BENEATH TROPIC SEAS 



of laymen will be enjoying the delights of walking 

 about the bottom of such reefs everywhere in the 

 world, and the results in future years should bring 

 joy to enforced city-dwellers, and hosts of new 

 facts to the records of those of us who are ever 

 trying to solve the ultimate mysteries of life and 

 evolution on the earth. 



After three weeks, at last I saw the topsails of 

 my four-masted schooner, the Lieutenant^ loom 

 above the horizon of the Haitian sea. I thought 

 of a queen ant spiralling slowly to earth, and in 

 the light of succeeding events I could not con- 

 sciously have chosen a better simile. On and on 

 she came, the huge fore and mizzen sails wing and 

 wing, straight in on the afternoon sea breeze, 

 escorted by the tiny sheets of a flock of Haitian 

 fishers. 



I met her several miles out, with the Captain of 

 the Port, and when we had boarded her he turned 

 her sharply to starboard and by voice alone guided 

 her in and out between ugly emerald water reefs, as 

 deftly as a skater encircles airholes in spring ice. 

 A few days before, I had been wading in two feet of 

 water in a reef just ahead. It seemed now as if 

 nothing could prevent our nine hundred tons of 

 wood and metal from barging into the coral, but at 

 a low, gruff order and a twist of the wheel the 

 enormous ship came up into the wind, slowed down, 

 her hundreds of yards of canvas hung limp, — 

 out crashed the anchor chain and we all breathed 

 again. It was a sight for ultra-modern engineers — 



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