"From their parents? O, yes! Well, how did you know the sellers were their parents?" I asked, still pointing my revolver towards him. "And why are the boys so unwilling to go? And what are the natives making such a noise over this little transaction in indentured labor for? If it's all as you say, what's this fuss and row about? Keep your rifles steady, lads."
"They want to back out of their bargain, I suppose, now they've drunk our rum and smoked our tobacco," the Frenchman said.
"No true, no true," one of the natives shouted out from beyond in his broken English. "Man a oui-oui!"—that's what they call the French, you know, all through the South Pacific—"man a oui-oui, bad—no believe man, a oui-oui—him make us drunk, so try to cheat us."
WHERE THE FRENCHMEN LANDED. Page 19
"Now, you look here, Monsieur," I said severely, turning to the skipper, "I know what you've been doing. I've seen this little game tried on before. You landed here last night with your peaceable equipment for recruiting labor—we know what that means—a Winchester sixteen-shooter and half a dozen pairs of English handcuffs. You brought on shore your 'trade'—a common clay pipe or two, some cheap red cloth, and a lot of bad French Government tobacco; and you treated the natives all round to free drinks of your square gin. When they'd reached that state of convenient conviviality that they didn't know who they were or what they were doing, you took advantage of their guileless condition. You picked out the likeliest young men and lads, selected any particularly drunken native lying about loose to represent their fathers, made 'em put their marks to a formal paper of indentures, and handed over twenty dollars, a bottle of rum, and a quid of tobacco, as a consolation for the wounded feelings of their distressed relations. You've been carrying them off all night at your devil's game; and now in the morning the natives are beginning to wake up sober, miss their friends, and put a summary stop to your little proceedings. Well, sir, I give you one minute to make up your mind; if you don't hand us over these four lads to set on shore again, we'll open fire upon you; and as we're stronger than you, with the natives at our back, we'll make a prize of you, and tow you into Fiji on a charge of slave-trading."
Before the words were well out of my mouth the French skipper had given the word "Fire!" and the bullets came whizzing past, and riddling the gunwale of the gig beside us. One of them grazed my arm below the shoulder and drew blood. Now there's nothing to put a man's temper up like getting shot in the arm. I lost mine, I confess, and I shouted aloud, "Fire, boys, and row on at them!" Our fellows fired, and the very same moment the natives closed in and went at them with their canoes, all alive with Sniders, lances and hatchets. It was a lively time, I can tell you, for the next five minutes, with those lithe, long black fellows swarming over them like ants; and poor Tom Blake got a bullet from a French rifle in his thigh, that lodges there still in very comfortable quarters. But one of the Frenchmen fell back in the jolly-boat shot through the breast, and the skipper, who turned out to be a fellow with one sound leg and a substitute, was severely wounded. So we'd soon closed in upon them, the natives and ourselves, and overpowered their crew, which was only ten, all told, besides the fellows on the big vessel in the harbor.
Well, we took out the four boys, when the mill was over, and transferred them to our gig; and then we escorted the Frenchmen, ironed in their own handcuffs, to the deck of their sloop, with the natives on either side in their canoes rowing along abreast of us like a guard of honor. The crew of the sloop didn't attempt to interfere with us as we brought their comrades handcuffed aboard; if they had, why, then, with the help of the savages, we should have been more than a match for them. So we prowled around the ship on a voyage of discovery, and found ample evidence in her get-up of her character as an honest and single-hearted recruiter of labor. A rack in the cabin held eight Snider rifles, loaded for use, above which hung eight revolvers, employed doubtless in self-defense against the lawless character of the Kanakas, as the skipper (with his hands in irons and his eyes in tears) most solemnly assured us. The sloop was prepared throughout, with loopholes and battening-hatches, to stand a siege, and could have made short work of the natives alone had they tried to attack her, for she carried a small howitzer, not so big as our own; but she never suspected interference from a European vessel. We went down into her hold, and there we found about forty natives, men, women and children—free agents all, the skipper had declared—packed as tight as herrings in a barrel, and with stench intolerable to the European nostril. Such a sight you never saw in your life. There they lay athwart ship, side by side, the unhappy black cattle, some handcuffed and manacled, others dead-drunk and too careless to complain, while the women and children were crying and screaming, and the men were shouting as loud as they could shout in their own lingo.
Fortunately, we had a sailor aboard the Albatross who had been a beach-comber (or degraded white man who lives like a native) for three years on the island of Ambrymon, and had a Kanaka girl for a sweetheart; so he could talk their palaver almost as easy as you can English, and he acted as interpreter for us with the poor people in the hold. We knocked their handcuffs off, and explained the situation to them. About a dozen of the wretchedest and most squalid-looking of the lot were prepared, even when we offered them freedom, to stand by their last night's bargain, and go on to New Caledonia; but the remainder were only too delighted to learn that they might go ashore again; and they gave us three ringing British cheers as soon as they understood we had really liberated them.