THE SOUTH SEA CHIEF.

_By Miss Jane Porter_.

While in the north of Europe, I met with a rather extraordinary person,
whose account of himself might afford a subject for a pretty romance; a
sort of new Paul and Virginia; but with what different catastrophe, it
is not fair to presage. He described himself as a Frenchman, a native of
Bourdeaux; where, at an early age, he was put on board a merchant ship,
to learn the profession of a seaman. About that time war broke out
between Great Britain, and the lately proclaimed Republic of France;
and the vessel he was in, being attacked, and taken by an English
man-of-war, he was carried a prisoner into England. When there, his
naturally enterprising character would not submit itself to a state of
captivity; and, soon making his wishes understood, he entered on board a
British sloop, bound to New Holland. While gazing with rapt astonishment
on the seeming new heavens which canopied that, to him, also, new
portion of the globe; while the stars of the Cross were exciting his
youthful wonder; and he could no where find the constellations of the
Great, or Little Bear in the midnight firmament, the sky was suddenly
overcast with a cloud, like the pall of nature, and a fearful tempest
burst from it. The scene was dreadful on that wide waste of waters; and
the vessel being driven at last into the rocky labyrinths of the Society
Isles, was finally wrecked on one not many leagues from the celebrated
Otaheite. Laonce, the young Frenchman, and one seaman of the sloop, an
honest north Briton, were the only persons who escaped; for when morning
broke, they found themselves, restored from insensibility, lying on the
shore, and not a trace of the ship, or of those who had navigated her,
was to be discerned. The inhabitants of the island, apparently wild
savages by their almost naked state, instead of seizing them as a prey,
took them to their huts, fed, and cherished them. Hope for awhile
flattered them that some other vessel, bound for New Holland, might also
be driven upon those islands, though not with the same hard fate, and
that by her means they might be released, and conveyed back to Europe.
But days, and weeks, and months, wearing away without any such arrival,
they began to regard the expectation less, and to turn their minds to
take a more intimate interest in objects around them. Time, indeed,
accustomed them to what might be called barbarous, in the manners of the
people; by de