Soon after my arrival I was visited by Captain Archer, late in command of the ship Essex, of Salem. Captain Archer had lost his ship a few months before on a reef while trading among the Fiji Islands, and he was anxious to obtain a passage home for himself, officers, and crew.
As I was very shorthanded, having lost both my mates, Mr. King and Mr. Robinson, whose places I had temporarily supplied from my crew, I was very glad to ship his two officers, and I arranged for his crew to work their passage home in the Mystic. I had a spare stateroom in the cabin, which I placed at the disposal of Captain Archer.
He was a veteran shipmaster, and had been in command before I was born, but he had decided, since his late misfortune in losing his ship, that this should be his last voyage. He had had many years’ experience in the Indian Seas, and particularly in the Fijis, where he had traded for bèche de mer, a marine delicacy which the Chinese esteemed so highly that it was not infrequently sold for its weight in silver.
The captain was full of stories of Thakombau, the savage chief of Bau, one of the Fiji group. This chief was a most terrible old cannibal, who, not satisfied with devouring the enemies captured in his raids on the neighboring islands, frequently ordered the massacre of his own people, when he was desirous of having a grand feast, and they were baked and eaten. “Long pig” he facetiously designated his human sacrifices.
The captain assured me that these dreadful orgies were not, as I had supposed, religious rites, but were simply for the satisfaction of a depraved appetite, and that in the gratification of this taste nothing was sacred.
And yet the captain had succeeded in inspiring a friendship in the breast of this old savage that had caused him to issue an edict making the captain strictly taboo, and no native dared to harm him, while the choicest canoe loads of bèche de mer were brought off to him for trade. Thakombau actually proposed to make Captain Archer a chief and to give him the island of Viti for his very own, but the captain declined the tempting offer.
It must be confessed, however, that this gentle treatment had had its effect upon the captain, who did not seem to think the cannibal chief was nearly so much of a brute as he was generally considered by Europeans.
I can scarcely realize that since that time such a marvelous change has taken place in the condition of the Fijians. The missionaries managed to gain a foothold in the islands soon after the time of which I am writing, and now there are Christian churches in every island of the group, several thousand professing Christians among the natives, absolute safety for white residents everywhere, and cannibalism is utterly unknown!
While the loading of my ship was progressing, in company with Captain Archer I made a visit to Canton, which is about one hundred miles above Hongkong. This was only a couple of years after the siege of Canton by the Triad rebels, and the breaches that had been made by them in the wall that surrounded Canton, six miles in extent, had not yet been repaired.
We passed a week at Russell & Sturgis’s hong, and had a very pleasant time exploring the curious city under the charge of one of his native clerks, who took us into many of the labyrinths of the “Old City” not usually penetrated by the Fanquis, as they called their foreign visitors.