The wind
was fresh, and a tidy sea was making. A black boy was at the wheel.
Captain Jansen, Mr. Jacobsen (the mate), Charmian, and I had just
sat down on deck to breakfast. Three unusually large seas caught
us. The boy at the wheel lost his head. Three times the Minota was
swept. The breakfast was rushed over the lee-rail. The knives and
forks went through the scuppers; a boy aft went clean overboard and
was dragged back; and our doughty skipper lay half inboard and half
out, jammed in the barbed wire. After that, for the rest of the
cruise, our joint use of the several remaining eating utensils was a
splendid example of primitive communism. On the Eugenie, however,
it was even worse, for we had but one teaspoon among four of us--but
the Eugenie is another story.
Our first port was Su'u on the west coast of Malaita. The Solomon
Islands are on the fringe of things. It is difficult enough sailing
on dark nights through reef-spiked channels and across erratic
currents where there are no lights to guide (from northwest to
southeast the Solomons extend across a thousand miles of sea, and on
all the thousands of miles of coasts there is not one lighthouse);
but the difficulty is seriously enhanced by the fact that the land
itself is not correctly charted.
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