on the _Roberta_; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss
paradise in the valley of Oomoa.

I sailed from Tai-o-hae for an unknown port, carried by the schooner
_Roberta_, which had brought the white mare from Atuona and whose
skipper had bore so well the white banner of Joan in the procession
that did her honor. The _Roberta_ was the only vessel in those
waters and, sailing as she did at the whim of her captain and the
necessities of trade, none knew when she might return to Nuka-hiva,
so I could but accept the opportunity she offered of reaching the
southern group of islands again, and trust to fortune or favor to
return me to my own island of Hiva-oa.

The _Roberta_ lay low in the water, not so heavily sparred as the
_Morning Star_, or with her under-cut stern, but old and battered,
built for the business of a thief-catcher, and with a history as
scarred as her hull and as slippery as her decks. Was she not once
the _Herman_, and before that something else, and yet earlier
something else, built for the Russians to capture the artful
poachers of the Smoky Sea? And later a poacher herself, and still
later stealing men, a black-birder, seizing the unoffending natives
of these South Seas and selling them into slavery of mine or
plantation, of guano-heap and sickening alien clime. Her decks have
run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his
beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior
white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and
masters had gone to Davy Jones's locker; the old brass cannon on her
deck had raked the villages of the Marquesans and witnessed a
thousand deeds of murder and rapine.

I pulled myself aboard by a topping-lift, climbed upon the low
cabin-house, and jumped down to the tiny poop where Jerome Capriata
held the helm.

This Corsican, with his more than sixty years, most of them in these
waters, was a Marquesan in his intuitive skill in handling his
schooner in all weather, for knowing these islands by a glimpse of
rock or tree, for landing and taking cargo in all seas. Old and worn,
like the _Roberta_, he was known to all who ranged the southern ocean.
What romances he had lived and seen were hidden in his grizzled bosom,
for he said little, and nothing of himself.

The supercargo, Henry Lee, a Norwegian of twenty-five years, six of
which he had passed among the islands, set out the rum and wine and
a clay bottle of water.