Boat.

600 Miles In A Crazy

From Tuamotus to Tahiti.

From Our Own Correspondent.

PAPEETE, April 20.

FIVE natives, emaciated and in the final stages of exhaustion, came into the pass at Tautira, on the south end of Tahiti, a few days ago.

They had sailed all the way from the atoll of Vanavana, a distance of more than 600 miles as the crow flies, in a dilapidated home-made craft, half scow and half outrigger canoe.

To the chief of Tautira, who took the sufferers into his home, and nourished them until they became strong enough to proceed to Papeete, they told a story which is not altogether an uncommon one in the scattered T'uamotu archi pelago—an area of the earth’s surface which has an unenviable, though well deserved, reputation for tricky currents and foul landing places. It was well named the Dangerous Archipelago by early navigators.

Before Vanavana passed into private ownership, and coconut planting began there, it was just one of many similar uninhabited atolls situated in various parts of the group. Nowadays a few labourers are put there to keep the young plantations in shape until pro ductipn commences, and these people often go for months at a stretch with out the sight of a vessel.

On the present occasion, nine months had passed since the gang was put ashore with a supply of provisions, and a hankering for more of the white man’s food was strong upon them, for a diet of straight fish and coconuts gets pretty wearisome, even for a Paumoto islander, once he has tasted doughboys and bully beef, to say nothing of to bacco.

So they knocked together a canoe, from some old lumber, and two of them sailed oft to Tureia, an inhabited island 30 miles away. Here, they eventually g-ot ashore with whole skins, but minus the canoe, which was smashed to atoms on the reef. From the native governor of Tureia, they secured a mat or two of rice and a lot of coconuts to drink on the return journey to Vanavana, and started off with three Tureia men who were to take back the boat they had borrowed.

But the luck was out. The breeze, which had carried them along for more than two-thirds of the distance, died away to a dead calm, one of those in

explicable currents took hold of their crazy vessel and carried them away till the bobbing palm tops were seen no more upon the horizon, and Vanavana was lost for good and all.

The following dawn disclosed a sail less ocean, with no land anywhere in sight. But a steady breeze was behind them, and they still hoped to make one or other of a group of islands that lay, so they thought, right ahead of them.

With luck, they ought to have done it; but they failed to sight Nukutipipi, Anuanu-raro, Anuanurunga, or Here heretue, and a dreadful gloom settled over the party as they came to a reali sation of the tragic possibilities of the situation. No doubt, too, the youngest Of the bunch knew quite well what was likely to happen to him, when their food finally ran out.

One of the men was a Tahitian who knew that his native land was some where a bit north of the setting sun.

So they kept the boat headed in that direction, and here, indeed, fortune fa voured them, for the wind remained steady throughout the whole of their adventurous journey—an unusual phe nomena in March. A change of wind to the north would have made a dif ferent ending to the story.

So they continued to battle along, two men baling all the time. The drinking nuts vanished, and of the rice, which they had been obliged to consume in an uncooked state, only a kilo or two re mained. Finally, on the twelvth or thirteenth day, they raised the peaks of Tahiti, and landed there after four teen days at sea. Evidently, Mehetia was passed during the night, or they would have attempted a landing on that island, where there is plenty of food, but no people.

There, on the beach at Tautira, at the end of her last journey, lies the impossible craft which carried these castaways into safety—about 12 feet long, designed like nothing else on earth, knocked together in the flimsiest kind of manner, gaping at every joint, worm eaten, rotten, and fit for nothing but the firewood heap. The story grows incredible, as one looks at her; yet it is true in every detail, nevertheless.