AIL, AND A STRANGE CREW, AND A
STILL STRANGER CARGO--NEW REASONS FOR FAVOURING MISSIONARIES--A
MURDEROUS MASSACRE, AND THOUGHTS THEREON.

Three weeks after the conversation narrated in the last chapter I was
standing on the quarter-deck of the schooner, watching the gambols of a
shoal of porpoises that swam round us. It was a dead calm--one of those
still, hot, sweltering days so common in the Pacific, when nature seems
to have gone to sleep, and the only thing in water or in air that proves
her still alive is her long, deep breathing in the swell of the mighty
sea. No cloud floated in the deep blue above, no ripple broke the
reflected blue below. The sun shone fiercely in the sky, and a ball of
fire blazed with almost equal power from out the bosom of the water. So
intensely still was it, and so perfectly transparent was the surface of
the deep, that had it not been for the long swell already alluded to, we
might have believed the surrounding universe to be a huge, blue, liquid
ball, and our little ship the one solitary material speck in all
creation floating in the midst of it.

No sound broke on our ears save the soft puff now and then of a
porpoise, the slow creak of the masts as we swayed gently on the swell,
the patter of the reef-points, and the occasional flap of the hanging
sails. An awning covered the fore and after parts of the schooner,
under which the men composing the watch on deck lolled in sleepy
indolence, overcome with excessive heat. Bloody Bill, as the men
invariably called him, was standing at the tiller; but his post for the
present was a sinecure, and he whiled away the time by alternately
gazing in dreamy abstraction at the compass in the binnacle and by
walking to the taffrail in order to spit into the sea. In one of these
turns he came near to where I was standing, and leaning over the side,
looked long and earnestly down into the blue wave.

This man, although he was always taciturn and often surly, was the only
human being on board with whom I had the slightest desire to become
better acquainted. The other men, seeing that I did not relish their
company, and knowing that I was a protege of the captain, treated me
with total indifference. Bloody Bill, it is true, did the same; but as
this was his conduct to every one else, it was not peculiar in reference
to me. Once or twice I tried to draw him into conversation, but he
always turned away after a few cold monosyllables. As he now