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“It’s either stick here and work for two dollars a day or get out for the Paumotus,” replied Davis, coming up from a last interview with Mandelbaum. “Which will we do, stick here and work for Mandelbaum for two dollars a day sure money, house, grub and everything found, or put out for the Paumotus in this blessed canoe which his royal highness says we can have in exchange for the ship’s money he’s robbed us of? Which is it to be, the society of Mandelbaum or the Paumotus, which is hell, sharks, tide races, contr’y winds and starvation, maybe?”

“The Paumotus,” said Harman without a moment’s hesitation.

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Have you ever tried to manage a South Sea canoe, a thing not much wider than a skiff, with mast and sail out of all proportion to the beam, yet made possible because of the outrigger?

The outrigger, a long skate-shaped piece of wood, is supposed to stabilize the affair; it is always fixed to port and is connected to the canoe proper in two chief ways, either by a pole fore and aft or by a central bridge of six curved lengths of wood to which the mast stays are fixed; there are subsidiary forms with three outrigger poles, with two outrigger poles and a bridge, but it was in a canoe of the pure bridge type that Bud Davis and William Harman found themselves afloat in the Pacific, making west with an unreliable compass, a dozen and a half drinking nuts, a breaker of water and food for a fortnight.