"The Baron's career, his studies of the pearl, and his new settlement on Iriatai were all ended by the hurricane of 1881. The island had been one of the finest of the Paumotus, with dense groves of coconuts and a deep soil on the higher spots, but when I first landed there, in ninety-six, it was a waste of sand and tumbled coral-blocks, clean-swept from end to end by breaching seas. On an islet, far down the lagoon, a small clump of palms remained--the only living things, save Turia and her child, to survive the fury of the sea. "The settlement was at the weather end, and when the seas began to breach across into the lagoon, von Tesmar's schooner was anchored fifty yards offshore. Both cables snapped and she disappeared in an instant among the driving clouds downwind. She must have piled up at the leeward end, or perhaps she was carried clean over into the open sea beyond. At any rate, no man of her crew was ever seen again. The people of the settlement--a dozen natives with their wives, brought by von Tesmar to labor in the oyster-beds--had no time to chop off the tops of the palms in which they took refuge. A pair of old palms, eighty feet high, flexible and tough as whalebone, stood close beside the house. High up on the bole of one, the Baron tied himself, and Turia swarmed up the other, her three-year-old boy lashed to her back. "It is useless to try to describe a South Sea hurricane. One after another, the houses were carried away. Each frothing comber seemed to rush over the land more fiercely than the last; the wind came in gusts that bent the palms like reeds. With a sound audible above the uproar of the hurricane, a palm-bole snapped, and its top, with two human beings clinging among the fronds, sped off to vanish in the wrack. Turia's was the last to withstand the wind; she watched the others go,--men, women, and babies at their mothers' breasts,--and finally a faint, splitting report close by told her that von Tesmar's palm had given way. Next moment her own refuge went, and still clinging to the upper bole, she was sailing above the torn white surface of the lagoon. How she survived the impact, disentangled herself from the wreckage, and lived through miles of angry water is a thing that I have never understood. When she struggled ashore on the islet which was the only land above the sea, her child was still alive. No one but a Paumotan could have done it, and no woman of any other race could have lived and supported her child--as Turia did for many weeks--on coconuts and the fish she was able to catch with her bare hands. In the end, the lookout of a passing schooner saw her signal-smoke."