It seemed as if that dark and roaring wind hung over our heads for infinite ages. How we clung to that outrigger and were not washed away is a mystery that is connected with Providence and that word “inscrutable.” When dawn at length brightened all the east, I lifted my head half fearfully. Soogy was huddled beside me, O’Hara on the other side, so tight that we were wedged in. The old gentleman had managed to fix his head and neck under the forward canoe-seat in such a way that he had become a part of the canoe itself! His bald head, through sea-water repeatedly washing over it, had become quite bluish-looking. By some miracle his clerical-shaped hat still lay just beside him. When O’Hara softly pulled his coat to see if he was still alive, he half opened his eyes and rolled them in a pathetic way. The fact that he still lived relieved our loneliness. The wind had ceased, but the swell remained, huge rolling hills of glassy water rising and travelling at about four knots an hour. We immediately commenced to bale out the canoe, using a calabash and a tin which we discovered beneath the seat. Soogy and the old man helped O’Hara and myself in this task. We all felt deeply thankful when the sun burst out over the great waste in all its tropical vigour. Soogy began to sing, and cheered us up. None of us seemed to realize the true state of affairs, that we were out of sight of land, were castaways on the Pacific, our paddles gone, and only about two pints of water in a rusty tin can!
The hot sunlight soon dried our soaked clothing.
The old fugitive became transformed. The erstwhile freezing look in his eyes had gone, and was replaced by a gleam of friendly appeal to us! It was quite evident that he saw things as they were, and had admitted O’Hara and myself into his social circle, so to speak. He gave us cigars. To our relief he discovered some matches in his breast pocket; they were damp, but we placed them on the rim of his clerical hat and they soon dried in the hot sunlight. That hat had gone through something! To this day I cannot look at a clerical hat without thinking of typhoons and tropic skies shining over wastes of water surrounded by illimitable skylines.
We commenced carefully, and drank a very small drop of water each. We made several attempts to make paddles out of the spare calabash and the slit wood of a canoe seat, but it was no good. We were drifting at about four knots an hour to the north-east.