Mystic Isles of the South Seas. Frederick O'Brien

18
One morning when we were near the middle of our voyage I went on
deck to see the sun rise. We were that day eighteen hundred miles
from Tahiti and the same distance from San Francisco, while north
and west twelve hundred miles lay Hawaii. Not nearer than there,
four hundred leagues away, was succor if our vessel failed. It was
the dead center of the sea. I glanced at the chart and noted the spot:
Latitude 10 N.; Longitude 137 W. The great god Ra of the Polynesians
had climbed above the dizzy edge of the whirling earth, and was making
his gorgeous course into the higher heavens. The ocean was a glittering
blue, an intense, brilliant azure, level save for the slight swaying
of the surface, which every little space showed a flag of white. The
evaporation caused by the blazing sun of these tropics made the water
a deeper blue than in cooler latitudes, as in the Arctic and Antarctic
oceans the greens are almost as vivid as the blues about the line.
I watched the thousand flying-fishes' fast leaps through the air, and
caught gleams of the swift bonitos whose pursuit made birds of their
little brothers. Then, a few miles off, I saw the first vessel that
had come to our eyes since we had sunk the headlands of California
more than a week before. She was a great sailing ship, under a cloud
of snowy canvas, one of the caste of clippers that fast fades under
the pall of smoke, and, from her route, bound for the Pacific Coast
from Australia. The captain of the Noa-Noa came and stood beside me
as we made her out more plainly, and fetching the glasses, he glanced
at her, started, and said in some surprise:
"She 's signaling us she wants to send a boat to us. That's the first
time in thirty years in this line I have ever had such a request from
a wind-jammer. She left her slant to cross our path."
Half a mile away a beautiful, living creature, all quivering with
the restraint, she came up into the eye of the wind, and backed
her fore-yard. A boat put off from her, and we awaited it with
indefinable alarm. It was soon at the gangway we had hastily lowered,
unknowing whether woman or child might not be our visitor. It was
a young Russian sailor whose hand had been crushed under a block a
fortnight before, and who, without aid for his injury other than the
simple remedies that make up the pharmacopoeia of sailing vessels,
was like to die from blood-poisoning. Had our ship not been met, he
would undoubtedly have perished, for no other steamer came to these