That these people were quite accustomed to the bartering of their produce with passing ships, and had been taught to understand that they would not be allowed on board, was evident; for, although within the next half-hour we were surrounded by quite a hundred canoes of various sizes, ranging from the sixteen-foot craft with two occupants up to the vessel measuring fifty feet over all, manned by from twenty to thirty natives, not one attempted to come alongside until specially invited to do so. They simply lay off a few fathoms and held up to our view the wares that they had for disposal, and then waited to be beckoned to approach.
These natives were for the most part fine, lithe, active-looking men, of a deep, rich, bronze colour. Most of them were almost naked, and adorned with necklaces of shells or sharks’ teeth, their hair so arranged that it stuck out all round their heads like the thrums of a twirled mop. A few of them wore necklaces or armlets of vari-coloured beads, of which they appeared to be inordinately proud, and these adornments furnished many of our people with a hint as to the kind of article most desired in exchange, a whole basket of assorted fruit, as heavy as one man could conveniently lift, being freely parted with for a hank containing five strings of ordinary glass beads which, at home, would cost about a penny. Next to beads, copper wire appeared to be the most prized commodity, nails coming next, such a basket of fruit as I have just described, or half a dozen fowls, costing twenty two-inch nails; while a dozen baskets of fruit were eagerly offered for a single six-inch spike. Fish-hooks, too, commanded good prices, that is to say, two baskets of fruit, or one dozen fowls, sold for a single hook. Fish, of which several basketfuls were brought off, were to be had almost for the asking, a basket containing about fifty pounds weight of delicious fresh fish being gladly given in exchange for a single ordinary pin! At such prices as these the crew and emigrants would willingly have taken as much as the natives had for sale, if I would have allowed it; but I was afraid to let them have too much fresh fruit all at once, lest they should make themselves ill; but we took every fowl that we could get hold of, killing enough to serve all hands for dinner that day, and putting the rest into the coops, which had by this time become almost empty.
It took us nearly two hours to complete our purchases, for I would not allow more than four canoes alongside at the same moment; and when we had acquired as much produce as I thought it prudent to lay in at one time, the mainyard was swung, the fore and main tacks boarded, and we resumed our voyage, parting from the natives with mutual smiles and upon the best of terms. I was very much gratified at this first experience of intercourse with the Pacific islanders, for it seemed to me that it would be impossible to find a more quiet, amiable, peace-loving race of people on the face of the earth. I made the mistake of judging the whole by a very few, and set down the stories I had heard of treachery, cruelty, and blood-curdling tragedy as malicious fables. I was speedily disillusioned, however; for a week later we reached the Caroline Islands; and while we found some of these islanders as friendly disposed as those above-mentioned, there were others who did their utmost to entice us to land and place ourselves within their power, and on one occasion, when they failed in this, produced hidden weapons and resolutely attacked the ship, giving us all that we could do to beat them off, and more or less seriously injuring three seamen and two of the male emigrants. This little experience taught us all a much-needed lesson in prudence; for it was more by luck than good management that we avoided capture and the general massacre that would most assuredly have followed.
For the next five weeks we cruised among these islands, vainly seeking the earthly paradise that Wilde had taught all hands to expect, and with less than which none of them would be satisfied. For such islands as seemed to approach Wilde’s standard in the matter of size and fertility were already inhabited, and that, too, for the most part, by natives whose pressing invitations to land, and lavishly proffered hospitality, we had learned to regard with something more than suspicion; while the uninhabited islands were invariably found to be wholly lacking in some essential feature.
Then, leaving the Carolines behind us, we passed on to the Marshall group, where the atoll—which we had already encountered in a somewhat modified form here and there among the Carolines—was to be found in its typically perfect development. Here the islands, such as they were, were entirely of coral formation, of diminutive area, generally not more than six or eight feet above the surface of the ocean, their vegetation consisting of a few coconut trees, with, maybe, a patch or two of coarse grass here and there, and possibly a few stunted bushes, the whole constituting a more or less irregularly shaped belt enclosing a saltwater lagoon, usually with an entrance from the open sea, and with water enough inside to float a ship; but sometimes with no entrance at all. A fortnight among these atolls sufficed to convince the most optimistic among us that what we were looking for was not to be found in that neighbourhood. Accordingly we bade farewell to the group, to my intense relief, for, between the shoals and the currents, I was worried very nearly into a fever, and scarcely dared to leave the deck day or night.
Once clear of the Marshall Islands, we stood away to the northward, gradually hauling round, as the wind favoured us, to about west-nor’-west, occasionally sighting a small island, but more frequently broken water, until at length, when we had been out from the Marshall group close upon three weeks, land was made at daybreak, bearing two points on the lee bow. It was at a considerable distance, for it showed soft and delicate of tint as a cloud in the brilliant light of the newly risen sun, but that it was good, solid earth was clear enough from the fact that it did not in the slightest degree alter its truncated conical shape as the minutes sped. True, there was no land shown on the chart at that precise spot; but that did not alter the fact of it being there; and since it showed above the horizon from the deck at a distance which we estimated at fully fifty miles, it was concluded that it must be of fairly respectable size, and quite worth looking at more closely; the helm was therefore shifted, and we kept dead away for it.
The ship was slipping along at about seven knots, before a nice little easterly breeze, under all plain sail—that being as much canvas as I cared to show, bearing in mind the fact that not infrequently, of late, we had been obliged to haul our wind rather suddenly in consequence of white water revealing itself unexpectedly at no great distance ahead. But although we were travelling at this quite respectable pace—for the Mercury—we did not appear to be decreasing our distance from the land ahead nearly so rapidly as we had anticipated, which circumstance led me to the conclusion that I had considerably underestimated that distance in the first instance. And this conclusion proved to be correct, for at six bells in the afternoon watch we were still fully seven miles from the island. But we had arrived within four miles of what, from the fore topmast crosstrees, I had been able to identify as a barrier reef that appeared to extend from the northern to the southern extremity of the island—and, indeed, might completely surround it, for aught that I could tell—enclosing a magnificently spacious harbour, some three miles wide between itself and the island, which I estimated to measure about ten miles long, from north to south, with a peak, apparently the crater of an extinct, or at all events a quiescent, volcano, approximating to three thousand feet high, rising almost in the centre of it. It was wooded from the inner margin of the somewhat narrow, sandy beach that lined it to within about three hundred feet of the summit of the peak; and—most promising of all, from the point of view of Wilde and his followers—there were no canoes on the beach, or any other signs of inhabitants.