Lost Island

“I don’t know, though,” he went on, “that any of them shipwrecks ever proved quite so excitin’ as the last shakin’ up we had in this steamer. When you get an easterly gale blowin’ in that part of the Pacific, it suttinly comes good and hard. We were making a course ’most due sou’east when the wind hit us. It came sudden, cuttin’ slices clean off the surface, and the old ship listed over till I thought she was a goner. Her port rail was right under water, and the big waves that broke over us sometimes reached half-way up the funnel. One man must have gone overboard at once, and the mate was knocked senseless against a stanchion. He’d have gone too, but he got entangled in some gear, and after a while we dragged him under shelter.

“It sure was blowin’ for about an hour, and then it eased off quick like, but we knew what to expect when it started again. Everything loose had been shot over the side, and one of the boats had been stove in. We just had time to get ready for the next snorter before it arrived, and then the old ship was nearly lifted clean out of water. You’ve heard of seas runnin’ mountains high, p’raps. Well, them seas was like mountains, and we were slidin’ down the sides same as the coasters at Coney, only it didn’t cost ten cents a time, and we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen when we got to the bottom.”

The sailor put down the paint-brush and recharged his pipe with great care before continuing:

“Give me an old wind-jammer for weatherin’ a gale. You never know what’s going to happen to these new-fangled steam contraptions. The ship’s engines was ’most shook to pieces after two days of it, and we all made up our minds we’d seen the last of New York or anywhere else on dry land. The ship was leakin’ enough to scare any one, and it was too rough to use the hand-pumps. We’d drifted some distance out of our course between Fanning and Christmas Islands when the current and wind took us under the lee of another island, and that saved us. Before you could say ‘knife’ we had the anchor down and were ridin’ as comfortable and snug as any man could want.

“We sheltered for three days under that bit of a place. As a rule, you don’t get much besides low coral islands in them waters, but there was a hill on this one. I remember that, from where we were lyin’, part of the island looked a good deal like a camel’s back.

“We were anchored off a little lagoon, and one day the captain sees something that might have been a wreck half buried in the sand. When the gale had spent itself he went ashore in a boat, thinkin’ p’raps there might be a chance of a bit of salvage. But there wasn’t. It was an old bark that must have been lost some years ago. We reckoned she’d struck a reef of rocks outside the lagoon, drifted over them afterwards, and landed inside the cove where we found her. Only the stumps of her masts were left. I remember her name. We could just make it out on a copper plate where the bell had hung. She was the Hatteras.”