ade
to understand, for no one of them knew a word of English--that about
twelve months previously a large vessel had run on shore one wild night
on the south side of the group and that all on board had perished.
Fourteen bodies had been washed on shore at a little island named Elaue,
all dreadfully battered about, and the ship herself had disappeared and
nothing remained of her but pieces of wreckage. She had evidently struck
on the reef near Elaue with tremendous violence, then slipped off and
sunk. The natives asked the captain to come on shore and be shown the
spot where the men had been buried, but he was too cautious a man to
trust himself among them.

On his reporting the matter to the colonial shipping authorities at
Sydney, he learned that two vessels were missing--one a Dutch barque of
seven hundred tons which left Sydney for Dutch New Guinea, and the other
a full-rigged English ship bound to Shanghai. No tidings had been heard
of them for over eighteen months, and it was concluded that the vessel
lost on Woodlark Island was one or the other, as that island lay in the
course both would have taken.

In 1868-69 there was a great outburst of trading operations in the
North-West Pacific Islands--then in most instances a _terra incognita_,
and there was a keen rivalry between the English and German trading
firms to get a footing on such new islands as promised them a lucrative
return for their ventures. Scores of adventurous white men lost their
lives in a few months, some by the deadly malarial fever, others by the
treacherous and cannibalistic savages. But others quickly took their
places--nothing daunted--for the coco-nut oil trade, the then staple
industry of the North-West Pacific, was very profitable and men made
fortunes rapidly. What mattered it if every returning ship brought news
of some bloody tragedy--such and such a brig or schooner having been cut
off and all hands murdered, cooked and eaten, the vessel plundered and
then burnt? Such things occur in the North-West Pacific in the present
times, but the outside world now hears of them through the press and
also of the punitive expeditions by war-ships of England, France or
Germany.

Then in those old days we traders would merely say to one another that
"So-and-So 'had gone'". He and his ship's company had been cut off at
such-and-such a place, and the matter, in the eager rush for wealth,
would be forgotten.

At that time I was in Levuka--the old ca