“I think it was about fifty feet. The radio report we heard said that the storm had just grazed us and moved off to the east. So everybody felt good about that, and then we really went to sleep. Then ... well, let’s see. It started to get light before three o’clock, I know. Up by the bow there was this sudden jerking like the ship was being pulled down. I was awake since I’d got up to go to the toilet, and it was just as I was coming back. I heard the captain yell from up above: ‘What’s the matter?’ And then the watch yelled back: ‘Everything’s all right.’ And so I went back to sleep, and when I woke up the next time, it was after four o’clock. I heard shouting up on deck, and so I went up to have a look. Everybody was yelling about the island being gone. The cloudiness had cleared up by now, and the surface of the ocean was fairly bright. And when you looked around, there wasn’t a thing to be seen, not a trace of the island, when, the night before, there it was looming up solid as could be right in front of your nose. The ship was floating there all by itself on the open sea as far as you could look in any direction. We were just drifting, with our engine off. The anchor line’s cut,’ somebody said. But in fact the anchor was hanging there, not touching the bottom. Then suddenly the watch yelled: ‘Somebody’s in the water.’ We looked and we saw some men swimming near the boat and yelling out something. We pulled them out right away, and it was this bunch here.”
“I see,” said Tadokoro, taking a quick breath. “These men, then—they were on the island that night.”
“So they say. They had their sails torn in a gale, and so they stopped off there at noon the day before.”
“I suppose you’ve been asked this any number of times,” said Yukinaga, “but did you measure the water’s depth at the rescue point?”
“Yes, sir. Right below the ship, it was two thousand feet. But, as we figured out later, we had been carried at least one and a half miles north from the spot where we had anchored. The captain said that it was the damnedest thing he’d ever heard of. And so, with the engine fixed, we got under way and headed south like a bat out of hell, taking depth soundings as we went. No more than fifteen minutes went by, before the mate yelled: ‘Captain! The water’s getting shallow all of a sudden. It’s 160 feet here.’ ‘You don’t often find anything so shallow in this area,’ the captain answered. ‘Come here,’ the mate said. Take a look at the depth chart. You see?’ Then the mate moved the compass bearing ten degrees to the west, and signaled for quarter-speed. Then he signaled for slow, and he kept a sharp watch as he moved the ship forward. The captain stood straight up in the prow—he had experience as a pilot, and with the sun finally out altogether, he kept his eyes fixed on the water in front of the ship, staring down into it. ‘Was there an island here or not?’ he muttered to himself. But then, all of a sudden, even I could see that there was a definite change in color coming over the water. ‘Watch it, it’s getting shallow,’ the captain yelled. ‘Captain, right now we’re over the island,’ the mate shouted. If we are, be careful,’ the captain yelled back, ‘it’s getting shallow fast.’ ‘We’re okay,’ said the mate, ‘we’ve already almost passed over the island. The deep part we went over just before must have been the inlet formed by the crater. One spot there was nearly three hundred feet deep. Right now we’re passing over the peak on the southern edge of the island. But even so, the depth is thirty feet. . . .’ ”
Yamamoto closed his mouth, his story done. There was perfect silence in the wardroom.
Finally the elderly man spoke, his manner quite composed. Onodera had by now recognized him as an eminent authority on oceanography. “And, gentlemen, while this nameless little island was going under, Torishima itself sank three feet.”
“Well, let’s hear what these men have to say,” said Tadokoro, turning toward the three Polynesians. “Can you interpret well enough?”
Yamamoto scratched his head and then set to work. Neither his Polynesian, however, nor the Japanese of the old man nor the English of the young one was of much help when it came to detailed questions. But rather the three natives, children of nature that they were, eloquently conveyed the circumstances of the sinking by skillful use of gestures and sounds.
After spending the day in repairing their damaged craft, the Polynesians had gone to sleep in a cave in the cliff face that looked down upon the inlet. In the middle of the night, they had been awakened by the sound of waves, and they had found the sea already at the mouth of their cave.
Had there been an earthquake? Had they heard any rumblings?
They answered that they had been aware of nothing of the sort. And when someone asked how fast the island had sunk, the youngest of the three, by way of answer, bent over to touch the floor with his hands and then raised them steadily until they were level with his chest.
“Like a submarine,” someone said.
They had rushed up to the top of the cliff and thence to the island’s peak, the encroaching sea hard on their heels. The peak had soon been reduced to a bit of rock on the black surface of the sea, beset by hungry white waves. Soon this, too, had been overwhelmed, and the three of them had been swept away, whirlpools of all sizes swirling all around them. Stricken with terror, they had felt themselves dead already, but a large piece of driftwood had happened to come their way, and they had taken turns clinging to it until daybreak.
“Well,” said Tadokoro after they had finished, “there have been accounts enough of islands sinking—but an island so large . . . and for it to sink so fast . . . Well, gentlemen, that’s not something you run into every day, now is it?”
“And there’s more yet,” said the gray-haired oceanographer coolly. “The fishing boat dropped a buoy to mark the island’s highest point.”
“You found it?”
“We found it all right. And we definitely established that we were over the island. But by then the peak was three hundred feet below the surface. What do you think of that, Tadokoro? The entire ocean floor in this area, in a mere two and a half days, has sunk more than five hundred feet.”