I was in was so smashed, and likewise the two men who sat next
to me. The dynamite fell between them. The other canoes turned and ran
away. Then that mate yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' at us. Also he went at us
again with his rifle, so that many were killed through the back as they
fled away. And all the time the black boys in the boat went on rowing.
You see, I told you true, that mate was hell.

"Nor was that all. Before he left the schooner, he set her on fire,
and fixed up all the powder and dynamite so that it would go off at one
time. There were hundreds of us on board, trying to put out the fire,
heaving up water from overside, when the schooner blew up. So that all
we had fought for was lost to us, besides many more of us being killed.
Sometimes, even now, in my old age, I have bad dreams in which I hear
that mate yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' In a voice of thunder he yells, Yah!
Yah! Yah!' But all those in the fishing camps were killed.

"The mate went out of the passage in his little boat, and that was the
end of him we made sure, for how could so small a boat, with four men in
it, live on the ocean? A month went by, and then, one morning, between
two rain squalls, a schooner sailed in through our passage and dropped
anchor before the village. The king and the headmen made big talk, and
it was agreed that we would take the schooner in two or three days. In
the meantime, as it was our custom always to appear friendly, we went
off to her in canoes, bringing strings of cocoanuts, fowls, and pigs, to
trade. But when we were alongside, many canoes of us, the men on board
began to shoot us with rifles, and as we paddled away I saw the mate who
had gone to sea in the little boat spring upon the rail and dance and
yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!'

"That afternoon they landed from the schooner in three small boats
filled with white men. They went right through the village, shooting
every man they saw. Also they shot the fowls and pigs. We who were not
killed got away in canoes and paddled out into the lagoon. Looking back,
we could see all the houses on fire. Late in the afternoon we saw many
canoes coming from Nihi, which is the village near the Nihi Passage in
the northeast. They were all that were left, and like us their village
had been burned by a second schooner that had come through Nihi Passage.

"We stood on in the darkness to the westward for Pauloo, but in the
middle of the night we heard women wailing and then we ran into a big