The Curse of Lono - By Hunter S. Thompson Page 0,40
especially as the old leak under the buttock had opened up again like an unhealable wound.
In the storm-swept dawn light, Cook had to make the critical decision on where to put in for repairs. Should he continue to Maui and trust that he would find shelter on the west or southerly coast, which he had not yet traced? Or perhaps to another island? Kauai and Niihau had already proved unpromising. In all their sailing among these islands, Kealakekua Bay was the only safe anchorage they had discovered.
To give himself time, Cook sent Bligh across the storm-tossed waters to acquaint Clerke of their situation. Now both ships' companies were conscious of their dilemma. They had already been too long at Kealakekua Bay. They had cleared the whole area of its immediately available food. All those hogs could not have been given to them without depriving the people of supplies. Repairs would take at least a week, probably two weeks.
Cook set himself upon the safer of the two courses open to him, and at 10 a.m. on the morning of 8 February, the two sloops bore away south for their old anchorage, "all hands much chagrined," wrote King, "and damning the foremast."
Richard Hough
The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook
Ackerman woke up while Captain Steve was down and I told him the story. "That crazy bastard," he muttered, reaching down for a diving knife that he kept in a sheath around his leg. "Start the engine. Let him swim back." He began to cut the line, then hesitated and pulled back. "No," he said, "the minute we start the engine, he'll hear the noise and come up like a rocket. We'll have a case of the bends on our hands."
Captain Steve finally emerged from the depths and signaled me to haul in the anchor. Twenty minutes later we were out of the surf and running north at easy trolling speed. The Captain had gone groggy while we were hauling him back into the boat and dropped his scuba tank on Ackerman's foot, crushing his big toe and putting blood all over the deck. Ackerman gobbled another handful of Dramamine and fell into a deep stupor. We put his foot in an ice bag and stretched him out like a corpse on a cushion in the shade of the bridge.
I took the helm while Captain Steve set the outriggers. "Are you out of your goddamn mind?" I yelled down at him from my perch on the tuna tower. "Get away from those lines! Go to sleep."
"No!" he shouted. "This is a fishing boat! We must catch fish."
The strain of the long night at South Point was beginning to tell on him. His eyes had swollen up like rotten eggs and he had chewed his own lips so severely during the night that now he could barely talk. When he tried to climb back to the bridge he lost his grip on the ladder and fell on his back in the cockpit, where he thrashed wildly around on the deck in a puddle of bloody filth.
It was an ugly thing to see. From my seat on the bridge I could look straight down on the main deck of the Haere Marue and see both the captain and the first mate badly disabled. One appeared to be dead, with his mouth hung open and his eyes rolled back in his head, and the other was twitching around like a fish with a broken neck.
The maze of human wreckage down below looked like something King Kam might have brought back to Kona in one of his war canoes that got caught in an ambush on Maui. We were victims of the same flaky hubris that had killed off the cream of Hawaiian warriors in the time of the Great Wars. We had gone off in a frenzy of conquest -- to the wrong place at the wrong time and probably for all the wrong reasons -- and now we were limping back home with our decks full of blood and our nerves turned to jelly. All we could hope for, now, was no more trouble and a welcoming party of good friends and beautiful women at the dock. After that, we could rest and lick our wounds.
I couldn't leave the wheel, or the boat would start running in circles and tangle its own propeller in the long fishing lines we were trailing. In order to keep the lures on the surface I had to maintain a constant