oved only whiskey, and still he lived.

I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up
with that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had not
died suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people
were high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet
of the graves, were relics of past sanguinary history--blubber-spades,
rusty old bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons,
bomb guns, bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's
trying-out furnace, and old brass pieces of the sixteenth century that
verified the traditions of the early Spanish navigators. Ship after
ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not thirty years before, the whaler
BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon for repair, had been cut off with
all hands. In similar fashion had the crew of the GASKET, a sandalwood
trader, perished. There was a big French bark, the TOULON, becalmed off
the atoll, which the islanders boarded after a sharp tussle and wrecked
in the Lipau Passage, the captain and a handful of sailors escaping in
the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of the
loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is
a matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING
DIRECTORY. But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to
learn. In the meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let
one degenerate Scotch despot live.

One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over
the lagoon, with all its wonder of jeweled colors. At our backs, across
the hundred yards of palm-studded sand, the outer surf roared on the
reef. It was dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south latitude and
the sun was directly overhead, having crossed the Line a few days before
on its journey south. There was no wind--not even a catspaw. The season
of the southeast trade was drawing to an early close, and the northwest
monsoon had not yet begun to blow.

"They can't dance worth a damn," said McAllister.

I had happened to mention that the Polynesian dances were superior to
the Papuan, and this McAllister had denied, for no other reason than
his cantankerousness. But it was too hot to argue, and I said nothing.
Besides, I had never seen the Oolong people dance.

"I'll prove it to you," he announced, beckoning to the black New Hanover
boy, a labor recruit, who served as cook and genera