pital of Fiji--supercargo of a
little topsail schooner of seventy-five tons. She was owned and sailed
by a man named White, an extremely adventurous and daring fellow, though
very quiet--almost solemn--in his manner.

We had been trading among the windward islands of the Fiji Group for six
months and had not done at all well. White was greatly dissatisfied and
wanted to break new ground. Every few weeks a vessel would sail into the
little port of Levuka with a valuable cargo of coco-nut oil in casks,
dunnaged with ivory-nuts, the latter worth in those days L40 a ton. And
both oil and ivory-nuts had been secured from the wild savages of
the North-West in exchange for rubbishy hoop-iron knives, old "Tower"
muskets with ball and cheap powder, common beads and other worthless
articles on which there was a profit of thousands per cent. (In fact, I
well remember one instance in which the master of the Sydney brig _E.
K. Bateson_, after four months' absence, returned with a cargo which was
sold for L5,000. His expenses (including the value of the trade goods he
had bartered) his crew's wages, provisions, and the wear and tear of the
ship's gear, came to under L400.)

White, who was a very wide-awake energetic man, despite his solemnity,
one day came on board and told me that he had made up his mind to join
in the rush to the islands to the North-West between New Guinea and the
Solomons.

"I have," he said, "just been talking to the skipper of that French
missionary brig, the _Anonyme_. He has just come back from the
North-West, and told me that he had landed a French priest{*} at Mayu
(Woodlark Island). He--the priest--remained on shore some days to
establish a mission, and told Rabalau, the skipper of the brig, that the
natives were very friendly and said that they would be glad to have
a resident missionary, but that they wanted a trader still more.
Furthermore, they have been making oil for over a year in expectation of
a ship coming, but none had come. And Rabalau says that they have over a
hundred tuns of oil, and can't make any more as they have nothing to put
it in. Some of it is in old canoes, some in thousands of big bamboos,
and some in hollowed-out trees. And they have whips of ivory nuts and
are just dying to get muskets, tobacco and beads. And not a soul in
Levuka except Rabalau and I know it. You see, I lent him twenty bolts of
canvas and a lot of running gear last year, and now he wants to do me
a good turn.