ts of rain I glimpsed other vessels reaching
for a holding-ground. The Fetia Taiao had made an anchorage a thousand
feet toward the reef. The waves were hammering against the quays,
and the lagoon was white with fury.

In the club, after all had been made secure, the skippers and managers
of trading houses gathered to discuss the weather. Tahiti is not so
subject to disastrous storms as are the Paumotu Islands and the waters
toward China and Japan, yet every decade or two a tidal-wave sweeps
the lowlands and does great injury. Though this occurs but seldom,
when the barometer falls low, the hearts of the owners of property and
of the people who have experienced a disaster of this kind sink. The
tides in this group of islands are different from anywhere else in the
world I know of in that they ebb and flow with unchanging regularity,
never varying in time from one year's end to another.

Full tide comes at noon and midnight, and ebb at six in the morning
and six in the evening, and the sun rises and sets between half
past five and half past six o'clock. There is hardly any twilight,
because of the earth's fast rotation in the tropics. This is a fixity,
observed by whites for more than a century, and told the first seamen
here by the natives as a condition existing always. Another oddity
of the tides is that they are almost inappreciable, the difference
between high and low tide hardly ever exceeding two feet. But every six
months or so a roaring tide rolls in from far at sea, and, sweeping
with violence over the reef, breaks on the beach. Now was due such a
wave, and its possibilities of height and destruction caused lively
argument between the traders and the old salts. More than a dozen
retired seamen, mostly Frenchmen, found their Snug Harbor in the Cercle
Bougainville, where liberty, equality, and fraternity had their home,
and where Joseph bounded when orders for the figurative splicing of
the main-brace came from the tables.

George Goeltz, a sea-rover, who had cast his anchor in the club after
fifty years of equatorial voyaging, was, on account of his seniority,
knowledge of wind and reef, and, most of all, his never-failing
bonhommie, keeper of barometer, thermometer, telescopes, charts,
and records. When I had my jorum of the eminent physician's Samoan
prescription before me, I barkened to the wisdom of the mariners.

Captain. William Pincher, who had at my first meeting informed me he
was known as Lying Bil