quesas
Islands, and opened a business there as a trader. He had made a lot of
money at sperm whaling; and, I suppose, thought that as I had left him,
swearing I never wished to see him again, that he would spend the rest
of his days in the South Seas--money grubbing to the last.

"Sometimes I heard of him as being very prosperous. Once, when I was
told that he had been badly hurt by a gun accident, I wrote to him and
asked if he would care for me to come and stay with him. This I did for
the sake of my dead mother. Nearly a year and a half passed before I got
an answer--an answer that cut me to the quick:--

"'I want no undutiful son near me. I do well by myself'.

"Several years went by, and then when I was mate of a trading schooner
in the Fijis I was handed a letter by the American Consul. It was two
years old, and was from my father--a long, long letter, written in such
a kindly manner, and with such affectionate expressions that I forgave
the old man all the savage and unmerited thrashings he had given me when
I sailed with him as a lad.

"In this letter he told me that he wanted to see me again--that made
me feel good--and that he had built a schooner which he had named
_Juliette_ after my mother, who was a French _Canadienne_. He described
the labour and trouble he had taken over her, the knees and stringers
of _ngiia_ wood, and the carvings of sperm whales he had had cut on the
windlass butts and stanchions. Then he went on to say that he had been
having a lot of trouble with the French naval authorities, who wanted to
drive all Englishmen and Americans out of the group, and had made up
his mind to leave the Marquesas and settle down again either in Samoa or
Tonga, where he hoped I would join him and forget how hardly he had used
me in the past.

"The gun accident, he wrote, had rendered him all but blind, and he
had engaged a man named Krause, a German, as mate, and to navigate the
_Juliette_ to Tonga or Samoa. Krause, he said, was a man he did not
like, nor trust; but as he was a good sailor-man and could navigate, he
had engaged him, as he could get no one else at Nukahiva.

"With my father were a party of Marquesan natives--a chief and his
wife and her infant, and two young men. The schooner's crew were four
Dagoes--deserters from some ship. He did not care about taking them, but
had no choice.

"Some ten days before the German and the crew came on board, my father
secretly took all his money--$8,000