so eight or ten men are recruited,
and told to either get into one of the boats or go off to the ship in
canoes. The business on shore is then finished, the harassed recruiter
wipes his perspiring brow, says farewell to the people, closes his trade
chest, and steps into his landing boat. The officer cries to the crew,
"Give way, lads," and off goes the boat.

Then the covering boat comes into position astern of the landing boat,
for one never knew the moment that some enraged native on shore might,
for having been rejected as "undesirable," take a snipe-shot at one of
the boats. Only two men pull in the covering boat--the rest of the crew
sit on the thwarts, with their rifles ready, facing aft, until the boats
are out of range.

That is what is the ordinary day's work among the Solomon, New Hebrides,
and other island groups of the Western Pacific But very often it
was--and is now--very different. The recruiter may be at work, when
he is struck down treacherously from behind, and hundreds of
concealed savages rush out, bent on slaughter. Perhaps the eye of some
ever-watchful man in the covering boat has seen crouching figures in the
dense undergrowth of the shores of the bay, and at once fires his rifle,
and the recruiter jumps for his boat, and then there is a cracking
of Winchesters from the covering boat, and a responsive banging of
overloaded muskets from the shore.

Only once was I badly hurt when "recruiting". I had visited a rather
big village, but could not secure a single recruit, and I had told the
officer to put off, as it was no use our wasting our time. I then
got into the boat and was stooping down to get a drink from the
water-beaker, when a sudden fusillade of muskets and arrows was opened
upon us from three sides, and I was struck on the right side of the neck
by a round iron bullet, which travelled round just under the skin,
and stopped under my left ear. Some of my crew were badly hit, one man
having his wrist broken by an iron bullet, and another received a heavy
lead bullet in the stomach, and three bamboo arrows in his chest, thigh
and shoulder. He was more afraid of the arrows than the really dangerous
wound in his stomach, for he thought they were poisoned, and that he
would die of lockjaw--like the lamented Commodore Goodenough, who was
shot to death with poisoned arrows at Nukapu in the Santa Cruz Group.

The skipper nicked out the bullet in my neck with his pen-knife, and
beyond two very un