les in width--although, as is the case at
Drummond's Island, or Taputeouea, they sometimes reach forty in the
length of their sweeping curve--but few present a continuous and
unbroken stretch of land, for the greater number consist of perhaps
two or three score of small islands, divided only by narrow and shallow
channels, through which at high water the tide sweeps in from the ocean
to the calm waters of the lagoons with amazing velocity. These strips
of land, whether broken or continuous, form the eastern or windward
boundaries of the lagoons; on the western or lee side lie barrier reefs,
between whose jagged coral walls there are, at intervals widely apart,
passages sufficiently deep for a thousand-ton ship to pass through in
safety, and anchor in the transparent depths of the lagoon within its
protecting arms.

*****

Years ago, in the days when the whaleships from Nantucket, and Salem,
and Martha's Vineyard, and New Bedford cruised northward towards the
cold seas of Japan and Tchantar Bay, and the smoky glare of their
tryworks lit up the ocean at night, the Gilberts were a wild place, and
many a murderous scene was enacted on white beach and shady palm grove.
Time after time some whaler, lying to in fancied security outside the
passage of a lagoon, with half her crew ashore intoxicated with sour
toddy, and the other half on board unsuspicious of danger, would be
attacked by the ferocious brown people. Swimming off at night-time, with
knives held between their teeth, a desperate attempt would be made to
cut off the ship. Sometimes the attempt succeeded; and then canoe after
canoe would put out from the shore, and the wild people, swarming up the
ship's side, would tramp about her ensanguined decks and into the cabins
seeking for plunder and fiery New England rum. Then, after she had been
gutted of everything of value to her captors, as the last canoe pushed
off, smoke and then flames would arise, and the burning ship would
drift away with the westerly current, and the tragedy of her fate, save
to the natives of the island, and perhaps some renegade white man who
had stirred them to the deed, would never be known.

*****

In those days--long ere the advent of the first missionary to the
isolated equatorial atolls of Polynesia and Melanesia--there were
many white men scattered throughout the various islands of the Ellice,
Gilbert, and Marshall groups. Men, these, with a past that they cared
not to speak of to the