Below this he added:—
Capt. Hayes,
Dear ——— The above-mentioned I have supplied as per bill.
I will feel obliged if you will pay the 120.00 to any of our
firm's vessels on my account, I hope that, as I have not
charged you native prices, you will pay me soon,
Yours, Ac.
He then handed the bill to old Tuna, and told her that she must give it to the captain when he reached Nukutavake. When he did meet Bully a long time afterwards in Samoa, Hayes paid up like a man. But long before this old Tuna had given the trader's bill and letter to Hayes. Two years later the young trader found awaiting him at the American Consulate at Tahiti, the following letter:—
Mr. ———
Dear Sir,—I received your note and bill for supplying some
of my household with some rotten cheese-cloth out of your
store, which you have the infernal impertinence to call
muslin; also, five bottles of stinking bilge-water, labelled
musk. I don't know who you are, but you can tell your
employers from me, that I will see them roasted before I
will give my good money for their filthy and disgusting
Sydney trade goods, and when I drop across you, you will get
a head put on you that will teach you not to again presume
to interfere in my domestic affairs.
Yours very sincerely,
Wm. Henry Hayes.
III
Three or four years passed by, during which time the writer cruised about from island to island in the North and South Pacific—sometimes living ashore as a trader, sometimes voyaging to and fro among the many groups as supercargo or recruiter in the labour trader; and then one day the schooner, in which I then served as supercargo, reached Samoa, and there I accepted the dignified but unsatisfactory financial position of inter-island supercargo to a firm of merchants doing business in Apia, the distracted little capital of the Navigator's Island. At this time, the late Earl of Pembroke, the joint author with Dr. Kingsley of "South Sea Bubbles," was in Apia Harbour in his schooner yacht Albatross, and every day we expected to see the French Pacific Squadron steam into the port and capture the numerous German ships then laying at anchor there. But the gallant Admiral Clouet, who commanded, disdained such work as this—he was willing and eager to fight any German warships that he could come across, but had no inclination for the inglorious task of seizing unarmed merchantmen.
For two years or so I remained in the employ of the trading firm. Hayes then lived in Apia—or rather at Matautu, on the east side of Apia Harbour. When I say lived there, I mean that Samoa was his headquarters, for he was absent six months out of the twelve, cruising away in the North West Pacific among the Caroline and Marshall Groups. His house at Matautu Point was sweetly embowered in a grove of coco-nut and breadfruit trees, and here the so-called pirate exercised the most unbounded hospitality to the residents and to any captains (not Germans) visiting Samoa. Sometimes we would meet, and whenever we did he would urge me to come away with him on a cruise to the north-west; but duty tied me down to my own miserable little craft, a wretched little ketch of sixty tons register, that leaked like a basket and swarmed with myriads of cockroaches and quite a respectable number of centipedes and scorpions.
But it so came about that that cruise with Bully Hayes was to eventuate after all; for one day he returned to Samoa from one of his periodical cruises and told the owners of the aforesaid basket that he could sell her for them to the King of Arhnu—one of the Marshall Islands—for quite a nice sum. And the owners, being properly anxious to get rid of such a dangerous and unprofitable craft before she fell to pieces, at once consented.