by his own hand. He made a still and manufactured alcohol from the roots of the ti-plant. Quintal was his chum, and they got drunk together all the time. At last McCoy got delirium tremens, tied a rock to his neck, and jumped into the sea.

  “Quintal’s wife, the one whose ear he bit off, also got killed by falling from the cliffs. Then Quintal went to Young and demanded his wife, and went to Adams and demanded his wife. Adams and Young were afraid of Quintal. They knew he would kill them. So they killed him, the two of them together, with a hatchet. Then Young died. And that was about all the trouble they had.”

  “I should say so,” Captain Davenport snorted. “There was nobody left to kill.”

  “You see, God had hidden His face,” McCoy said.

  By morning no more than a faint air was blowing from the eastward, and, unable to make appreciable southing by it, Captain Davenport hauled up fulland-by on the port tack. He was afraid of that terrible westerly current which had cheated him out of so many ports of refuge. All day the calm continued, and all night, while the sailors, on a short ration of dried banana, were grumbling. Also, they were growing weak, and complaining of stomach pains caused by the straight banana diet. All day the current swept the Pyrenees to the westward, while there was no wind to bear her south. In the middle of the first dog-watch, coco-nut trees were sighted due south, their tufted heads rising above the water and marking the low-lying atoll beneath.

  “That is Taenga Island,” McCoy said. “We need a breeze to-night, or else we’ll miss Makemo.”

  “What’s become of the south-east trade?” the captain demanded. “Why don’t it blow? What’s the matter?”

  “It is the evaporation from the big lagoons—there are so many of them,” McCoy explained. “The evaporation upsets the whole system of trades. It even causes the wind to back up and blow gales from the south-west. This is the Dangerous Archipelago, captain.”

  Captain Davenport faced the old man, opened his mouth, and was about to curse, but paused and refrained. McCoy’s presence was a rebuke to the blasphemies that stirred in his brain and trembled in his larynx, McCoy’s influence had been growing during the many days they had been together. Captain Davenport was an autocrat of the sea, fearing no man, never bridling his tongue, and now he found himself unable to curse in the presence of this old man with the feminine brown eyes and the voice of a dove. When he realized this, Captain Davenport experienced a distinct shock. This old man was merely the seed of McCoy, of McCoy of the Bounty, the mutineer fleeing from the hemp that waited him in England, the McCoy who was a power for evil in the early days of blood and lust and violent death on Pitcairn Island.

  Captain Davenport was not religious, yet in that moment he felt a mad impulse to cast himself at the other’s feet—and to say he knew not what. It was an emotion that so deeply stirred him, rather than a coherent thought, and he was aware in some vague way of his own unworthiness and smallness in the presence of this other man who possessed the simplicity of a child and the gentleness of a woman.

  Of course he could not humble himself so before the eyes of his officers and men. And yet the anger that had prompted the blasphemy still raged in him. He suddenly smote the cabin with his clenched hand and cried:

  “Look here, old man, I won’t be beaten. These Paumotus have cheated and tricked me and made a fool of me. I refuse to be beaten. I am going to drive this ship, and drive and drive and drive clear through the Paumotus to China but what I find a bed for her. If every man deserts, I’ll stay be her. I’ll show the Paumotus. They can’t fool me. She’s a good girl, and I’ll stick by her as long as there’s plank to stand on. You hear me?”

  “And I’ll stay with you, captain,” McCoy said.

  During the night, light, baffling airs blew out of the south, and the frantic captain, with his cargo of fire, watched and measured his westward drift, and went off by himself at times to curse softl
y so that McCoy should not hear.

  Daylight showed more palms growing out of the water to the south.

  “That’s the leeward point of Makemo,” McCoy said. “Katiu is only a few miles to the west. We may make that.”

  But the current, sucking between the two islands, swept them to the northwest, and at one in the afternoon they saw the palms of Katiu rise above the sea and sink back into the sea again.

  A few minutes later, just as the captain had discovered that a new current from the north-east had gripped the Pyrenees, the masthead look-outs raised coco-nut palms in the north-west.

  “It is Raraka,” said McCoy. “We won’t make it without wind. The current is drawing us down to the south-west. But we must watch out. A few miles farther on a current flows north and turns in a circle to the north-west. This will sweep us away to Fakarava, and Fakarava is the place for the Pyrenees to find her bed.”

  “They can sweep all they—all they well please,” Captain Davenport remarked with heat. “We’ll find a bed for her somewhere just the same.”

  But the situation on the Pyrenees was reaching a culmination. The deck was so hot that it seemed an increase of a few degrees would cause it to burst into flames. In many places even the heavy-soled shoes of the men were no protection, and they were compelled to step lively to avoid scorching their feet. The smoke had increased and grown more acrid. Every man on board was suffering from inflamed eyes, and they coughed and strangled like a crew of tuberculosis patients. In the afternoon the boats were swung out and equipped. The last several packages of dried bananas were stored in them, as well as the instruments of the officers. Captain Davenport even put the chronometer into the long-boat, fearing the blowing up of the deck at any moment.

  All night this apprehension weighed heavily on all, and in the first morning light, with hollow eyes and ghastly faces, they stared at one another as if in surprise that the, Pyrenees still held together and that they still were alive.