Frewen showed his letters to the agent Beilby, who corroborated
Raymond's statement in every particular regarding the money that could
be made by growing cotton on an organised system with native labour,
and with proper machinery to clean and pack it; and he also bore out the
planter's remarks about the danger that attended small vessels employed
in the black labour trade.

"You have seen a good deal of the natives of the South Sea Islands,
Captain Frewen, and know what desperate cut-throats are those of the
Western Pacific Groups. Two small trading vessels of my own have been
cut off within the last five years, and every soul massacred, and the
vessels looted and then burnt. It is a most difficult matter to keep
a swarm of natives off the decks of a vessel with a low freeboard, all
they have to do is to step out of their canoes over the rail, and if
they are bent on mischief they can simply overpower a small vessel's
company by mere weight of numbers. You will be surprised to hear
that, even now, some of the Sydney trading craft use the old-fashioned
boarding nettings, and their skippers only allow a certain number
of natives on board at a time. But with a large vessel like the
_Esmeralda_, this very great source of danger--the low freeboard--is
absent; and besides that, you can carry a crew large enough to squelch
any attempt at a rising, if, after you get them on board, your gentle
passengers took it into their heads to attempt to possess themselves of
the ship."

"Just so. And I have heard of several instances where Honolulu and
Tahiti labour vessels have been captured, even though they carried large
crews and were well armed."

"Exactly! Just carelessness. You never know, when you have a hundred or
so of these savages on board, what they may do. They all know that they
are going to a foreign country to work on sugar or cotton plantations
for three years, at the end of which they will be paid for their labour
in guns, powder, beads, calicoes, &c, &c. Well, they come on board
perfectly content, and all goes well for a week or two, until some of
them begin to notice that the crew are not keeping such a good watch
over them as they did when they first came on board. These fellows begin
the mischief. 'Why should we not kill the white men on board?' (they
will argue) 'and help ourselves to _everything_--guns, pistols, powder,
and bullets, cutlasses, grog and tobacco, and all the other riches in
the ship? It is muc