westing and fooled God.

[Illustration]

THE HEATHEN

I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the
hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone
to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had
seen him with the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not
consciously been aware of his existence, for the _Petite Jeanne_ was
rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her
white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she
sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck
passengers--Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with
a trade box, to say nothing of sleeping-mats, blankets, and
clothes-bundles.

The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were
returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl-buyers.
Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever
known), one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half
dozen.

It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint,
nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well,
and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete.

Of course, the _Petite Jeanne_ was overloaded. She was only seventy
tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board.
Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl-shell and
copra. Even the trade room was packed full of shell. It was a miracle
that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks.
They simply climbed back and forth along the rails.

In the night-time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck,
I'll swear, two deep. Oh! and there were pigs and chickens on deck, and
sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings
of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the
fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the
foreboom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty
bunches of bananas were suspended.

It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or
three days that would have been required if the southeast trades had
been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five
hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm
continued all that night and the next day--one of