schooner, a
thousand men, covering the lagoon with our canoes. Also, we were blowing
conch shells, singing war songs, and striking the sides of the canoes
with our paddles. What chance had one white man and three black boys
against us? No chance at all, and the mate knew it.

"White men are hell. I have watched them much, and I am an old man now,
and I understand at last why the white men have taken to themselves all
the islands in the sea. It is because they are hell. Here are you in
the canoe with me. You are hardly more than a boy. You are not wise,
for each day I tell you many things you do not know. When I was a little
pickaninny, I knew more about fish and the ways of fish than you know
now. I am an old man, but I swim down to the bottom of the lagoon, and
you cannot follow me. What are you good for, anyway? I do not know,
except to fight. I have never seen you fight, yet I know that you are
like your brothers and that you will fight like hell. Also, you are a
fool, like your brothers. You do not know when you are beaten. You will
fight until you die, and then it will be too late to know that you are
beaten.

"Now behold what this mate did. As we came down upon him, covering the
sea and blowing our conches, he put off from the schooner in the small
boat, along with the three black boys, and rowed for the passage. There
again he was a fool, for no wise man would put out to sea in so small
a boat. The sides of it were not four inches above the water. Twenty
canoes went after him, filled with two hundred young men. We paddled
five fathoms while his black boys were rowing one fathom. He had no
chance, but he was a fool. He stood up in the boat with a rifle, and he
shot many times. He was not a good shot, but as we drew close many of us
were wounded and killed. But still he had no chance.

"I remember that all the time he was smoking a cigar. When we were forty
feet away and coming fast, he dropped the rifle, lighted a stick of
dynamite with the cigar, and threw it at us. He lighted another and
another, and threw them at us very rapidly, many of them. I know now
that he must have split the ends of the fuses and stuck in match heads,
because they lighted so quickly. Also, the fuses were very short.
Sometimes the dynamite sticks went off in the air, but most of them went
off in the canoes. And each time they went off in a canoe, that canoe
was finished. Of the twenty canoes, the half were smashed to pieces. The
canoe