I suggested that he should be detained on board till we met the Morning Star, and then be given to Mr. Morland to keep.
"By ——! just the thing! but just let me tell you, you drunken hound, that when I picked you up a starving beach-comber in Ponapé, I thought you had at least enough sense to know that I am not a man to be trifled with. I was the first man to place a trader on Pingelap. I overcame the natives' hostility, and made this one of the safest islands in the group for whaleships to call at. Now I have lost a thousand dollars by your cowardice. So take this to remember it by."
Then, holding him by one hand, he shook him like a rag, finally slinging him up the companion way, and telling the men to tie him up.
"Lower away the longboat," he roared, "I'll teach the Pingelap gentry how to dance." I went with him, as I wanted to get some bananas and young cocoa-nuts. In five minutes we drew up on the beach.
The head-men of the island now came forward to meet the Captain, and to express their pleasure at seeing him. But he was not to be mollified, and sternly bade them follow him to the largest house in the town where he would talk to them.
The boy Sunday, who was a native of Pingelap, came with us to act as interpreter. Behind the crowd of natives were the two Hawaiian teachers, dressed in white linen shirts and drill trousers. They had their wives with them, dressed in mixed European and native costume.
None of us had arms, nor did we think them necessary. Hitherto these people had been slavish admirers of Hayston, and he assured me that he would reassert his former influence over them in ten minutes. The crowd swarmed into the council-house and sat down on their mats. The Captain remained standing.
His grand, imposing form, as he stood in the centre of the house and held up his hands for silence, seemed to awe them as would a demi-god, and murmurs of applause broke from them involuntarily.
"Tell them, Sunday," he said, fixing his piercing blue eyes on the cowering forms of the two missionary teachers, "that I have come to talk peace, not to fight. Ask them who it was years ago, when the hurricane came and destroyed their houses and plantations—when their little ones were crying with hunger—that brought them to his ship and fed them? Have they forgotten who it was that carried them to Ponapé, and there let them live on his land and fed them on his food till they grew tired of the strange land, and then brought them back to their homes again?"
Sunday translated, and the silence was unbroken till the Captain resumed, "Did not the men of Pingelap say then that no man should be more to them than me—that no one else should place a white man here? And now a strange ship comes, and the men of Pingelap have turned their faces from me?"