By noon we had our temporary camp made comfortable, and were having dinner when five natives made their appearance—three men and two women—coming towards us in a canoe. They landed without the slightest hesitation, and sat down with us; but we found that they spoke the Marshall Island dialect, which none of us but Niâbon could speak, and she but slightly. However, we managed to worry along, and to our surprise learned that Hayes had been at the island in his famous brig, the Leonora, only a month before, and that for a year and six months previously, seventy Line Island natives had been working on the islands under the supervision of a white man, making oil for the captain, but most of them, and the white man as well, had left the atoll in the brig, for Hayes had been so well pleased with the result of their work that he invited forty of the seventy to come on board and go with him to Ponapé, in the Carolines, for a month's recreation and “feasting” on that beautiful island.
So with forty of his sturdy Line Islanders, and seven hundred barrels of coco-nut oil, he had sailed; and now, said our five friends, he would soon be back—perhaps in two days—perhaps in ten, or twenty, or more, for how could one tell what the winds would be? He was a good man, was the captain, but hot and sudden in his anger, over-fond of women who were good to look at, and cruel to those who sought to cross his desire; but generous—always generous—and kind to those who were weak and ill, giving them good medicine and rich food; tins of the red rich fish called samani which came from his own country, and biscuit and bread such as white men eat. Ah, he was a good man was “Puli Ese” (Bully Hayes).
“Ask them about the wretched ship on the reef,” I said to Niâbon, repeating the first question I had tried to put to them, but which they did not answer, so eager were they to tell us about Captain Hayes and themselves; “ask them all about her—when did she run ashore, and where are the crew?”
Ah, the ship, the great ship! they replied. She had run up on the reef one night four moons ago, when the sky was bright and clear, and the wind blew strongly; and when in the morning they discerned her from the village, the white man had two boats manned to go to her assistance, but as the boats approached, two cannons fired heavy balls at them from the deck of the ship; and although the white man (Hayes's trader) tied his handkerchief to an oar and held it upright, the people on the ship continued to fire on the boats with the big cannons, and with muskets, and then, when one man was hit by a bullet and died quickly, the white man cursed those on the ship for fools, and turned the boats shoreward again, saying that those on board could perish before he would try to help them again. By sunset three boats, filled with men, had left the ship and sailed to the south. In the morning the white man (whom I knew from their description of him to be a well-known and decent South Sea trader named Harry Gardiner) boarded the ship and began to remove all that was of value on shore. Her hold was filled with all sorts of goods in barrels and cases, and when “Puli Ese” came, three months later, he was well pleased, not only for the seven hundred barrels of oil, but with the many things that had been gotten from the wrecked ship.
We promised our new friends to come up to their village—where they and about twenty of their fellow islanders lived with the remainder of Bully Hayes's Line Island contingent—on the following day, and sent them away with a few trifling presents. As they said they could walk back, and I wanted to have a look at the wreck, they cheerfully agreed to let their canoe remain with us.
About four in the afternoon, as the heat of the sun began to relax, I determined to set out in the canoe. Tematau and Tepi had gone across to the weather side of the island with my gun to shoot plover and frigate birds, of which latter, so the natives had told us, there were great numbers to be found on the high trees to windward. Lucia and Niâbon were resting in the shade, but the latter, when she saw me pushing the canoe into the water, asked me to let her come also.
“Yes, of course; and you too, Lucia. Won't you come as well?” I said.
“No, Jim. I feel very lazy, and I'm always so afraid of canoes,” she said with a smile, “and do be careful and not be capsized; look at all those horrid sharks swimming about—I can see nearly twenty of them from where I am sitting.”