South Sea Tales

Jack London

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486143149
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie nordamericane

Set against the natural beauty of south sea islands and alive with the hazards of headhunters, sharks, storms and disease, these 8 powerful short stories include `Mauki,` which tells of a young Melanesian sold into slavery; as well as `The Terrible Solomons,` `The House of Mapuhi,` `The Whale Tooth,` `Yah! Yah! Yah!,` `The Heathen,` `The Inevitable White Man,` and `The Seed of McCoy.` Pure entertainment for lovers of adventure tales and Jack London fans.

The Seed of McCoy

The Pyrenees, her iron sides pressed low in the water by her cargo of wheat, rolled sluggishly, and made it easy for the man who was climbing aboard from out a tiny outrigger canoe. As his eyes came level with the rail, so that he could see inboard, it seemed to him that he saw a dim, almost indiscernible haze. It was more like an illusion, like a blurring film that had spread abruptly over his eyes. He felt an inclination to brush it away, and the same instant he thought that he was growing old and that it was time to send to San Francisco for a pair of spectacles.

As he came over the rail he cast a glance aloft at the tall masts, and, next, at the pumps. They were not working. There seemed nothing the matter with the big ship, and he wondered why she had hoisted the signal of distress. He thought of his happy islanders, and hoped it was not disease. Perhaps the ship was short of water or provisions. He shook hands with the captain whose gaunt face and care-worn eyes made no secret of the trouble, whatever it was. At the same moment the new-comer was aware of a faint, indefinable smell. It seemed like that of burnt bread, but different.

He glanced curiously about him. Twenty feet away a weary-faced sailor was calking the deck. As his eye lingered on the man, he saw suddenly arise from under his hands a faint spiral of haze that curled and twisted and was gone. By now he had reached the deck. His bare feet were pervaded by a dull warmth that quickly penetrated the thick calluses. He knew now the nature of the ship’s distress. His eyes roved swiftly forward, where the full crew of weary-faced sailors regarded him eagerly. The glance from his liquid brown eyes swept over them like a benediction, soothing them, wrapping them about as in the mantle of a great peace. “How long has she been afire, Captain?” he asked in a voice so gentle and unperturbed that it was as the cooing of a dove.

At first the captain felt the peace and content of it stealing in upon him; then the consciousness of all that he had gone through and was going through smote him, and he was resentful. By what right did this ragged beach-comber, in dungaree trousers and a cotton shirt, suggest such a thing as peace and content to him and his overwrought, exhausted soul? The captain did not reason this; it was the unconscious process of emotion that caused his resentment.

“Fifteen days,” he answered shortly. “Who are you?”

“My name is McCoy,” came the answer in tones that breathed tenderness and compassion.

“I mean, are you the pilot?”

McCoy passed the benediction of his gaze over the tall, heavy-shouldered man with the haggard, unshaven face who had joined the captain.

“I am as much a pilot as anybody,” was McCoy’s answer. “We are all pilots here, Captain, and I know every inch of these waters.”

But the captain was impatient.

“What I want is some of the authorities. I want to talk with them, and blame quick.”

“Then I’ll do just as well.”

Again that insidious suggestion of peace, and his ship a raging furnace beneath his feet! The captain’s eyebrows lifted impatiently and nervously, and his fist clenched as if he were about to strike a blow with it.

“Who in hell are you?” he demanded.

“I am the chief magistrate,” was the reply in a voice that was still the softest and gentlest imaginable.

The tall, heavy-shouldered man broke out in a harsh laugh that was partly amusement, but mostly hysterical. Both he and the captain regarded McCoy with incredulity and amazement. That this barefooted beach-comber should possess such high-sounding dignity was inconceivable. His cotton shirt, unbuttoned, exposed a grizzled chest and the fact that there was no undershirt beneath. A worn straw hat failed to hide the ragged gray hair. Halfway down his chest descended an untrimmed patriarchal beard. In any slop-slop, two shillings would have outfitted him complete as he stood before them.

“Any relation to the McCoy of the Bounty?” the captain asked.

“He was my great-grandfather.”

“Oh,” the captain said, then bethought himself. “My name is Davenport, and this is my first mate, Mr. Konig.”

They shook hands.

“And now to business.” The captain spoke quickly, the urgency of a great haste pressing his speech. “We’ve been on fire for over two weeks. She’s ready to break all hell loose any moment. That’s why I held for Pitcairn. I want to beach her, or scuttle her, and save the hull.”

“Then you made a mistake, Captain,” said McCoy. “You should have slacked away for Mangareva. There’s a beautiful beach there, in a lagoon where the water is like a mill-pond.”

“But we’re here, ain’t we?” the first mate demanded. “That’s the point. We’re here, and we’ve got to do something.”

McCoy shook his head kindly.

“You can do nothing here. There is no beach. There isn’t even anchorage.”

“Gammon!” said the mate. “Gammon!” he repeated loudly, as the captain signalled him to be more soft-spoken. “You can’t tell me that sort of stuff. Where d’ye keep your own boats, hey—your schooner, or cutter, or whatever you have? Hey? Answer me that.”

McCoy smiled as gently as he spoke. His smile was a caress, an embrace that surrounded the tired mate and sought to draw him into the quietude and rest of McCoy’s tranquil soul.

“We have no schooner or cutter,” he replied. “And we carry our canoes to the top of the cliff.”

“You’ve got to show me,” snorted the mate. “How d’ye get around to the other islands, heh? Tell me that.”

“We don’t get around. As governor of Pitcairn, I sometimes go. When I was younger, I was away a great deal—sometimes on the trading schooners, but mostly on the missionary brig. But she’s gone now, and we depend on passing vessels. Sometimes we have had as high as six calls in one year. At other times, a year, and even longer, has gone by without one passing ship. Yours is the first in seven months.”

“And you mean to tell me—” the mate began.

But Captain Davenport interfered.

“Enough of this. We’re losing time. What is to be done, Mr. McCoy?”

The old man turned his brown eyes, sweet as a woman’s, shoreward, and both captain and mate followed his gaze around from the lonely rock of Pitcairn to the crew clustering forward and waiting anxiously for the announcement of a decision. McCoy did not hurry. He thought smoothly and slowly, step by step, with the certitude of a mind that was never vexed or outraged by life.

“The wind is light now,” he said finally. “There is a heavy current setting to the westward.”

“That’s what made us fetch to leeward,” the captain interrupted, desiring to vindicate his seamanship.

“Yes, that is what fetched you to leeward,” McCoy went on. “Well, you can’t work up against this current to-day. And if you did, there is no beach. Your ship will be a total loss.”

He paused, and captain and mate looked despair at each other.

“But I will tell you what you can do. The breeze will freshen to-night around midnight—see those tails of clouds and that thickness to windward, beyond the point there? That’s where she’ll come from, out of the southeast, hard. It is three hundred miles to Mangareva. Square away for it. There is a beautiful bed for your ship there.”

The mate shook his head.

“Come in to the cabin, and we’ll look at the chart,” said the captain.

McCoy found a stifling, poisonous atmosphere in the pent cabin. Stray waftures of invisible gases bit his eyes and made them sting. The deck was hotter, almost unbearably hot to his bare feet. The sweat poured out of his body. He looked almost with apprehension about him. This malignant, internal heat was astounding. It was a marvel that the cabin did not burst into flames. He had a feeling as if of being in a huge bake-oven where the heat might at any moment increase tremendously and shrivel him up like a blade of grass.

As he lifted one foot and rubbed the hot sole against the leg of his trousers, the mate laughed in a savage, snarling fashion.

“The anteroom of hell,” he said. “Hell herself is right down there under your feet.”

“It’s hot!” McCoy cried involuntarily, mopping his face with a bandana handkerchief.

“Here’s Mangareva,” the captain said, bending over the table and pointing to a black speck in the midst of the white blankness of the chart. “And here, in between, is another island. Why not run for that?”

McCoy did not look at the chart.

“That’s Crescent Island,” he answered. “It is uninhabited, and it is only two or three feet above water. Lagoon, but no entrance. No, Mangareva is the nearest place for your purpose.”

“Mangareva it is, then,” said Captain Davenport, interrupting the mate’s growling objection. “Call the crew aft, Mr. Konig.”

The sailors obeyed, shuffling wearily along the deck and painfully endeavoring to make haste. Exhaustion was evident in every movement. The cook came out of his galley to hear, and the cabin-boy hung about near him.

When Captain Davenport had explained the situation and announced his intention of running for Mangareva, an uproar broke out. Against a background of throaty rumbling arose inarticulate cries of rage, with here and there a distinct curse, or word, or phrase. A shrill Cockney voice soared and dominated for a moment, crying: “Gawd! After bein’ in ’ell for fifteen days—an’ now ’e wants us to sail this floatin’ ’ell to sea again!”

The captain could not control them, but McCoy’s gentle presence seemed to rebuke and calm them, and the muttering and cursing died away, until the full crew, save here and there an anxious face directed at the captain, yearned dumbly toward the green-clad peaks and beetling coast of Pitcairn.

Soft as a spring zephyr was the voice of McCoy:

“Captain, I thought I heard some of them say they were starving.”

“Ay,” was the answer, “and so we are. I’ve had a sea-biscuit and a spoonful of salmon in the last two days. We’re on whack. You see, when we discovered the fire, we battened down immediately to suffocate the fire. And then we found how little food there was in the pantry. But it was too late. We didn’t dare break out the lazarette. Hungry? I’m just as hungry as they are.”

He spoke to the men again, and again the throat-rumbling and cursing arose, their faces convulsed and animal-like with rage. The second and third mates had joined the captain, standing behind him at the break of the poop. Their faces were set and expressionless; they seemed bored, more than anything else, by this mutiny of the crew. Captain Davenport glanced questioningly at his first mate, and that person merely shrugged his shoulders in token of his helplessness.

“You see,” the captain said to McCoy, “you can’t compel sailors to leave the safe land and go to sea on a burning vessel. She has been their floating coffin for over two weeks now. They are worked out, and starved out, and they’ve got enough of her. We’ll beat up for Pitcairn.”

But the wind was light, the Pyrenees’ bottom was foul, and she could not beat up against the strong westerly current. At the end of two hours she had lost three miles. The sailors worked eagerly, as if by main strength they could compel the Pyrenees against the adverse elements. But steadily, port tack and starboard tack, she sagged off to the westward. The captain paced restlessly up and down, pausing occasionally to survey the vagrant smoke-wisps and to trace them back to the portions of the deck from which they sprang. The carpenter was engaged constantly in attempting to locate such places, and, when he succeeded, in calking them tighter and tighter.

“Well, what do you think?” the captain finally asked McCoy, who was watching the carpenter with all a child’s interest and curiosity in his eyes.

McCoy looked shoreward, where the land was disappearing in the thickening haze.

“I think it would be better to square away for Mangareva. With that breeze that is coming, you’ll be there to-morrow evening.”

“But what if the fire breaks out? It is liable to do it any moment.”

“Have your boats ready in the falls. The same breeze will carry your boats to Mangareva if the ship burns out from under.”

Captain Davenport debated for a moment, and then McCoy heard the question he had not wanted to hear, but which he knew was surely coming.

“I have no chart of Mangareva. On the general chart it is only a fly-speck. I would not know where to look for the entrance into the lagoon. Will you come along and pilot her in for me?”

McCoy’s serenity was unbroken.

“Yes, Captain,” he said, with the same quiet unconcern with which he would have accepted an invitation to dinner; “I’ll go with you to Mangareva.”

Again the crew was called aft, and the captain spoke to them from the break of the poop.

“We’ve tried to work her up, but you see how we’ve lost ground. She’s setting off in a two-knot current. This gentleman is the Honorable McCoy, Chief Magistrate and Governor of Pitcairn Island. He will come along with us to Mangareva. So you see the situation is not so dangerous. He would not make such an offer if he thought he was going to lose his life. Besides, whatever risk there is, if he of his own free will come on board and take it, we can do no less. What do you say for Mangareva?”

This time there was no uproar. McCoy’s presence, the surety and calm that seemed to radiate from him, had had its effect. They conferred with one another in low voices. There was little urging. They were virtually unanimous, and they shoved the Cockney out as their spokesman. That worthy was overwhelmed with consciousness of the heroism of himself and his mates, and with flashing eyes he cried:

“By Gawd! if ’e will, we will!”

The crew mumbled its assent and started forward.

“One moment, Captain,” McCoy said, as the other was turning to give orders to the mate. “I must go ashore first.”

Mr. Konig was thunderstruck, staring at McCoy as if he were a madman.

“Go ashore!” the captain cried. “What for? It will take you three hours to get there in your canoe.”

McCoy measured the distance of the land away, and nodded.

“Yes, it is six now. I won’t get ashore till nine. The people cannot be assembled earlier than ten. As the breeze freshens up to-night, you can begin to work up against it, and pick me up at daylight tomorrow morning.”

“In the name of reason and common sense,” the captain burst forth, “what do you want to assemble the people for? Don’t you realize that my ship is burning beneath me?”

McCoy was as placid as a summer sea, and the other’s anger produced not the slightest ripple upon it.

“Yes, Captain,” he cooed in his dove-like voice, “I do realize that your ship is burning. That is why I am going with you to Mangareva. But I must get permission to go with you. It is our custom. It is an important matter when the governor leaves the island. The people’s interests are at stake, and so they have the right to vote their permission or refusal. But they will give it, I know that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“Then if you know they will give it, why bother with getting it? Think of the delay—a whole night.”

“It is our custom,” was the imperturbable reply. “Also, I am the governor, and I must make arrangements for the conduct of the island during my absence.”

“But it is ...