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In the South Seas By: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) |
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PART 1: THE MARQUESAS
CHAPTER I AN ISLAND LANDFALL For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some
while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to
the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to
expect. It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I
was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a
bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health. I
chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's schooner yacht, the Casco,
seventy four tons register; sailed from San Francisco towards the
end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and was left early
the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to return to my
old life of the house and sick room, I set forth to leeward in a
trading schooner, the Equator, of a little over seventy tons, spent
four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert
group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time
gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I
had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had
learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days
in fairyland; and I decided to remain. I began to prepare these
pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer Janet
Nicoll. If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I
have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of
my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future
house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts
of the sea. That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's
hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the
islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm
shades and the trade wind fans them till they die, perhaps
cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely
made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part
of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and
the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some
sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and
ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and
language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and
habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars. The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the
first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and
touched a virginity of sense. On the 28th of July 1888 the moon
was an hour down by four in the morning. In the east a radiating
centre of brightness told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline,
the morning bank was already building, black as ink. We have all
read of the swiftness of the day's coming and departure in low
latitudes; it is a point on which the scientific and sentimental
tourist are at one, and has inspired some tasteful poetry. The
period certainly varies with the season; but here is one case
exactly noted. Although the dawn was thus preparing by four, the
sun was not up till six; and it was half past five before we could
distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon.
Eight degrees south, and the day two hours a coming. The interval
was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary
thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that
we were then approaching. Slowly they took shape in the
attenuating darkness. Ua huna, piling up to a truncated summit,
appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our
destination, Nuka hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the
southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua
pu. These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the
pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in
the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a
world of wonders. Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the islands, or
knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues;
and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as
thrilled the bosom of discoverers that we drew near these
problematic shores... Continue reading book >>
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