The skipper floated beside it all night. It had a round steel bung in its side, which inevitably floated at the bottom. The top of the drum would have floated perhaps one inch—at most two—above the surface of still water. In these swells at times it was entirely sub-merged and at other times it seemed nearly half exposed. He fastened it to his wrist with a narrow strip torn from his sunshade and tied to the bung.
When the sun rose, the skipper was not in as good condition as the day before. He had been two days without food or water. He had minimized the lack of the first by avoiding all possible exertion. He had helped himself to endure the second by the sunshade, ridiculous as it was, which at least kept the sun from frying his brain in his skull. But his immersion in the water helped some-what too. While it drained his strength, at least it supplied some moisture to his body. But this morning the skipper was in something of a bad way.
He was not impressive to look at, the skipper. He was a naked, emaciated figure of a man, oil-smeared and foul to look at
He ate the barnacles from the drum. Very composedly, very deliberately, he crushed their shells and swallowed the improbable bits of protoplasm within, picking out the hard parts with his tongue and teeth. There was little enough nourishment in them, but they were moist and they did not increase his thirst. Then he examined his prize.
HIS fingers found holes rusted in the drum. They were in the bottom, of course, or the drum would have sunk. The skipper stirred the drum experimentally. It turned readily, proving that if any of its original contents remained, they were liquid.
The skipper slipped loose from his float of planks. He let himself sink down below the drum, his lungs distended with air. He put his lips to the rusted hole his fingers had found and which one finger had enlarged a little. Air trickled up into the drum. He put more in, and more. After the fifth such trip under water he rested for fifteen minutes. The drum floated higher. Five more trips. The drum was markedly more buoyant.
The skipper considered for a long time. He reflected upon the position of the sun. He knew the direction of the wind, of course. It was the southeast trade. He calculated absorbedly upon his fingers. Then, using the oar once more to support his weight, he disassembled the float which had maintained him. He selected such planks as could be flexed a little. He wove seven of them, well separated, over and under each other, and made a sort of grating which was a little over four feet across. He was not as strong as he had been, and this took a long time. But it gave him back some of the cloth stripping with which he had kept the planks together. He used that cloth to fasten the drum to the grating so that it would not roll over. The balance he applied to the fastening of all his remaining strips of wood to the other edge of the grating. He had, then, a sort of catamaran.
It took him two hours, after that, to get the drum really buoyant. He had to go underneath and put air into it by placing his lips to the largest hole he had found. When the drum was a little more than half out of the water, oil began to seep out as the air went in.
It was clear, then, how the rusted holes happened to be so nearly in a line at the bottom of the drum. It had originally contained oil. It had been washed overboard, perhaps, from a tanker carrying oil in drums as a deck load. There had been some water mixed with the oil—it would be salt water, too—which when it separated out settled to the bottom and started rust spots on the inside to meet rust eating in from without.
The skipper rested for a long time, considering the oil. Then he began to clamber up on the grating. It went under water with his weight, of course. But it was in some sense a pontoon. It did keep the drum from rolling, and at long last the man was astride it and the slight buoyancy of the planks made balancing a not impossible task.
He sat there, panting and resting carefully, A long time later he began to strip off what rags of clothing remained to him. A money-belt next his skin he suffered to remain, but otherwise he sat naked in the sunlight while heat beat upon him and the trade wind dried him. His skin, everywhere, was bleached and shriveled by his long immersion. But before the sun could scorch his naked skin, he was shifting his balance again.
“The southeast trade wind’s northern limit is always north of the equator, reaching as far as 8° N. in July and August.” Pacific/Islands Pilot.(Supra.)
The pontoon rose out of the water once, as the skipper balanced, and he swiftly shifted his weight to put it back again. He looked down at the trickle of oil the movement had allowed to come out. He dipped his hand in the spreading, iridescent slick. The oil stuck to his now dry skin. He dipped carefully wrung-out rags in the oil and rubbed himself with it.
He was not impressive to look at, the skipper. He was a naked, bleached, already emaciated figure of a man, oil-smeared and foul to look at. His eyes were bloodshot and reddened. His lips were puffed and cracking. He had not even dignity, teetering upon his clumsy float. But he had determination.
A steady wind, the trade wind, blew over the waves. The drum received the tiniest possible impulse from that wind. The skipper’s body and the plank float served as rudder. Acting as a sail, the drum floated the skipper perhaps half a mile in an hour’s time toward the northwest.
He was weaker than he had been. This was his third day without food, save the dubious nourishment of the barnacles upon the drum. There had been a similar time since he had drunk. But thirst had not been, up to now, as great a problem as the steady sapping of his strength by the water.
For a long time he lay motionless. For two hours he did not stir, conserving his strength. It was two hours before sundown when he moved. Then it was to climb again, and again precariously, upon the drum which still floated corklike upon the waves. And again he made the absurd spectacle of an oil-smeared, emaciated, naked man balancing himself upon a bobbing rusty oil drum to which were clumsily fastened certain splintered planks. He was a sight by which even the malevolent sea could be diverted. He stared to northward and the sea was amused. But the skipper did see, definitely, a difference in the appearance of the sea toward the horizon.
“The lines of division between the equatorial and counter-equatorial currents are sometimes distinctly marked, the currents of the former—the westward drift—being generally at their greatest strength when near these lines of division.” Pacific Islands Pilot. (Supra.)
The skipper slipped into the water again. He worked at the cloth-strip lashings of the drum. He loosened it and turned it. Air bubbled out. It sank lower in the water. He watched intently and stopped it, and started it again, and at last tightened his lashings again when the drum was low in the water. On a glassy sea, it might have floated four inches above the water. The wind would no longer affect its drift.
THIS night the skipper did not seem to sleep at all. He lay motionless in a new arrangement of his floats. When the dawn came he was a scarecrow. His oil-smeared face seemed set in a perpetual grimace, which was actually the thicker coating of oil in the deepening lines about his eyes and mouth. His eyes were red and inflamed. His lips were puffed and cracked. His limbs seemed to quiver from sheer weakness when, as the dawn light grew stronger, he puffed a little more air into the drum and then essayed to crawl on his grating and stand erect. It took him a long time to get out of the water and longer to stand up. Then he wavered visibly. He glanced swiftly to the north, but his gaze was bent most intently to westward. He searched, desperately, all the sky opposite the newly risen sun. It was empty. Of course.
He slumped down upon the grating with an effect of extreme weakness. But his eyes remained open. He had seen little specks flying above the waves. He waited for one of them to come close enough for identification.
Half an hour later a little gull came streaking over the wave tips, saw him stir, and veered away with a startled squeak. The skipper’s dry lips parted in the racked semblance of a grin. It was a short-winged gull, of the sort which never goes many miles out to sea.
ABOUT noon he struggled erect again. He saw a dim cloud on the horizon to the north of west. It was not la
nd, but the loom of land yet unseen and un-seeable below the edge of the world. The skipper stared, and stared, until the tossing of his completely awash raft sent him to his knees.
He took his oil rags and rubbed him-self all over again, increasing the foulness of his appearance, but adding to the protective coating of greasy filth upon his body. He slid into the water. He began to slip under the drum, bubbling air into it from the bottom again. He was very weak. After two such trips he had to stop and rest, gasping.
It took him nearly four hours to cause the drum again to ride high upon the waves, and for the wind to give it an almost infinitely slight velocity.
Before sundown he stood erect again. He saw a definite dark speck against the horizon. He had lived upon his own fat for four days, and he had possessed no fat to live on. He was not impressive to look at. The sea found his appearance diverting. But the sea is malevolent, sometimes.
He watched the sun set. Repeatedly he sighted the evening star, making apparent mental calculations in terms of degrees of arc. As the sun touched the horizon, he tried to stand. The effort was tremendous. He desisted and crawled to a sitting position on the drum instead. Even here, though, he caught glimpses of land the equatorial current planned to sweep him past.
“The currents … when near the islands are sometimes deflected and always accelerated.” Pacific Islands Pilot. (Supra.)
An hour after dark, with his ear to the metal of the drum, he heard a certain booming noise which was not the sound of waves breaking in open sea. It was surf. The skipper began to dismantle his floats. He reassembled them, pausing often to rest.
Two hours after dark he deserted the oil-drum. He began to paddle away from it with his reconstructed floats. He was very weak indeed. Often he stopped to rest. As often he searched for the evening star and seemed to gauge his paddling by it.
Four hours after sundown he heard surf very near. He floated, resting, for a long time. He listened as he floated, seeming to form a picture in his mind. The tide moved him toward that surf. The booming grew louder and ever louder. Presently the booming seemed loudest of all a little distance to the north of west. The skipper seemed possessed of sudden new energy. He fought his way toward that nearer booming, though his movements were weak and feeble like those of a half-drowned kitten.
He saw the surf breaking not more than twenty yards away as the tide carried him past it. And in the darkness the skipper’s teeth gleamed. That surf was upon a bank, a danger, a small outlying reef, nearly opposite the lagoon entrance of Kafuili, which the skipper had chosen two hundred miles back as the point to which he would make the equatorial current carry him. He lowered himself into the sea again.
Then the surf rose about him. It tossed him. It tore the float from his hands and shredded it to bits, and the sea roared furiously as if its amusement were abruptly ended when its victim seemed so likely to escape. It cried out in its rage. But the skipper had rested much, saving his strength. He put forth all that strength now, and it was not great but it was applied with skill and maintained both by desperation and by hope. Moreover, he was already in the lagoon entrance and the sea was at a disadvantage.
A long time later he came out upon the stilly quietness of the atoll’s inner beaches. He could not walk. He crawled away from the gently surging water. And his belly clamored. But he went doggedly on. The storm which had shattered his schooner should have come on to this very island. In its fury, it should have snapped some palm trees and shaken down coconuts both ripe and green. If he found coconuts young enough, he should be able to gouge out the eyes of the young nuts, after tearing off the husk with his teeth. The sweet milk would quench his thirst and stay his belly, too. Then rest, and more strength, and more food and drink ….
“Navigation among these islands requires constant attention to the currents encountered, as only by thorough knowledge and unremitting care can even the smallest ships move freely through its dangers.” Pacific Islands Pilot.
TWO days later the skipper walked into the trader’s store on the other side of the atoll. He was a good deal thinner than when the trader had last seen him, and his eyes were still some-what inflamed. Too, instead of his usual natty whites he wore a native lava-lava as his only garment.
“Hello, Skipper,” said the trader, staring. “When’d your schooner get in? Nobody told me it was sighted.”
“The schooner’s sunk,” said the skipper. “Everybody else drowned. I’ll need some clothes, because I haven’t a stitch except this rag I got from one of your natives.”
He loosened a money-belt from about his waist as the trader blinked. He began to pull out golden coins.
“When will I get a chance to get passage out of here?” the skipper asked. “I’ve got to get back to Tahiti and buy myself a new schooner. I don’t want to miss a whole season’s trade.”
“But—look here!” said the trader. “Your schooner’s sunk? Where?”
“ Couple of hundred miles east of here,” said the skipper. “Simply went to pieces at the end of that blow. Pretty old, she was. I don’t suppose I ought to complain.”
“But—how did you get here? We had the same blow that must have sunk your ship! No ship’s boat could live through it!”
“I know,” said the skipper. “I rode the equatorial current down. Had a hell of a time. I’ve been resting and eating on the other side of the lagoon for the past two days. Floated most of the way. The rest of it I swam. My next schooner—”
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