Jenkins (who knew what awaited him) threw himself on the floor at the feet of Captain Funkal. Horrified by the abject distress of one who, after all, was their countryman, Bude and Logan induced the captain to seclude Jenkins in his cabin. They then, by their combined entreaties, prevailed on the officer to land the Berbalangs on their own island, indeed, but to drop Jenkins later on civilised shores. Dawn saw the George Washington and the Pendragon in the port of Cagayan Sulu, where the fetters of the two natives, ill looking people enough, were knocked off, and they themselves deposited on the quay, where, not being popular, they were received by a hostile demonstration. The two vessels then resumed their eastward course. The taxidermic appliances without which Jones Harvey never sailed, and the services of his staff of taxidermists, were placed at the disposal of his brother savants. By this means a stuffed Mylodon, a stuffed Beathach, stuffed five-horned antelopes and a stuffed Bunyip, with a common gorilla and the Toltec mummy, now forever silent, were passed through the New York Custom House, and consigned to the McCabe Museum of Natural Varieties.
The immense case that contained the discovery of Jones Harvey was also carefully conveyed to an apartment prepared for it in the same repository. The competitors sought their hotels, Te-iki-pa marching beside Logan and Jones Harvey. But, by special arrangement, either Jones Harvey or his Maori ally always slept beside their mysterious case, which they watched with passionate attention. Two or three days were spent in setting up the stuffed exhibits. Then the trustees, through The Yellow Flag (the paper founded by the late Mr. McCabe), announced to the startled citizens the nature of the competition. On successive days the vast theatre of the McCabe Museum would be open, and each competitor, in turn, would display to the public his contribution, and lecture on his adventures and on the variety of nature which he had secured.
While the death of the animals was deplored, nothing was said, for obvious reasons, about the causes of the catastrophe.
The general excitement was intense. Interviewers scoured the city, and flocked, to little purpose, around the officials of the McCabe Museum. Special trains were run from all quarters. The hotels were thronged. ‘America,’ it was announced, ‘had taken hold of science, and was just going to make science hum.’
On the first day of the exhibition, Dr. Hiram Dodge displayed the stuffed Mylodon. The agitation was unprecedented. America had bred, in ancient days, and an American citizen had discovered, the monstrous yet amiable animal whence prehistoric Patagonia drew
her milk supplies and cheese stuffs. Mr. Dodge’s adventures, he modestly said, could only be adequately narrated by Mr. Rider Haggard. Unluckily the Mylodon had not survived the conditions of the voyage, the change of climates. The applause was thunderous. Mr. Dodge gracefully expressed his obligations to his fair and friendly rival, Mr. Jones Harvey, who had loaned his taxidermic appliances. It did not appear to the public that the Mylodon could be excelled in interest. The Toltec mummy, as he could no longer talk, was flat on a falling market, nor was Mr. Rustler’s narrative of its conversational powers accepted by the scepticism of the populace, though it was corroborated by Captain Funkal, Professor Dodge, and Professor Wilkinson, who swore affidavits before a notary, within the hearing of the multitude. The Beathach, exhibited by Professor Potter, was reckoned of high anatomical interest by scientific characters, but it was not of American habitat, and left the people relatively cold. On the other hand, all the Macleans and Macdonnells of Canada and Nova Scotia wept tears of joy at the corroboration of their tribal legends, and the popularity of Professor Potter rivalled even that of Mr. Ian Maclaren. He was at once engaged by Major Pond for a series of lectures. The adventures of Howard Fry, in the taking of his gorilla, were reckoned interesting, as were those of the captor of the Bunyip, but both animals were now undeniably dead. The people could not feed them with waffles and hominy cakes in the gardens of the institute. The savants wrangled on the anatomical differences and
resemblances of the Bunyip and the Beathach; still the critters were, to the general mind, only stuffed specimens, though unique. The African five-horned brutes (though in quieter times they would have scored a triumph) did not now appeal to the heart of the people.
At last came the day when, in the huge crowded amphitheatre, with Te-iki-pa by his side, Jones Harvey addressed the congregation. First he exhibited a skeleton of a dinornis, a bird of about twenty-five feet in height.
‘Now,’ he went on, ‘thanks to the assistance of a Maori gentleman, my friend the Tohunga Te-iki-pa’—(cheers, Te-iki bows his acknowledgments)—‘I propose to exhibit to you this.’
With a touch on the mechanism he unrolled the valves of a gigantic incubator. Within, recumbent on cotton wool, the almost frenzied spectators perceived two monstrous eggs, like those of the Roc of Arabian fable. Te-iki-pa now chanted a brief psalm in his own language. One of the eggs rolled gently in its place; then the other. A faint crackling noise was heard, first from one, then from the other egg. From each emerged the featherless head of a fowl—the species hitherto unknown to the American continent. The necks pushed forth, then the shoulders, then both shells rolled away in fragments, and the spectators gazed on two fledgling Moas. Te-iki-pa, on inspection, pronounced them to be cock and hen, and in healthy condition. The breed, he said, could doubtless be acclimatised.