From out the open door he sees the Josephine, of New Bedford, Captain Jos Long, awaiting the four whaleboats now on the little beach below his house, which are engaged in conveying on board his household goods and chattels, his wives and his children, with their children, and a dusky retinue of blood-relations and retainers; for the drought had made food scarce. Blood had been shed over the ownership of certain cocoa-nut trees; and old Bob Ridley has decided to bid farewell to his island, and to make for Ponapé in the Carolines. So the old man sits alone and awaits a call from the last boat. Perhaps he feels unusual emotion stirring him, as the faint murmur of voices ascends from the beach. He would be alone for awhile to conjure up strange memories of the past, or because the gin bottle is but half emptied.
"The Josephine, of New Bedford!" he mutters, as a grim smile passes over his bronzed, sin-wrinkled countenance; "why, t'other one was from New Bedford too. This one's larger—a six-boat ship—and carries a big afterguard. Still the job could be done agin. But—what's the good now! If Joe, the Portuguese, was here with me I'd say it could be done." Another gulp at the "square face." "Damn it! I'm an old fool. There's too many of these here cussed blubber-hunting Yankees about now. Say we took the ship, we'd never get away with her. Please God, I'll go to Ponapé and live like a d—d gentleman. There's some of the old crowd there now, and I a'n't so old yet."
And here, maybe, the old renegade falls a thinking afresh of "the other one" from New Bedford, that made this very island on the evening of the 3rd of December 1852.
Out nearly two years, and working up from the Line Islands towards Honolulu, the skipper had tried to make Pleasant Island, to get a boat-load of pigs for his crew, but light winds and strong currents had drifted him away, till, at dawn, he saw the rounded summits of Ocean Island pencilled faintly against the horizon, and stood away for it. "We can get a few boat-loads of pigs and 'punkins' there, anyhow," he said to the mate.
The mate had been there before, and didn't like going again. That was in 1850. Sixteen white men lived there then, ten of whom were runaway convicts from Sydney or Norfolk Island. He told his captain that they were part of a gang of twenty-seven who had at various times been landed from whalers at Pleasant Island in 1845. They had separated—some going away in the Sallie whaler, and others finding their way to Ocean Island. Now, the Sallie was never heard of again, the mate remarked. The captain of the Inga looked grave, but he had set his heart upon the pigs and "punkins." So at dusk the brig hove to, close to the south-west point, and as no boats came off the skipper went ashore.
There were nearly a thousand people on Ocean Island then, and he felt a trifle queer as the boat was rushed by the wild, long-haired crowd, and carried bodily on shore.
Through the gathering darkness he saw the forms of white men trying to push their way through the yellow crowd of excited natives. Presently a voice called out, "Don't be scared, mister! Let the niggers have their way and carry up the boat."
He let them have their way, and after being glared at by the red light of cocoa-nut torches borne by the women, he was conducted to one of three houses occupied by the six gentlemen who had arranged to leave the continent of Australia without beat of drum.