few strangers they might chance to meet in their
savage retreats. Many were escaped convicts from Van Diemen's Land and
New South Wales, living, not in dread of their wild native associates,
but in secret terror of recapture by a man-of-war and a return to the
horrors of that dreadful past. Casting away the garb of civilisation
and tying around their loins the _airiri_ or grass girdle of the Gilbert
Islanders, they soon became in appearance, manners, language, and
thoughts pure natives. For them the outside world meant a life of
degradation, possibly a shameful death. And as the years went by and
the bitter memories of the black days of old, resonant with the clank
of fetters and the warder's harsh cry, became dulled and faint, so died
away that once for-ever-haunting fear of discovery and recapture. In
Teake, the bronzed, half-naked savage chief of Maiana, or Mesi, the
desperate leader of the natives that cut off the barque _Addie Passmore_
at Marakei, the identity of such men as "Nuggety" Jack West and Macy
O'Shea, once of Van Diemen's Land or Norfolk Island, was lost for ever.

II.

On Kuria, the one beautiful island of the Gilberts, there lived four
such white men as those I speak of. Whence they came they alone knew.
Two of them--a Portuguese deserter from a whaler and a man named
Corton--had been some years on the island when they were joined by two
others who came over from Apamama in a boat. One was called Tamu (Tom)
by the natives, and from the ease with which he spoke the Gilbert Island
dialect and his familiarity with native customs, he had plainly lived
many years among the natives; the other was a tall, dark-skinned,
and morose-looking man of nearly fifty. He was known as Hari to the
natives--once, in that outer world from which some crime had dissevered
him for ever, he was Henry Deschard.

Although not familiar with either the language or the customs of the
ferocious inhabitants of the Gilbert Group, it was soon seen by the ease
with which he acquired both that Hari had spent long years roaming about
the islands of the Pacific. In colour he was darker than the Kurians
themselves; in his love of the bloodshed and slaughter that so often ran
riot in native quarrels he surpassed even the fiercest native; and as
he eagerly espoused the cause of any Kurian chief who sought his aid he
rapidly became a man of note on the island, and dreaded by the natives
elsewhere in the group.

There were then over