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Walter E. Traprock - The Cruise of the Kawa
"Yes," agreed Swank, "but I suppose we ought to be thankful. They were a wonderful people, it was a
wonderful experience. And no matter what art-juries of the future may do to me, my pictures were a
success in the Filberts."
Blessed old Swank, he always looked on the bright side of things!
Day by day matters mended - and our spirits rose. We began to think more and more of getting in touch
with civilization. What a tale we should have to tell. How we should put it over the other explorers with
their trite Solomons and threadbare Marquesas!
"Where do you think we'll land, Captain?" I asked Triplett.
"Hard to say," he answered, "accordin' to compass-plant I'm steerin' a straight course for anywhere, but
accordin' to the jackass (he had dropped the word "quadrant" since Swank's thrust) we're spinnin' a web
round these seas from where we started to nowhere via where we be."
We tried to help him. While the Captain pointed his astrolabe sunward and announced the figures
Whinney and I, like tailors' assistants, took them down, Whinney doing the adding, I the subtracting and
Swank the charting. The results were confusion worse confounded.
And then a dreadful thing happened.
The compass-plant sickened and died.
Whether some sea-water splashed into the shell or whether it was just change of environment, I do not
know. But day by day it drooped and faded.
I shall never forget the night she breathed her last. With white faces we sat about the tiny brown bowl in
which lay our hope of orientation. In Triplett's great rough paw was a fountain-pen filler of fresh water
which he gently dropped on the flowerlet's unturned face. At exactly one-thirty, solar time, the tiny petals
fluttered faintly and closed.
"She's gone," groaned Triplett, and dashed a tear, the size of a robin's egg, from his furrowed cheek. In
that ghastly light we stared at each other.
We were lost!
From then on we gave up all attempts at navigation and went in for plain sailing. Taking an approximate
north from sun and stars we simply headed our tight little craft on her way and let her pound.
A sort of desperate feeling, the panic which always comes to those who are lost, led us to wild outbursts
of gaiety and certain excesses in the matter of use of our supplies. Every evening we opened fresh gourds
of hoopa and made large inroads into our stores of pai, pickled gobangs and raw
crawfish.
How long this kept up I cannot say, for we had given up time reckoning along with other forms of
arithmetic. But I well remember that it was the Captain who had to intervene at last.
"Look here, boys," he said. "Do you realize that you're eatin' an' drinkin' yourselves outer house an'
home? We got jest a week's grub in our lockers, if we go on short rations. Beyond that," - he waved his
arm toward the ocean, as if to say "overboard for ours."
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