Hawaii - James Michener [120]
The whaler, sensing that Abner might be a minister, asked him if he would consent to conduct divine services as a guest, and this pleased the missionary very much, for he looked at Captain Janders as if to say, "Here's one sea captain who acknowledges God," but Janders could never willingly permit Abner complete triumph, so in snakelike tones he destroyed Hale's paradise by commenting, when the whaler went below to rouse the men, "He's probably run the vilest ship on the seas. Probably has crimes on his head no man could measure. Ask him what he did in Honolulu? Once these whalers get back around the Cape and near Boston, they all beg for one good prayer to wash away their accumulation of evil."
Nevertheless, a surly, husky lot of men and officers assembled for worship, and Abner flayed whatever crimes they had committed, with this text: "Leviticus 25, verse 41: 'And shall return unto his own family.' And upon returning, will his conscience return with him?"
In impassioned words, heightened by Captain Janders' goading, he analyzed the condition of a man who had been away from both the home of the Lord and the home of his family for four years, the changes which had occurred both in him and in his home of which he could not be aware and the steps which must be taken to remedy those changes, if ill, and to capitalize upon them, if favorable. The whalers listened with astonishment as he laid bare their half-expressed thoughts, and at the end of the service three men asked if he would pray with them, and when the prayers were over, the captain said, "That was a powerful sermon, young man. I should like to give you a token of our ship's appreciation." And he surprised Abner by delivering to the Thetis' longboat a stalk of handsome green bananas.
"They'll ripen and be good for many days," he said, "and the sickly ones will enjoy them."
"What are they?" Abner asked.
"Bananas, son. Good for constipation. Better get to like them because they're the principal food in Hawaii." The whaler showed Abner how to peel one, took a big bite, and gave the stub to Abner.
"Once you become familiar with 'em, they're real good." But Abner found the penetrating smell of the skin offensive, whereupon the whaler bellowed, "You damn well better get to like 'em, son because that's what you'll be eatin' from now on."
"Were you in Hawaii?" Abner asked.
"Was I in Honolulu?" the whaler shouted. Then, recalling the sermon just concluded, he finished lamely, "We took a dozen whales south of there."
On Tuesday, December 18, after Captain Janders had copied all the charts that his fellow skipper could provide of the Magellan passage, and had compared them with his own, finding that no two placed any single island in the passage even close to where the others did, the Thetis weighed anchor and headed back for Tierra del Fuego, but this time to the northern end of the island, where it abutted onto South America, and where the forbidding passage discovered by Magellan waited sullenly. As its bleak headlands came into view on the morning of December 21, Captain Janders said to Mlister Collins, "Take a good look at 'em. We're not comin' back this way." And with stubborn determination he plunged into the narrow strait which had defeated many vessels.
The missionaries were fascinated by the first days of the passage and they lined the rails staring first at South America and then at Tierra del Fuego. These were the first days of summer, and once a band of natives clad only in skins were spotted. At night Abner saw the fires that had given the large island its name when Magellan first coasted, for in spite of the fact that all was bleak, it was also interesting.
The Thetis, aided by the easterly wind, sometimes made as much as thirty miles in a day, but more often about twenty were covered in slow and patient probing. After the first westward thrust was completed, the brig turned south, following the shoreline of Tierra del Fuego, and the days became somnolent, and there was scarcely any night at all. The missionaries sometimes slept on