Covered by the Sea: Surviving a Hurricane – Part 16
The sea coming across was then pretty deep. It would break and roar all over the top of the island. You’d try to look out, but you couldn’t turn your head up to windward. The rain and the grit and everything was flying in the wind, cutting your face so badly and hurting your eyes so much that you couldn’t turn up to see what was up to windward. And I say, every now and again you’d look down [beneath] where we were and there’s big boulders’d come rolling over the island and then the next sea’d come and the boulders’d disappear. Between our tamanu trees, where we were tied there, and what had been the beach, there were four rows of coconut trees.
And just as it got light, when the sea came across, I remember you could see that a row of trees had disappeared. Then the sea’d come again and the next row of trees disappeared. And then finally the last row of trees closest to us disappeared, and then two or three seas came over the top of our tree. We were still tied in, as I tell ya, tied in with plenty of rope ‘round us and tied on to these trees. At times the seas came right over the top, just underneath my armpits. And the kids were about underwater. We’d hold ‘em onto us, and the seas were coming right over the top of us and everything else.”
Pratt had to hand Elaine up to Ellenden, then climb higher up the tree after a wave washed over his head. Then he took Elaine back and retied them both to each other and to the tree. Clark watched one of the tamanu trees go over. It fell against a palm tree and both the trees went down.
The wind had increased, probably to eighty or ninety miles an hour, but there was really no way of knowing for sure. According to Clark, the wind continuously came from the northeast. The waves smashed across the top of the island, carrying everything with them. Later they would be seen as having been twenty-three feet above normal lagoon level at their highest, and ten feet above the highest point on the island.
Powell says, “When it got light enough to really see what was happening, at about nine or ten in the morning, I could see that Jimmy, the Manihikian, was up with Johnnie Frisbie on a tree on the eastern side of us. Then on the other side of us, I could see the treehouse Frisbie had built for his kids, which nobody ever thought would stand up in a blow–strangely enough, the roof and the walls blew away, but the floor stayed there–and John Pratt and the surveyor and the radio operator were there. I had lost my shirt, most of my clothes had gone, were stripped off, and the only thing that made it better for me was that Nahora gave me a piece of canvas he’d picked up. I put this piece of canvas ‘round my back and over Nga and that sheltered us. Good job it did. It made us a little better sheltered from the wind and the rain. [It had been raining continuously during the time the group had been in the trees.] The others had got shorts and pants, bits of clothes between them, but most of our clothes were stripped off us and we were in bad shape.”
The seas continually crashing over the island and sweeping everything before them had actually cut the island into three pieces. The southern tip now was separated from the rest of the island by a watery channel. A slice of the western side of the island had also become separated. The repetition of one sea after another hitting the same places with a force that can hardly be imagined chiseled away those parts of the island, much as if they had been worn down by some giant grinding wheel.
Apparently, at some point, Clark, Ellenden, Pratt, and probably Elaine, Jackie and Lino had decided to move from their tree to the remains of the tree house. Teophilo and Johnny were tied into the third tamanu and were relatively well-sheltered by a mat that Teophilo had picked up and wrapped around them both.
Ellenden, who was then in the remains of Frisbie’s tree house, says, “Trees were going over everywhere. Visibility was only about twenty feet. Terrific damage was being done to the island. I never had seen such huge seas before – and the noise was unbearable. The rum bottle was passed around continuously and the nips helped to keep us warm inside. Frisbie joined us and made the kiddies take a sip of rum, which they didn’t like. Frisbie joined Jackie and I under our wet blanket about noon. He says that the wind was going around to the north, and another hour or so should see the worst over. Sure enough, he was right. One PM–the wind is northerly now, shifting to the west and gradually decreasing.”
Powell noticed the same thing, “Gradually the sea went down and the wind went down a little bit, and by four o’clock in the afternoon we realized we’d never be able to spend another night in the trees. We were too cold, you know, we couldn’t have existed. And by four o’clock we sort of agreed that we’d better come down. The sea wasn’t washing right over the island. There was a little bit of dry land sticking out. So we came down and made for this little bit of dry land. And when we came down we were so cold and so exhausted we couldn’t do anything. We staggered over to a place where Nahora had found a bit of a hole in the ground with stones, just a heap of stones. He’d got an old piece of canvas he’d found, a bit of canvas tent, a few sticks, and he propped up this piece of canvas with some sticks and the lot of us just came into this hole and lay down in a heap on the stones. There wasn’t any sand to lie on. It was just nothing but stones.”
“Well, we’d reached the stage where we just couldn’t take it anymore, and I think at that stage we were all in the same boat. We were absolutely beaten with the wind and the rain. We could barely speak. We couldn’t walk. We were frozen stiff with exposure–really in bad way. It was almost night and we just collapsed in a heap, none of us thinking we would live till morning. We sort of dozed off, rolled around. You couldn’t sleep, but on the other hand you couldn’t stay awake.”