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Published, 1902.

THE STRANGE ADVENTURE OF JAMES SHERVINTON

By Louis Becke

T. FISHER UNWIN, 1902

LONDON



CHAPTER I

The night was close and stifling, and the dulled bellowing of the surf
on the weather side of the island told me that the calm was about to
break at last, and in another hour or so the thirsty, sandy soil would
be drenched with the long-expected rain, and the drooping palms and
pandanus trees wave their wearied branches to the cooling trade-wind
once more.

I rose from my rough bed of cane-work and mats, and, lighting my pipe,
went outside, walked down to the beach, and seating myself on a canoe,
looked out upon the wide expanse of ocean, heaving under a dark and
lowering sky, and wondered moodily why I was ever such an idiot as to
take charge of a trading station on such a God-forsaken place as Tarawa
Island in the Gilbert Group.

My house--or rather the collection of thatched huts which formed the
trading station--stood quite apart from the native village, but not so
far that I could not hear the murmur of voices talking in their deep,
hoarse, guttural tongue, and see, moving to and fro on the beach, the
figures of women and children sent out to see that the fleet of canoes
lying on the beach was safe beyond the reach of the waves which the
coming storm would send in sweeping, endless lines across the outer reef
to the foot of the coco-palms fringing the low-lying, monotonous shore.

The day had been a more than usually depressing one with me; and I had
had many depressing days for the last four months. First of all, ever
since I had landed on the island, nearly half a year before, I had
suffered from bad health. Malarial fever, contracted in the gloomy,
rain-soaked forests of New Ireland and New Britain, had poisoned
my blood, soured my temper, and all but made me an old man at
seven-and-twenty years of age. Violent attacks of ague, recurring with
persistent and diabolical regularity every week for many months, had so
weakened me, that although I was able to attend to my business and do
justice to my employers, I felt that I should never live to see the end
of my two years\' engagement unless I either shook off the fever or was
enabled to leave the torrid regions of the Equatorial Pacific for a
cooler climate--such as Samoa or the Marquesas or Society Islands. The
knowledge, moreover, of the fact that the fever was slowly but surely
killing me, and that there was no prospect of my being relieved by my
employers and sent elsewhere--for I had neither money, friends, nor
influence--was an additional factor towards sending me into such a
morbid condition of mind that I had often contemplated the idea--weak
and ill as I was--of leaving the island alone in my whaleboat, and
setting sail for Fiji or Samoa, more than a thousand miles distant.

Most people may, perhaps, think that such an idea could only emanate
in the brain of a lunatic; but such things had been done, time and time
again, in my own knowledge in the Pacific, and as the fever racked my
bones and tortured my brain, and the fear of death upon this lonely
island assailed me in the long, long hours of night as I lay groaning
and sweltering, or shaking with ague upon my couch of mats, the thought
of the whale-boat so constantly recurred to me even in my more cheerful
moments, when I was free from pain, that eventually I half formed a
resolution to make the attempt....