behind her. From a slow two knots an
hour she crawled up to a triumphant four. Anything beyond that made
the struts quiver dangerously, and filled the engine-room with steam.
Morning showed her out of sight of land, and there was a visible ripple
under her bows; but she complained bitterly in her bowels, and, as
though the noise had called it, there shot along across the purple sea
a swift, dark proa, hawk-like and curious, which presently ranged
alongside and wished to know if the Haliotis were helpless. Ships, even
the steamers of the white men, had been known to break down in those
waters, and the honest Malay and Javanese traders would sometimes aid
them in their own peculiar way. But this ship was not full of lady
passengers and well-dressed officers. Men, white, naked and savage,
swarmed down her sides--some with red-hot iron bars, and others with
large hammers--threw themselves upon those innocent inquiring strangers,
and, before any man could say what had happened, were in full possession
of the proa, while the lawful owners bobbed in the water overside.
Half an hour later the proa's cargo of sago and trepang, as well as a
doubtful-minded compass, was in the Haliotis. The two huge triangular
mat sails, with their seventy-foot yards and booms, had followed the
cargo, and were being fitted to the stripped masts of the steamer.

They rose, they swelled, they filled, and the empty steamer visibly laid
over as the wind took them. They gave her nearly three knots an hour,
and what better could men ask? But if she had been forlorn before, this
new purchase made her horrible to see. Imagine a respectable charwoman
in the tights of a ballet-dancer rolling drunk along the streets,
and you will come to some faint notion of the appearance of that
nine-hundred-ton, well-decked, once schooner-rigged cargo-boat as she
staggered under her new help, shouting and raving across the deep. With
steam and sail that marvellous voyage continued; and the bright-eyed
crew looked over the rail, desolate, unkempt, unshorn, shamelessly
clothed beyond the decencies.

At the end of the third week she sighted the island of Pygang-Watai,
whose harbour is the turning-point of a pearl sea-patrol. Here the
gun-boats stay for a week ere they retrace their line. There is no
village at Pygang-Watai; only a stream of water, some palms, and a
harbour safe to rest in till the first violence of the southeast monsoon
has blown itself out.

They opened