don't think I realised. We had a very small schooner,
and, like most yachts, over-rigged and over-sparred, and like many
American yachts on a very dangerous sail plan. The waters we sailed in
are, of course, entirely unlighted, and very badly charted; in the
Dangerous Archipelago, through which we were fools enough to go, we were
perfectly in ignorance of where we were for a whole night and half the
next day, and this in the midst of invisible islands and rapid and
variable currents; and we were lucky when we found our whereabouts at
last. We have twice had all we wanted in the way of squalls: once, as I
came on deck, I found the green sea over the cockpit coamings and
running down the companion like a brook to meet me; at that same moment
the foresail sheet jammed and the captain had no knife; this was the
only occasion on the cruise that ever I set a hand to a rope, but I
worked like a Trojan, judging the possibility of hemorrhage better than
the certainty of drowning. Another time I saw a rather singular thing:
our whole ship's company as pale as paper from the captain to the cook;
we had a black squall astern on the port side and a white squall ahead
to starboard; the complication passed off innocuous, the black squall
only fetching us with its tail, and the white one slewing off somewhere
else. Twice we were a long while (days) in the close vicinity of
hurricane weather, but again luck prevailed, and we saw none of it.
These are dangers incident to these seas and small craft. What was an
amazement, and at the same time a powerful stroke of luck, both our
masts were rotten, and we found it out--I was going to say in time, but
it was stranger and luckier than that. The head of the mainmast hung
over so that hands were afraid to go to the helm; and less than three
weeks before--I am not sure it was more than a fortnight--we had been
nearly twelve hours beating off the lee shore of Eimeo (or Moorea, next
island to Tahiti) in half a gale of wind with a violent head sea: she
would neither tack nor wear once, and had to be boxed off with the
mainsail--you can imagine what an ungodly show of kites we carried--and
yet the mast stood. The very day after that, in the southern bight of
Tahiti, we had a near squeak, the wind suddenly coming calm; the reefs
were close in with, my eye! what a surf! The pilot thought we were gone,
and the captain had a boat cleared, when a lucky squall came to our
rescue. My wife, hearing the order