The Hawaiian Archipelago | Page 5

under the circumstances we meekly acquiesced. We
were allowed to know that a part of the foreguards had been carried
way, and that iron stanchions four inches thick had been gnarled and
twisted like candy sticks, and the constant falling of the saloon casing
of the mainmast, showed something wrong there. A heavy clang, heard
at intervals by day and night, aroused some suspicions as to more
serious damage, and these were afterwards confirmed. As the wind fell
the sea rose, and for some hours realized every description I have read
of the majesty and magnitude of the rollers of the South Pacific.
The day after the hurricane something went wrong with the engines,
and we were stationary for an hour. We all felt thankful that this

derangement which would have jeopardised or sacrificed sixty lives,
was then only a slight detention on a summer sea.
Five days out from Auckland we entered the tropics with a temperature
of 80 degrees in the water, and 85 degrees in the air, but as the light
head airs blew the intense heat of our two smoke stacks aft, we often
endured a temperature of 110 degrees. There were quiet, heavy tropical
showers, and a general misty dampness, and the Navigator Islands,
with their rainbow-tinted coral forests, their fringe of coco palms, and
groves of banyan and breadfruit trees, these sunniest isles of the bright
South Seas, resolved themselves into dark lumps looming through a
drizzling mist. But the showers and the dampness were confined to that
region, and for the last fortnight an unclouded tropical sun has blazed
upon our crawling ship. The boiler tubes are giving way at the rate of
from ten to twenty daily, the fracture in the shaft is extending, and so,
partially maimed, the old ship drags her 320 feet of length slowly along.
The captain is continually in the engine-room, and we know when
things are looking more unpropitious than usual by his coming up
puffing his cigar with unusual strength of determination. It has been so
far a very pleasant voyage. The moral, mental, and social qualities of
my fellow-passengers are of a high order, and since the hurricane we
have been rather like a family circle than a miscellaneous accidental
group. For some time our days went by in reading aloud, working,
chess, draughts and conversation, with two hours at quoits in the
afternoon for exercise; but four days ago the only son of Mrs. Dexter,
who is the only lady on board besides myself, ruptured a blood vessel
on the lungs, and lies in a most critical state in the deck-house from
which he has not been moved, requiring most careful nursing, incessant
fanning, and the attention of two persons by day and night. Mrs. D. had
previously won the regard of everyone, and I had learned to look on her
as a friend from whom I should be grieved to part. The only hope for
the young man's life is that he should be landed at Honolulu, and she
has urged me so strongly to land with her there, where she will be a
complete stranger, that I have consented to do so, and consequently
shall see the Sandwich Islands. This severe illness has cast a great
gloom over our circle of six, and Mr. D. continues in a state of so much
exhaustion and peril that all our arrangements as to occupation,
recreation, and sleep, are made with reference to a sick, and as we

sometimes fear, a dying man, whose state is much aggravated by the
maltreatment and stupidity of a dilapidated Scotch doctor, who must be
at least eighty, and whose intellects are obfuscated by years of whiskey
drinking. Two of the gentlemen not only show the utmost tenderness as
nurses, but possess a skill and experience which are invaluable. They
never leave him by night, and scarcely take needed rest even in the day,
one or other of them being always at hand to support him when faint, or
raise him on his pillows.
It is not only that the Nevada is barely seaworthy, and has kept us
broiling in the tropics when we ought to have been at San Francisco,
but her fittings are so old. The mattresses bulge and burst, and
cockroaches creep in and out, the deck is so leaky that the water
squishes up under the saloon matting as we walk over it, the bread
swarms with minute ants, and we have to pick every piece over because
of weevils. Existence at night is an unequal fight with rats and
cockroaches, and at meals with the stewards for time to eat. The
stewards outnumber the passengers, and are the veriest riff-raff I have
seen on board ship. At meals, when the captain is not below, their