In the South Seas | Page 2

five before we could
distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon. Eight
degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming. The interval was
passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of
landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then
approaching. Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness.
Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the
starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva,
whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of
the sun displayed the needles of Ua- pu. These pricked about the line of
the horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church,

they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit
signboard of a world of wonders.
Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the islands, or knew,
except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was
with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the
bosom of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores. The
land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses;
its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and
olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of
vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded
with the articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its
unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass.
There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying
pilot. Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our
haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it--the only sea-
mark given--a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam and
Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal figures,
the gross statuary of nature. These we were to find; for these we craned
and stared, focused glasses, and wrangled over charts; and the sun was
overhead and the land close ahead before we found them. To a ship
approaching, like the Casco, from the north, they proved indeed the
least conspicuous features of a striking coast; the surf flying high above
its base; strange, austere, and feathered mountains rising behind; and
Jack and Jane, or Adam and Eve, impending like a pair of warts above
the breakers.
Thence we bore away along shore. On our port beam we might hear the
explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there
was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that
quarter of the island. Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze,
the Casco skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach
and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The
trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have
been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the
Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more
considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now
with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to slide
into the bay of Anaho. The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so

graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen
crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of
mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it
was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In
every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling
there like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened
the razor edges of the summit.
Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze,
continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way,
appearing motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating of
young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a
hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a
house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles of the hills, and
one of these surrounded with what seemed a garden. These conspicuous
habitations, that patch of culture, had we but known it, were a mark of
the passage of whites; and we might have approached a hundred islands
and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native
village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach,
close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening
on a concave arc of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both