f steam from the soaked decks.

The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with
millions and millions of germs. We always took another drink when we saw
it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three
more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a rule
to take an additional several each time they hove the dead over to the
sharks that swarmed about us.

We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well,
or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what
followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two
men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at least, that was
what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware
of the heathen's existence. But to come back.

It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl
buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in
the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90,
and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00,
or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient
to sober the most drunken pearl buyer that ever incinerated smallpox
microbes in Scotch whiskey.

I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he
had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but
that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took
off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life
lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the
wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do
south of the Equator, if--and there was the rub--IF one were NOT in the
direct path of the hurricane.

We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of
the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him
to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer
ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to
hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not
get the rest of the pearl buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to
know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?
was what was in their minds, I knew.

Of course, the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never
forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped