Captain X—— was a horrible example of what ill temper will do. His half-breed son declared that he was born angry. At any rate, he seemed aboard the p092 Snark to have the idea that he was working Kanaka sailors, and would have sworn at us continually had we allowed it. It may be that he had cause to be irritable, for he had once been beaten out of a great fortune. X—— had been plying around the South Seas for twenty years, and once had discovered a small island covered with guano—about twenty million dollars' worth of it. X—— beat back to Honolulu with all haste, that he might arrange to take the island in the name of the United States. He was given the proper authority, and with a small crew he hastened back to his wonderful find. Daylight was breaking dimly as he approached; there was sufficient light for him to see a small Japanese man-of-war slipping in the gloom toward the cherished island. When he and his men landed, they were met by soldiers, who told them that the island was now formally in the possession of the Japanese government. I really think that this would be enough to sour any man's temper. Another time, he drifted around for weeks in a small ship, nearly dead for water, and with half his crew lying corpses on the deck. He escaped when wrecked off the coast of the island of Maui. One of his occupations was "shanghai"-ing South Sea Islanders for work on the Hawaiian plantations; and a favourite trick was to cheat the natives when buying copra—he would put his knee under the sack while weighing it, thus making a two-hundred-pound sack lose half of its weight. He was a regular old skinflint; but whatever his merits p093 or demerits, one thing was certain: he had been everywhere in the South Seas, and had the records to prove it.
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Much work was being done on the Snark. Men came from Honolulu and put everything shipshape. They got the seventy-horse-power engine to running, also the dynamo of the small engine, painted the Snark again, cleaned the rigging, scraped the masts and spars, and stopped the leaks. Best of all, they put the engine of the gasolene launch into condition. We used to make little trips in the launch by night. All this time, Jack and Mrs. London were making visits to the neighbouring islands, so that we saw little of them.
Oftentimes, in the evening, I would spend an hour or more watching the beauties of the Hawaiian scenery when bathed in the soft beams of the moon. In the harbour lay the Snark, looking as if lighted by electricity where the moonbeams were mirrored on her freshly painted sides and her polished metal, and further away was the shadowy shore-line, fringed by groves of cocoanut palms, and still further back, fading away into the night, were the majestic mountains.
"The Snark will never be able to heave-to," we were told. "She catches too much wind aft, no matter how the sails are trimmed." But with the seventy-horse-power engine in running order, the danger was vastly minimised, for with its aid we could cut through a storm like a knife.