104 MYSTIC ISLES 



the round table of the Polonsky-Llewellyn group at the 

 Cercle Bougainville, I looked him over narrowly. His 

 name was Dixon, — Lovaina never got a name right, — 

 an Englishman, a wanderer, with an Eton schooling, 

 short, solidly built, with a bluff jaw and a keen, blue 

 eye. He was not good-looking. He had learned the 

 nickname given me, and was in such a happy frame of 

 mind that he ordered drinks for the club. 



"I 'm lucky to be here at all," he said seriously. "I 

 have a seven-ton cutter, and left the Paumotus four 

 days ago for Papeete. We had eight tons of copra in 

 the hold, filling it up within a foot of the hatch. Eight 

 miles off Point Venus the night before last, at eleven 

 o'clock, we hoped for a bit of wind to reach port by 

 morning. It was calm, and we wer-e all asleep but the 

 man at the wheel, when a waterspout came right out 

 of the clear sky, — so the steersman said, — and struck 

 us hard. We were swamped in a minute. The water 

 fell on us like j^our Niagara. Christ ! We gave up for 

 gone, all of us, the other five all kanakas. We heeled 

 over until the deck was under water, — of course we 've 

 got no freeboard at all, — and suddenly a gale sprung 

 up. We pulled in the canvas, but to no purpose. Un- 

 der a bare pole we seemed every minute to be going 

 under completely. We have no cabin, and all we could 

 do was to lay flat on the deck in the water, and hold on 

 to anything we could grab. The natives prayed, by 

 God! They 're Catholics, and they remembered it then. 

 The mate wanted to throw the copra overboard. I was 

 willing, but I said, 'What for? We 're dead men, and 

 it '11 do no good. She can't stand up even emptJ^' We 

 stayed swamped that way all night, expecting to be 



