The Cithara's anchor shattered the mirrored surface of Anaho Bay, and Tim Tyler lifted his eyes to the mountains that had guided him in from the sea. A gentle breeze pressed the sails and his tired boat backed away to set her hook in the sandy bottom.
     Legends of piracy, salacious whale boat crews, and beautiful native vahines teased Tim's mind as shadows filled the valleys of Nuku Hiva, the Marquesa Island where Herman Melville lived with the cannibals long ago. He watched the shoreline become a work of art in deepening shades of gray but tensed when a shadow separated itself from shore and slowly came his way.
     "Who?" he wondered as the shadow came closer.
     While he watched, the tropic jungle exhaled a pleasant breath, laced with the sweet scent of hibiscus and frangipani, its whispers lazily slatted the Cithara's sails. After a thirty day passage from San Francisco to Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, he wanted company, yes, but the welcoming committee came a darkness, looming larger with each subdued stroke of muffled oar. In the tropic twilight, terror walked its chilling fingers up his spine.
     When no friendly hail came from the growing menace, Tim crouched low to minimize his silhouette and moved back from the bow. In the cockpit, he wished he had a weapon, but felt foolish for his fears when the skiff came alongside manned by a single sailor.
     The solitary figure lifted his seabag to the toerail and demanded, "Lend a hand, lad!"
     When Tim did not move, the demand became a threat. "Damn it man, take my bag aboard, or wait for me in hell."
     At this, Tim grabbed the sack and pulled while the man pushed until they managed the bag safely onto the Cithara's wooden deck. The man cursed again and growled, "Who are you and where's my bloody crew?"
     Tim's fears returned, for never had subdued sounds from one man's mouth seemed so vile, and when a nickel plated pistol sparkled in the starlight, the hair at the nape of his neck stood in hackles.
     Looking down at the man the tropic shadows had produced, Tim saw that he was middle aged, and aging, yet seemed quick and spry. His wizened face had the leathered look of men who spend their lives at sea. From the shadows of his coal black beard and bushy eyebrows, a glass eye stared up, returning the light from every star that glittered in the sky above. Out the hollow of that incandescent sphere, the dull red fire of hell burned bright, his aspect was more of monster than of man.
     "I'll take command now," the shadow bellowed and, waving the gun toward the bow, demanded, "Get the anchor up, step to it, lad!"
     Tim's hand, resting on the cabin top, touched the gaff pole, and he thought how like a hockey stick it felt.
     "Stop!" He spoke his first word in this new land.
     To his amazement, Glasseye, his hands gripping the lifeline ready to haul himself aboard, stopped. Momentarily he seemed suspended then dropped back into the skiff and swung the gleaming gun.
     With the roar and flame of burning powder, Tim's rage exploded and using muscles tuned by weeks of rolling on a pitching ship at sea, he swung the pole and struck the man close behind his ear. The glass-eyed head popped like a melon, and the man, who had tried to murder him but missed, slumped a pile of lumpy arms and legs down into his little boat.
     Tim saw the smoking gun drop into the water and watched it lead a trail of bubbles to the starlit sand below.
     "If shifting sand hides the gun how can I ever prove self defense?"
     He saw his Grandfather sitting on a piling back in Powell River, across the Straights of Georgia from Vancouver Island, and heard him say, "In some lands, you are guilty until proven innocent." He had said to run from trouble in a foreign land, and this South Pacific island was foreign land to Tim. With fumbling fingers he untied the painter and cast the fellow's dinghy off then ran to the Cithara's bow to raise the anchor and get away.
     Lugging the big hook up into the bow chock, he looked aft expecting Grandpa to ease the mizzen sail, which would let the ship fall off the wind so that she might retrace the course she made coming in. But he was alone and hurried back to trim the sails himself.
     The breeze that had greeted him with a song of the islands now became a dismal moan filled with the pain of tragedies these lands had suffered long ago. It slithered down the ancient mountainside and whispered across the water invading the peace he thought that he had found. What had been a pleasant song now shook his soul to its deepest core and he recalled the sorrow explorers had laid on the native populations by slaughter, whiskey, and disease.
     His sails filled with the jungle's breath, a breath laced with the bouquet of funeral flowers, and the Cithara, forty feet on deck and weighing twelve tons, gathered way. Looking back, Tim saw the little dinghy, now a spot of darkness at the far end of the Cithara's phosphorescent wake -- Glasseye's funeral pyre.
     But then, a new sound wedged its way into his world, and all fears of retribution for the death that he had wrought were lost in the threat of rumbling breakers on rocks that guard the entrance to the bay. The surf thundered where a rogue wave broke. Roiling and seething it tripped across the entrance rocks spreading white foam that glowed like snow beneath a sky now full of stars.
     A dark path in the swirling spindrift marked the passage he must take. Gripping the helm, he urged his boat to leap through death's door in search of open water. With vision clouded by swirling sea spray they cleared the maelstrom and, once again, the Cithara stepped her forefoot into the long swells of the boundless South Pacific Ocean.
     While trimming the sails, Tim heard again the horrid, hollow sound of Glasseye's cracking skull and saw him slump into his little boat, not much larger than a coffin.
     "I murdered him," he gasped and with the nausea that comes when one has taken someone's life, he sprawled across the cockpit coaming to vomit in the sea. Shuddering, hating the sensation, but unable to dispel the vision of the fire and brimstone glowing from the man's glass eye, he lurched his guts into a darkness that drew a curtain on this dreadful day.
     Sea creatures flashed their luminescent lights in protest as the Cithara roiled the waters in her rush to get away. In the glow he saw again the hollow eye and watched in wonder as the pirate's seabag rolled to the rail where it balanced, taunting him, then dropped into the water with a splash that rinsed his troubled face.
     He felt a sense of sweet relief; all trace of that cruel moment when a pirate tried to take his ship was sinking into the depths taking secrets he didn't wish to know.
     The Cithara lifted on a crest and he saw the sack settling in the sea. When his boat dropped into the following trough, the bag was lost from view.
     Casting his eyes ahead, Tim wondered where to go and what to do. His fingers touched the toggle on the cockpit light to study the deep sea chart and locate other island landfalls he might make.
     When he felt his craft rise on yet another swell, he stole a last look into the Cithara's foaming wake.
     A small white hand was reaching from the sinking sack.