nine o'clock
Every few minutes we would drop down into a valley as dark as death , with an awful wall of blackness astern , towering over us mountain high , shaking and wavering as if it knew not the exact spot whereunder we , struggling upward , lay helpless in the trough , awaiting to be sent to the bottom if we failed to rise on the first swelling outlier of the black terror astern . -LSB- Illustration : How we escaped broaching to 140 -RSB- How we escaped broaching to and foundering in that wild gale will always be a wonder to me , for the boat , although she did not ship much water , seemed so deadly sluggish at times that looking astern made my flesh creep . All that night we went tearing along , and glad enough we were when day broke , and we saw the sun rise . The wind still blew with great violence , but later on in the morning the sky cleared rapidly , and at nine o'clock , to our delight , we sighted Apamama a little to leeward , distant about eight miles , and in another hour we raced through the north passage and brought-to in smooth water under the lee of two small uninhabited islands which gave us good shelter . From where we were anchored we could see the main village , which was six miles away to the eastward , and I quite expected to see visitors coming as soon as the wind fell sufficiently to permit of boats or canoes beating over to us , and determined to give them the slip if possible , and get under way again before they could board us and urge me to come and anchor on the other side , abreast of the village . My reasons for wishing to avoid coming in contact with the people were shared by my companions , and were based on good grounds . The ruler of Apamama , King Apinoka , was , although quite a young man , the most powerful and most dreaded of all the chiefs of the islands of the mid-Pacific , and he boasted that in time he would crush out and utterly exterminate the inhabitants of the surrounding islands unless they submitted to him , and for years past had been steadily buying arms of the best quality .