and Eniwetok as great chains of palm-clad
islets, enclosing lagoons through which there was no passage for ships.)

"The natives themselves had no idea of the value to white men of the
beds of pearl shell, and as a matter of fact Gurden himself at that
time did not think them of much value. Later on, after he left the
Island and visited China, he spoke to several merchants and traders
there, and tried to induce them to send him back to the lagoon with a
crew of divers, but as he was usually drunk when he called on them, no
one would listen to him. His story was merely regarded as the fiction
of a drunken sailor.

"My husband did not so regard it. He had never been to Arrecifos, but
knew something of it by its native name of Ujilong and its chart name
of Providence as a place of very few inhabitants--the group takes its
name from the island off which you are anchored--living on a number of
low islands covered with coconuts.

"'Let us go there and you can pilot me in,' he said to Gurden.

"The old man agreed with alacrity. Taking him on board, we sailed the
following morning, and reached this place five days later. He took us
in safely through the south-east passage, and the moment we landed he
was recognised and welcomed by the people as one returned from the dead.

"We remained in the lagoon for three months, and during that time
Gurden and my husband, aided by the willing natives, obtained ten tons
of magnificent shell, and more than a thousand pounds' worth of pearls.
Those which Rawlings showed you were some of them; I suppose he found
them in my husband's cabin after he was murdered. He had often shown
them to both Rawlings and Barradas on board the _Mahina_, for he was,
as I will show you later on, the most unsuspicious and confiding of men.

"Convinced that there was indeed at least some hundreds of thousands of
pounds' worth of pearl shell to be obtained if he could secure
experienced native divers from the equatorial islands--for these people
here are not good divers--my husband decided to go to Honolulu, sell
the cutter and the pearl shell we had obtained, and then with the money
he had in hand, which amounted to about 1,100 pounds, buy a larger
vessel, secure a number of good divers, and return to the lagoon, on
one of the islands of which he intended to make his home for perhaps
many years. Arrecifos, he knew, did not belong to any nation, and both
he and old Gurden thought that the British Consu