South Sea Bubble

“ South-Sea Scheme, called the South Sea Bubble, was a plan orginated by Harley, Earl of Oxford, to provide for the extinction of the public debt. A company was formed to which was given the monopoly of the trade of the South Seas and of certain import duties. ”

“ Oh! may some western tempest sweep These locusts whom our fruits have fed, That plague, directors, to the deep, Driven from the South Sea to the Red! May he, whom Nature's laws obey, Who lifts the poor, and sinks the proud, "Quiet the raging of the sea, And still the madness of the crowd!" But never shall our isle have rest, Till those devouring swine run down, (The devils leaving the possest) And headlong in the waters drown. The nation then too late will find, Computing all their cost and trouble, Directors' promises but wind, South Sea, at best, a mighty bubble. ”

“ And when the full moon peered over the ocean rim, touching with dim light the feathery palms that sheltered the tin roofs of the scattered coral-built houses, it looked like some staged faery town of a South Sea isle. Often by night some strange-rigged ship would hug the coast-line for hours while its crew of blackbirders crept ashore and kidnapped native men and women from the villages. ”

“ True, the night is dark, but without portent of storm. It is, as Harry Blew knows, only a thick rain-cloud, such as often shadows this part of the Pacific.
But the darkness need not be dreaded. They are in too low a latitude to encounter icebergs; and upon the wide waters of the South Sea there is not much danger of collision with ships.
Notwithstanding these reasons for feeling secure, the chief officer of the Condor paces her decks with a brow clouded, as the heavens over his head; while the glance of his eye betrays anxiety of no ordinary kind. ”

“ Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided. They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that hurricane center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea-water gone mad.
The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The heathen told me afterwards that he did not know. ”

“ I had heard of the hurricane of 1906, when the sea rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papeete to the hills. On Motu Uta, an islet in the bay, a white man was living with his Paumotuan wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef without a pause, sweeping the islet from end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost. ”

“ THE PEARL PEOPLE
“This is a terrible experience,” said De Jiminez in a gloomy voice. “A nation’s fate has been decided by a South Sea typhoon!”
“All is not lost,” replied Little Jim, attempting to console him. “The ship is high on the rocks yonder, and all the arms and ammunition may yet be saved. Perhaps the natives of this island are civilized and friendly, and will care for us until we can find another ship to take us to Colombia.” ”

“ Crash after crash succeeded, and the thunder was deafening, while around us the lightning darted like angry serpents. They have terrible storms in these tropics, at times, and it is no unusual thing for an island to suddenly disappear and never be heard of again. The tempest we now experienced was so extraordinary that I believe it awed even the natives.
I could hear the sea pounding against the rocks and wondered if the boats patrolling the reefs could survive. ”

“ The vessel broke up rapidly, and seeing that nothing could be done, the captain and crew, numbering ten men in all, took to one of the boats, carrying with them only a single chronometer belonging to the ship. Even after entering the small boat they were still in great danger, and only succeeded after the utmost difficulty in reaching a small islet some miles to the southward. The storm was still raging so violently that the shelter was a most welcome one, though as there were no animals or vegetation, or even water upon the island, their stay of necessity could be only temporary. ”

“ It is probable that there are few instances on record where a movement toward relief of such magnitude, commenced under circumstances so new, so unexpected, so unprepared, and so adverse, was ever carried on for such a length of time and closed with results so entirely satisfactory to both those served and those serving, as this disaster, which, if remembered at all at the present day, is designated as the “Hurricane and Tidal Wave of the Sea Islands off the Coast of South Carolina.” ”

“ By day light on the morning of the twentieth the gale had increased to a furious tempest; and the sea, keeping pace with it, ran mountain high; and as it kept invariably to the same point, the captain and officers became seriously alarmed, and almost persuaded that the south-west monsoon had set in, which, if it were so, would render it absolutely impossible for us to weather the coast. All the day, however, we kept as close as the violence (illegible text) the weather would allow us to the wind: but the sea canted her head so to leeward, that she made more lee than head-way ”

“ The wind blew fresh from the south-south-east and south-east all the afternoon with fair weather. As we stood to the north by west we found more sea, which I attributed to our receiving less shelter from the reefs to the eastward: it is probable they did not extend so far north as this; at least it may be concluded that there is not a continued barrier to prevent shipping having access to the shore. I observed that the stream set to the north-west, which I considered to be the flood. In some places along the coast we saw patches of wood. ”

“ Taking the old sea road, they came at last to Barbados, and here the Albemarle, seized by a storm, was wrecked. The two other ships, with a Barbados sloop, sailed on anal were approaching the Bahamas when another hurricane destroyed the Port Royal. ”

“ It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three days that would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and the next day—one of those glaring, glassy, calms, when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache.
The second day a man died—an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that season in the lagoon. Smallpox—that is what it was ”

“ At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no more than a stiff breeze was blowing. And by six it was dead calm and the sun was shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless edge of the lagoon, Mapuhi saw the broken bodies of those that had failed in the landing. Undoubtedly Tefara and Nauri were among them. He went along the beach examining them, and came upon his wife, lying half in and half out of the water. He sat down and wept, making harsh animal noises after the manner of primitive grief. ”

“ The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in the morning, and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapuhi and his women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon, still clutching his daughter Ngakura. Only a South Sea islander could have lived in such a driving smother. ”

“ The beach is not visible from it, this concealed by the dry reef which runs across it as the chord of an arc. Only a small portion of it can be seen through the portal which admits the tidal flow. Beyond, stretches the open sea outside the surf, with the breakers more than a mile off.
Such is the topography of the place where the mutineers have made landing and passed the night. When the day dawns, but little is there seen to betray their presence. Only a man seated upon a stone, nodding as if asleep, at intervals awakening with a start, and grasping at a gun between his legs ”

“ Rain, rain, rain! The sodden thatch has long since ceased to turn the flood. The water beats down the tree-tops, bowing beneath its weight. A raging torrent has been formed through the village square. The soil is crumbling away to the house-foundations, and fast pouring out seawards. There are six inches of water in every house. The crazy rafters of Turo’s house have given way, and the last trophy has fallen and been whirled out to sea, grinning at its enemies’ new misfortunes. Voices are drowned in the never-ceasing roar of rushing water. ”

“ Malarial fever in one of its many forms, some of them intermittent, others remittent, is the scourge of the east coast as well as of the west coast. To find some means of avoiding it would be to double the value of Africa to the European powers which have been establishing themselves on the coasts. No one who lives within thirty miles of the sea nearly all the way south from Cape Guardafui to Zululand can hope to escape it. It is frequent all round the great Nyanza lakes, and particularly severe in the valley of the Nile from the lakes downward to Khartoum. ”

“ There are certain parts of the world—like our American mountains, deserts, and lonely stretches of coast—which seem planned for the spiritual refreshment of mankind; places from which one carries away a new serenity and the sense of a yearning for beauty satisfied. Ever since the days of Cook the islands of the South Sea have charmed the white man—explorers, naturalists, traders, and the rough crews of whaling vessels ”

“ And, in looking back, that old gent of the South Sea Organization seems to stand out, not so much as a wicked, eccentric individual, as he does of a type that represents nine-tenths of the men whom one is doomed to knock up against in one’s pilgrimage along this shore of hope and sudden chills, wrecks, and buffeted dreams. ”

“ It’s all very well for shore-goin’ folk in the old country to make their jokes about ‘Cold missionary on the sideboard,’ and to sing of the ‘King of the Cannibal Islands;’ but, as sure as there is a sky over your head, and a coral island under your feet, so certainly do the South Sea savages kill, roast, and eat their enemies, and so fond are they of human flesh that, when they can’t get hold of enemies, they kill and eat their slaves. Look, you can make out the canoe well enough now without the glass; she’s makin’ straight for the opening in the reef. ”

“ England has not forgotten them, and for their use has built the lighthouse, the breakwater, and the harbour of refuge. But there are sources of danger which nearly defy human power. Take, among all dangerous shoals and sands, the Goodwin Sands as a prominent example; they are replete with danger to all sailing vessels at least, resorting to the Thames or to the North Sea, while even steamships have been lost on their treacherous banks.
These Sands, so well known to, and feared by, the mariner, are ten miles in length, running in a north-east and south-west direction off the east coast of Kent. ”

“ Captain Lynch reported, coming out from another look at the barometer, a chair in his hand.
He sat down and stared at the spectacle of the sea. The sun came out, increasing the sultriness of the day, while the dead calm still held. The seas continued to increase in magnitude.
“What makes that sea is what gets me,” Raoul muttered petulantly.
“There is no wind, yet look at it, look at that fellow there!”
Miles in length, carrying tens of thousands of tons in weight, its impact shook the frail atoll like an earthquake. Captain Lynch was startled. ”

“ In this month the wind begins to be variable with showers of rain.
The current is said always to run with the wind. Nevertheless I found the reverse in sailing from Timor to Java. Between the end of October and the beginning of the ensuing year no Dutch ship bound for Europe is allowed to sail from Batavia for fear of being near the Mauritius at the time of the hurricanes which are frequent there in December and January. ”

“ We have already had, and still have, a contagion of another sort, more universal, and less merciful, than that at Marseilles: The latter has destroy’d, we are told, about sixty thousand lives; ours has done worse, it has render’d a much greater number of lives miserable, who want but the sickness to finish their calamity ”

“ A bright sky vying with the sea for blueness, a sun whose rays are not too hot to be cooled by the sea-breeze, the distant roar of the great Pacific rollers as they break in foam on the coral-reef, the whisper of the feathery palms as they wave their giant leaves above yonder cluster of brown native huts,—all these form a picture whose poetry is not easily reconciled with the stern prose of an English court of law. ”

“ A belt of coral, such as is now called a “fringing reef,” against which the sea beat with considerable violence, throwing up a heavy surf, extended along the shore, making an attempt to land highly dangerous, if not impossible. The mate accordingly hauling the boat to the wind, stood to the southward, in the hope of finding some bay or inlet into which they might run. All eyes were eagerly turned towards the shore. As they coasted along, no huts or habitations of any kind were seen, nor was there any appearance of the island being inhabited. ”

“ Then, presently, between puffs, as he stretched himself and sidled along to take the wheel as the cutter began to close the slowing steamer: "Wonder 'oo the bally cove'll be 'oo bumps a mis-charted reef w'en 'e thinks 'e's got four 'undred fathom uv brine 'tween his keel an' the bottom uv the Pacific." The notorious inaccuracy of the South Sea charts is a continual source of amusement or wrath—according to whether a misplaced shoal or passage has spelt comedy or tragedy to him—for the man who sails their reef-beset waters. ”