A Primal Woman

Utara lies northeast of Clermont Tonnerre, a high island out of trade tracks and the most lonely and beautiful in the Pacific.

Lygon sighted it first at dawn one clear, almost windless morning and from the deck of the Sarah Dodsley, a whaler, a year out from New Bedford.

They had taken the westward trail by Cape Verde round the Horn to New Zealand and up by the Kermadecs and then between the Gambiers and Low Archipelago. They were half full of oil, and an offense to the freshness of the morning, and Lygon, as he stood on the greasy deck with the perfumed land wind blowing on his face and the first rays of the sun touching the twin peaks of Utara, thought he saw paradise.

He was a gentleman, and whatever crime or foolishness had pursued him to New Bedford and chased him aboard the Sarah Dodsley had been paid for during the last year. The smoke of the try works, the hazing of the Yankee captain—no honest old whaling captain, but a slim, dried, sandy-haired east coaster—the clank of the cutting tackles, the very voices of his companions, had embittered his soul.

The Sarah Dodsley had run out of wood, that was why Captain Sellers had brought her up to Utara, but he had no intention of entering the lagoon. He hove to outside the reef and ordered three boats away, under the direction of the first mate.