A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam', Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months
Annie Allnutt Brassey
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, May 13, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 Excerpt: ...in spite of all our efforts to exclude them. Tuesday, December lh.--The heat in the night was suffocating, and soon after twelve o'clock we both woke up, feeling half-stifled. There was a dim light shining into the room, and Tom said, 'Thank goodness, it's getting daylight;' but on striking my repeater we found to our regret that this was a mistake. In the moonlight I could see columns of nasty brown cockroaches ascending the bedposts, crawling along the top of the curtains, dropping with a thud on to the bed, and then descending over the side to the ground. At last I could stand it no longer, and. A LIVELY NIGHT. opening the curtains cautiously, I seized my slippers, knocked half-a-dozen brown beasts out of each, wrapped myself in a poncho--previously well shaken--gathered my garments around me, surmounted a barricade I had constructed overnight to keep the pigs and chickens out of our doorless room, and fled to the garden. All was still, the only sign of life being a light in a neighbouring hut, and I sat out in the open air in comparative comfort, until driven indoors again by torrents of rain, at about halfpast two o'clock. I plunged into bed again, taking several mosquitoes with me, which hummed and buzzed and devoured us to their hearts' content till dawn. Then I got up and walked Jown to the beach to bathe, and returned to breakfast at six o'clock, refreshed but still disfigured. It is now the depth of winter and the middle of the rainy season in Tahiti; but, luckily for us, it is nearly always fine in the daytime. At night, however, there is often a perfect deluge, which floods the houses and gardens, turns the streams into torrents, but washes and refreshes the vegetation, and leaves the landscape brighter and greener than before. At half-past seve...