Sitting with his great arms clasped lovingly around his daughter, Big Harry told his tale. Briefly, it was this:—After reaching the Pelew Islands and remaining there a few weeks, he had taken passage in a vessel bound to Manila, in the hope that from that port he could get a passage back to Nukufetau in another whaler. But the vessel was cast away, and the survivors were rescued by a ship bound for Liverpool. Landed at that port, and waiting for an opportunity to get a passage to New Bedford, from where he could return to his island home in a whaler, he had one day picked up a paper and read the account of the slavers' onslaught upon the Ellice Islands, and the story of the escape of a young half-caste girl. Never dreaming that this girl was his own daughter—for there are many half-castes in the eight islands of the group—he had sought her out, in the hope that she would be pleased to hear the sound of her native tongue again, and perhaps return with him to her native land.
Nearly a year passed before Big Harry, with his daughter Fetu, sailed into the placid waters of Nukufetau Lagoon, and of the glad meeting of those four happy souls there is no need to tell.
A QUESTION OF PRECEDENCE
Denison, the supercargo of the Indiana was always reproaching Packenham, the skipper, for getting the ship into trouble by his inconsiderate and effusive good-nature—“blind stupidity,” Denison called it. And whenever Packenham did bring trouble upon himself or the ship's company by some fresh act of glaring idiotcy, he would excuse himself by saying that it wouldn't have happened if Nerida had been with him that trip. Nerida was Packenham's half-caste Portuguese wife. She was a very small woman, but kept her six-foot husband in a state of placid subjection and also out of much mischief whenever she made a cruise in the Indiana. Therefore Denison loved her as a sister, and forgave her many things because of this. Certainly she was a bit of a trial sometimes to every living soul on board the brig, but then all skippers' wives are that, even when pure white. And Nerida's doings would make a book worth reading—especially by married women with gadabout husbands like Packenham. But on this occasion Nerida was not aboard, and Denison looked for trouble.
For four days and nights the little Indiana had leapt and spun along, before a steady southerly gale, rolling like a drunken thing a-down the for'ard slopes of mountain seas, and struggling gamely up again with flattened canvas from out the windless trough; a bright, hot sun had shone upon her swashing decks from its slow rosy dawn to its quick setting of fiery crimson and blazing gold; and at night a big white moon lit up an opal sky, and silvered the hissing froth and smoky spume that curled in foaming ridges from beneath her clean-cut bows.
The brig was bound from Auckland to Samoa and the islands of the north-west, and carried a cargo of trade goods for the white traders who hoisted the Indiana's house-flag in front of their thatched dwellings. Packenham thought a good deal of this flag—it bore the letters R. P. in red in a yellow square on a blue ground—until one day Hammerfeld, the German supercargo of the Iserbrook, said it stood for Remorseless Plunderer. Some one told this to Packenham, and although he gave the big Dutchman a bad beating for it, the thing travelled all over the South Seas and made him very wroth. So then he got Nerida to sew another half turn in red to the loop of the P, and thereby made it into a B.
“That'll do fine,” he said to Denison. '“Bob Packenham' instead of 'Robert Packenham,' eh?”