ff. Also, we made it a rule to
take an additional several each time they hove the dead over to the
sharks that swarmed about us.

We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well,
or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what
followed, as you will see when I mention the little fact that only two
men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at least, that was
what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became
aware of the heathen's existence. But to come back.

It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the
pearl-buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung
in the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was
29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and
30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was
sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl-buyer that ever incinerated
smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.

I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he
had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but
that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off
the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread
life-lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did
after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right
thing to do south of the Equator, if--and there was the rub--_if_ one
were _not_ in the direct path of the hurricane.

We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of
the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to
turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer
ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to
hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not
get the rest of the pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to
know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?
was what was in their minds, I knew.

Of course the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never
forget the first three seas the _Petite Jeanne_ shipped. She had fallen
off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a clean
breach. The life-lines were only for the strong and well, and little
good were they even for them when the women and children, the bananas
and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade boxes, the sick an