sharks would promptly appear. This was a bluff on my part. I
didn't believe it. It lasted as a deterrent for two days. The
third day the wind fell calm, and it was pretty hot. The Snark was
moving a knot an hour. Bert dropped down under the bowsprit and let
go. And now behold the perversity of things. We had sailed across
two thousand miles and more of ocean and had met with no sharks.
Within five minutes after Bert finished his swim, the fin of a shark
was cutting the surface in circles around the Snark.

There was something wrong about that shark. It bothered me. It had
no right to be there in that deserted ocean. The more I thought
about it, the more incomprehensible it became. But two hours later
we sighted land and the mystery was cleared up. He had come to us
from the land, and not from the uninhabited deep. He had presaged
the landfall. He was the messenger of the land.

Twenty-seven days out from San Francisco we arrived at the island of
Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. In the early morning we drifted around
Diamond Head into full view of Honolulu; and then the ocean burst
suddenly into life. Flying fish cleaved the air in glittering
squadrons. In five minutes we saw more of them than during the
whole voyage. Other fish, large ones, of various sorts, leaped into
the air. There was life everywhere, on sea and shore. We could see
the masts and funnels of the shipping in the harbour, the hotels and
bathers along the beach at Waikiki, the smoke rising from the
dwelling-houses high up on the volcanic slopes of the Punch Bowl and
Tantalus. The custom-house tug was racing toward us and a big
school of porpoises got under our bow and began cutting the most
ridiculous capers. The port doctor's launch came charging out at
us, and a big sea turtle broke the surface with his back and took a