The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton by Louis Becke

We were thirteen long weary days between Apamama Lagoon and Kusaie, whose misty blue outline we hailed with delight when we first sighted it early one afternoon, forty miles away.

Calms and light winds had delayed us greatly, for as we crawled further northward, we were reaching the limit of the south-east trades, which, at that time of the year, were very fickle and shifty. Not a single sail of any description had we seen, though we kept a keen lookout night and day; for, after being ten days out from Apamama, I began to feel anxious about our position and would have liked to have spoken a ship, fearing that the current, in such calm weather, would set us so far to the westward that I should have difficulty in making the island if we once got to leeward of it.