N the old Pacific days, before sandalwood had quite failed and before copra was king, the schooner Calumet, trading on a private venture to Raratonga, was lost by fire some four hundred miles from her destination.
The loss of a trading schooner excites little interest, yet the loss of the Calumet made a great stir in the Pacific world, owing to the mystery attached to one of the survivors, Pariseault by name, a Canadian.
The fire broke out on the 18th of May, 18—. It was occasioned by a member of the crew disobeying orders and taking a light into the room where paint and varnish were stored. It took the vessel as a spark takes a resin torch, and, as a result, the boats, though lowered safely, were not victualled properly.
There were two boats, a whale-boat and a sailing dinghy. Pariseault found himself in the dinghy with two Kanakas; the rest of the crew crowded the whale-boat. Now, the fact that created such a stir was briefly as follows: The dinghy and the whale-boat parted company on the 20th of May. The whale-boat made Raratonga about a fortnight later, but the dinghy was not picked up by the brig Alsatian till the 1st of September, nearly four months later. She was found drifting with the mast stepped and the sail flapping, and Pariseault lying in the stern of her, senseless but alive. There was not a scrap of food in her, not a drop of water, not a sign of the two Kanakas, and the spot on the ocean where she was met with lay only a hundred and fifty miles south of the spot where the Calumet was lost.
When the boats parted company, they had each provisions only for ten days and water for about the same length of time. Captain Halifax, the master and owner of the Calumet, made this quite clear in the written statement of the occurrence which he drew up. Yet the dinghy had been adrift for four months, and Pariseault, when rescued, was alive. What had he lived on?
When picked up, his mind was a blank to all things that had happened since the burning of the schooner, and it was not till long years after that remembrance of the whole event came to him, following upon a severe illness, and the riddle was solved—too late, however, to serve the interest of the sailor-men who had speculated so deeply on the matter at the time of the occurrence, and whose solutions of the mystery included the theory that Pariseault had eaten the two Kanakas, and the more probable supposition that he had been picked up by a ship that had in her turn come to grief. Both of these solutions were wrong. The real key to the matter lay in the mentality of Pariseault, in his strength and in his weakness.
This is the story.
On the 20th of May the boats, that had been keeping company about a mile apart, were separated by a still greater distance, the sail of the captain's boat being now glimpsed like a gull's wing, now lost in the sun-blaze and the glitter of the sea. Pariseault, though he had a compass and a chart giving him the lie of Raratonga, steered by the captain's boat, which was much better off in this respect. It was also faster. It was also bound to prove its speed, for it was crammed with living men, and it was racing against death.
At sunset it was still visible, far away across the moving meadows of swell; at sunrise it had vanished as though the warm, steady blow of the "trades" had wiped it out of existence. Pariseault was of the type that knows not fear. He had run away to sea, urged by the love of adventure, and he was by no means an uneducated man. Though only eighteen, he had thoughts about things eternal, and a naive philosophy of his own which told him that death was not to be dreaded, for the simple fact that it is universal. He was a disciple of Goethe, though he had never heard his name nor read a line of his works.
He also had a belief in the reliability of the boat's compass, which, as a matter of fact, was absolutely untrustworthy.
But the two Kanakas, who were brothers, had neither a philosophy nor even an ill-founded belief to stay their minds. The vanishing of the whale-boat filled them with gloom; they had friends and relations in her, and, as far as Pariseault could gather, the idea had come to them that they would never, never see those friends and relations again.
The younger of the two men had been ailing for a long time past, smitten by the disease which civilisation introduced to Polynesia—consumption.