"Poor Dick dead!" she said; "just die before me come up."
The people we had brought for the big firm, mostly Line Island natives, were quiet and easily controlled. Hayston now and then executed orders of this sort, though he would have scorned the idea of turning the Leonora into a labour vessel. He was naturally too humane to permit any ill-treatment of the recruits, and having his crew under full control, always made matters as pleasant for these dark-skinned "passengers" as possible.
But there were voyages of very different kind,—voyages when the recruiting agents were thoroughly unscrupulous, caring only for the numbers—by fair means or foul—to be made up. Sometimes dark deeds were done. Blood was shed like water; partly from the fierce, intractable nature of the islanders—sometimes in pure self-defence. But "strange things happen at sea." One labour cruise of which Hayston told me—he heard it from an English trader who saw the affair—was much of that complexion. We had plenty of time for telling stories in the long calm days which sometimes ran into weeks. And this was one of them.
One day a white painted schooner, with gaff-headed mainsail, and flying the German flag, anchored off Kabakada, a populous village on the north coast of New Britain. She was on a labour cruise for the German plantations in Samoa.
Not being able to secure her full complement of "boys" in the New Hebrides and Solomon groups, she had come northward to fill up with recruits from the naked savages of the northern coast of New Britain.
In those days the German flag had not been formally hoisted over New Britain and New Ireland, and apart from the German trading station at Matupi in Blanche Bay, which faces the scarred and blackened sides of a smouldering volcano springing abruptly from the deep waters of the bay, the trading stations were few and far between.
At Kabakada, where the vessel had anchored, there were two traders. One was a noisy, vociferous German, who had once kept a liquor saloon in Honolulu, but, moved by tales of easily accumulated wealth in New Britain, he had sold his business, and settled at his present location among a horde of the most treacherous natives in the South Seas. His rude good nature had been his safety; for although, through ignorance of the native character, he was continually placing his life in danger, he was quick to make amends, and being of a generous disposition and a man of means, enjoyed a prestige among the natives possessed by no other white man.
His colleague—or rather his opponent, for they traded for opposition firms—was a small, dark Frenchman, an ex-bugler of the Chasseurs d'Afrique, who had spent some years of enforced retirement at New Caledonia. His advent to New Britain had been made in the most private manner, and his reminiscences of the voyage from the convict colony with his four companions were not of a cheerful nature.
Ten miles away, at the head of a narrow bay that split the forest-clad mountains like a Norwegian fiord, lived another trader, an English seaman. He had been on the island about two years, and was well-nigh sickened of it. Frequently recurring attacks of the deadly malarial fever had weakened and depressed him, and he longed to return to the open, breezy islands of eastern Polynesia, where he had no need to start from his sleep at night, and, rifle in hand, peer out into the darkness at the slightest noise.