r, and all but made me an old man at
seven-and-twenty years of age. Violent attacks of ague, recurring with
persistent and diabolical regularity every week for many months, had so
weakened me, that although I was able to attend to my business and do
justice to my employers, I felt that I should never live to see the end
of my two years' engagement unless I either shook off the fever or was
enabled to leave the torrid regions of the Equatorial Pacific for a
cooler climate--such as Samoa or the Marquesas or Society Islands. The
knowledge, moreover, of the fact that the fever was slowly but surely
killing me, and that there was no prospect of my being relieved by my
employers and sent elsewhere--for I had neither money, friends, nor
influence--was an additional factor towards sending me into such a
morbid condition of mind that I had often contemplated the idea--weak
and ill as I was--of leaving the island alone in my whaleboat, and
setting sail for Fiji or Samoa, more than a thousand miles distant.

Most people may, perhaps, think that such an idea could only emanate
in the brain of a lunatic; but such things had been done, time and time
again, in my own knowledge in the Pacific, and as the fever racked my
bones and tortured my brain, and the fear of death upon this lonely
island assailed me in the long, long hours of night as I lay groaning
and sweltering, or shaking with ague upon my couch of mats, the thought
of the whale-boat so constantly recurred to me even in my more cheerful
moments, when I was free from pain, that eventually I half formed a
resolution to make the attempt.

For at the root of the despondency that ever overpowered me after a
violent attack of ague there was a potent and never dormant agent urging
me to action which kept me alive; and that was my personal vanity and
desire to distinguish myself before I died, or when I died.

For ten years I had sailed in the South Seas, and had had my full share
of adventure and exciting episode, young as I was, as befell those who,
in the "sixties" and "seventies," ranged the Western and North-Western
Pacific. But though I had been thrice through the murderous Solomon
Group as "recruiter" for a Fijian labour vessel--"blackbirders" or
"slavers" these craft are designated by good people who know nothing of
the subject, and judge the Pacific Islands labour trade by two or three
dreadful massacres perpetrated by Englishmen in the past--I had "never
done anything."