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 Niabon 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 Ponape,
in the Carolines, for a month's recreation and "feasting" on that
beautiful island.

[Illustration: He had sailed 188]

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 Niabon,
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 w