Midway Atoll

“ We left Midway Islands on the evening of Friday, October 28, and the next morning at three o'clock found ourselves thumping on the reef. We stayed by the ship until daylight, when we got out three boats and all the provisions we possibly could. We also saved the safe, part of the ship's books, about one [65] fourth of my clothing, and my watch. If you could see me now you would hardly recognize me: a pair of boots almost large enough for two feet in one, ragged trousers, an old felt hat, and no coat—I keep that for evenings when it is cool. ”

“ It was to one of these I was directed: a thing coarsely and wittily handled, mostly with the palette-knife; the colour in some parts excellent, the canvas in others loaded with mere clay. But it was the scene and not the art or want of it that riveted my notice. The foreground was of sand and scrub and wreckwood; in the middle distance the many-hued and smooth expanse of a lagoon, enclosed by a wall of breakers; beyond, a blue strip of ocean. The sky was cloudless, and I could hear the surf break. For the place was Midway Island ”

“ The crash of the surf upon the outer reef, the waving of the breeze-stirred cocoanuts, the flight of a solitary bird, contrasted with the marvelous fabrication of man, the metal ship, thrown by a toss of the sea and a puff of the wind among these evidences of a beautiful yet deadly design.
The Saint François crept along the coast of the atoll and anchored opposite the pass, a good mile from the breakers. Everybody was on deck, the black-gowned nuns with Mademoiselle Narbonne—she also in a tunic of religious hue. Since we had left Nuku-hiva they had not appeared. ”

“ New York, N. Y.; mining of gold and other minerals.
TKe Pacific
S. S. Dickenson, the special agent of the Commercial Pacific Cable Co. states that he has chosen cable landing sites at Midway
Island, Guam and Manila. He also surveyed for a route around Nero Deep, the very deep hole in the ocean bed between Guam and Midway, which was discovered by the United States survey ship Nero, and re ported to be the deepest bit of ocean in the world. ”

“ The wonderful shores of Nuka Hiva are sharply outlined in my memory, lulled by the echoing monotone of the ocean. The winds are all asleep. Even my old schooner the Molyhawk, whose every board and bunk I know, looks unreal, like some painted ship on a painted moonlit tropical lagoon. The half-reefed, hanging canvas sails seem the tired wings of Silence itself; they look unreal, as though fixed—a mirage hanging between the crystalline, moonlit sky and sea.
Only the creeping shadows, belated natives by the shore banyans, give a touch of reality that is somehow stranger than the dream. ”

“ I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a mile from shore, not more, and then the current took a turn, and I had to paddle as hard as I could with my hands and bits of the Æpyornis shell to make the place. However, I got there. It was just a common atoll about four miles round, with a few trees growing and a spring in one place, and the lagoon full of parrot-fish. I took the egg ashore and put it in a good place, well above the tide lines and in the sun, to give it all the chance I could, and pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed about prospecting. It's rum how dull an atoll is. ”

“ Leaving Midway Islands on the 28th of October, Commander Sicard, of the Saginaw, determined to run to Ocean Island, a small island lying about one hundred miles to the westward of Midway, to rescue any sailors who might have been wrecked there and who, being out of the ordinary track of vessels in that part of the Pacific Ocean, would have little chance of relief from any other source. ”

“ The great breakers of the ocean were now far up on our beach at each end of the tide. The whole width of the land from the edge of the beach to the lagoon is but the length of four or five cocoanut-trees. The water below the atoll was forced up through the coral sand, Monsieur, until it was like the dough of the baker when he first pours in the cocoanut juice. People still on the ground went up to their arms in it. We feared the atoll would be taken back to the depths. Our platform was nearer the lagoon than the moat—to be exact, two hundred feet from the moat, and a hundred from the lagoon. ”

“ So, with [78] gradually weakened strength, owing to lack of sustaining food, the labor we find arduous and exhausting; I, being included in the carpenter's gang on the schooner, realize that fact thoroughly. Yesterday the captain and myself made another circuit of the island, and both were glad to rest on the return to the camp.
The captain has ordered the cutter to be also fitted for a voyage to the Midway Islands. There he intends to have a sign erected stating, briefly, our situation; to serve in case the Navy Department should send (as we expect it will) a searching vessel for us. ”

“ To learn that the haunting sounds of the tide would at length subside was a new and disquieting addition to what he had previously deduced. He had accurately hit upon the natives' superstitious awe of the sounds to account for the island's desertion.
How long these invaluable shrieks and moans might be counted upon to continue became a vital question. Could they only last till a boat could be completed, launched, provisioned, and directed away to a safer retreat, he would ask for nothing more. ”

“ The atoll island has never been adequately described by pen or brush—never will be. What brush or pen could paint the starlight on the great lagoons, the sunrises and sunsets, the vastness of the distances unbroken by any land but just the low ring of reef? Life on an atoll is like life on a raft: immensity on every side—and the sea.
Here the girl felt herself suddenly shut in, the groves rising to the hill-top fretted her spirit, the bit of lagoon was nothing, and even the reef was different from the reef of Karolin. ”

“ He really cared for the estuary as she did for the Pentlands; she need never be afraid of telling him anything that she felt, for it had always turned out that he felt something just like it. But that pleasure had not lasted long. He had shown her the gap where the Medway found its way among the low hills on the Kentish coast, and had told her that the golden filaments the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped. ”

“ Here we experienced a strong current from the northward, which was attributed by Mr. Petley, our navigating officer, to the ebb tide flowing from the Otway Water. This channel is twenty miles in length, from its southern opening opposite Tilly Bay to its northern extremity abreast of Corona Island, where it dilates into the wide expanse of Otway Water. Its shores are lined by precipitous mountains of an average height of 1,000 feet, and clothed to their summits with the dense evergreen forest which characterizes the scenery of the western half of the Magellan Straits. ”

“ The Amatikulu drew too much water to attempt crossing this bar even in the smoothest of seas. From her decks the lines of roaring, boiling surf, the spume flying in misty clouds from each combing roller, were plainly visible. Visions of battening down, of a horrible half-hour spent in darkness beneath closed hatchways and crushing, thunderous seas, arose in the minds of her dismayed passengers. And their misgivings underwent no abatement as they watched the puffing little tug-boat, tossing like a cockle-shell upon the great rollers, or burying her hull out of sight beneath the surf. ”

“ Innumerable birds of a noddy kind made this island their resting-place; so that we had reason to flatter ourselves with hopes of getting supplies in greater abundance than it had hitherto been in our power. Our situation was at least four leagues distant from the main. We were on the north-westernmost of four small keys which were surrounded by a reef of rocks connected by sandbanks except between the two northernmost, and there likewise it was dry at low water, the whole forming a lagoon island into which the tide flowed: at this entrance I kept the boat. ”

“ This was the highest spot of land in miles, and already, in many places on either hand, the great seas were making a clean breach of the slender ring of the atoll and surging into the lagoon. Twenty miles around stretched the ring of the atoll, and in no place was it more than fifty fathoms wide. It was the height of the diving season, and from all the islands around, even as far as Tahiti, the natives had gathered.
"There are twelve hundred men, women, and children here," said Captain Lynch. "I wonder how many will be here to-morrow morning." ”

“ Atolls are more or less irregular ring-shaped reefs inclosing a lagoon of quiet water. They usually rise from profound depths; Keeling Atoll, in the Indian Ocean, is a good example. The upper surface of atolls and barrier reefs often peers at separate points above the level of the sea, so as to form low-lying islets. In some cases, the land thus formed is almost co-extensive with the reef, and being clothed with palms and tropical verdure, resembles a beautiful chaplet floating, as it were, in mid-ocean. ”

“ On a chart the island of Grande Mignon bears the same relation to surrounding islands that a mother-ship bears to a flock of submarines. Westward her coast is rocky and forbidding, being nothing but a succession of frowning headlands that rise almost perpendicularly from the sea. It is one of the most desolate stretches of coast in moderate latitudes, for no one lives there, nor has ever lived there, except a few hermit dulce-pickers during the summer months. ”

“ In the Low Archipelago one atoll was found, in the space of only thirty-four years, to have been transformed from a mere rock-reef to a lagoon island, fourteen miles in length, with tall trees growing along almost the whole of one side.
As a specimen of the sizes to which coral-buildings reach, the Maldive Archipelago may be named. It is a vast collection of islands and reefs, stretching to a length of four hundred and [p. 172] seventy miles, and in parts fifty miles broad. Barrier-reefs, reaching through many hundreds of miles, are even more remarkable. ”

“ The island is surrounded by a reef of coral rock, which forms several excellent bays and harbours, some of which have been particularly described, where there is room and depth of water far any number of the largest ships. Port Royal bay, called by the natives Matavai which is not inferior to any in Otaheite, may easily be known, by a very high mountain in the middle of the island, which bears due south from Point Venus. ”

“ Here began an official tour of great interest through the Middle Island, where I was received by the provincial authorities and by all classes of the community with a warmth of courtesy and hospitality for which I shall ever feel grateful.
“Although Milford Sound, at the extreme north of the thirteen inlets of the West Coast, surpasses the rest in stern grandeur and awful solitude, they all have many features in common. They are everywhere deep and narrow, subject to violent winds and strong tides and currents, and with few safe and sheltered anchorages. ”

“ Throughout the long line of the Aleutian Islands and the neighbouring coasts of North America, for over a century, hunters' boats—little cockle-shell skiffs made of oiled walrus-skin stretched on whalebone frames, narrow as a canoe, light as cork—rode the wildest seas in the wildest storms in pursuit of the sea-otter. Sea-otter became to the Pacific coast what beaver was to the Atlantic—the magnet that drew traders to the north-west seas, and ultimately led to the settlement of the north-west coast. ”

“ We had passed Ceylon, catching a glimpse of the distant island and a whiff of the spicy breeze offshore, and were nearing the treacherous chain of coral reefs known as the Maldive Islands, when I came up from the cabin after dinner for a stroll on deck. The evening sky glowed with the beauty of a rich sunset such as is rarely seen outside the tropics. ”

“ Anchored off the Reef
On the third day of the homeward voyage the wind died away, and in the middle of the afternoon it fell dead calm when we were less than a mile distant from the atoll of Pinaki. With the exception of a small group of Papeete traders, I don't suppose there are a dozen white men who have ever heard of the place; and those who have seen it or set foot upon it must be fewer still. It lies toward the eastern extremity of the Low Archipelago, and is one of four small atolls, all within a radius of thirty miles of one another. ”

“ Off to the north the islands showed their mountain-tips against the sky, blue and continuous as some distant mainland. Talking with the mates and boat-steerers and Kanakas, Tom Dennis was entertained with many stories of those islands: how fox- and seal-farmers were scattered through the group; how small launches cruised the entire length of the island chain with impunity; how in time to come there would be a thriving island population where now were empty stretches of land or scattered communities of miserable natives. ”

“ I long to see the lovely island. It looks a perfect paradise at this distance."
The rough sailor-captain screwed his mouth on one side, and gave me one of his comical looks, but he said nothing until he assisted in placing me and the baby in the boat.
"Don't be too sanguine, Mrs. Moodie; many things look well at a distance which are bad enough when near."
I scarcely regarded the old sailor's warning, so eager was I to go on shore—to put my foot upon the soil of the new world for the first time—I was in no humour to listen to any depreciation of what seemed so beautiful. ”