Squall after squall, driving wind and blinding rain, smote the Minota, while a heavier sea was ******.The Eugenie lay at anchor five miles to windward, but she was behind a point of land and could not know of our mishap.At Captain Jansen's suggestion, I wrote a note to Captain Keller, asking him to bring extra anchors and gear to our aid.But not a canoe could be persuaded to carry the letter.
I offered half a case of tobacco, but the blacks grinned and held their canoes bow-on to the breaking seas.A half a case of tobacco was worth three pounds.In two hours, even against the strong wind and sea, a man could have carried the letter and received in payment what he would have laboured half a year for on a plantation.Imanaged to get into a canoe and paddle out to where Mr.Caulfeild was running an anchor with his whale-boat.My idea was that he would have more influence over the natives.He called the canoes up to him, and a score of them clustered around and heard the offer of half a case of tobacco.No one spoke.
"I know what you think," the missionary called out to them."You think plenty tobacco on the schooner and you're going to get it.Itell you plenty rifles on schooner.You no get tobacco, you get bullets."At last, one man, alone in a small canoe, took the letter and started.Waiting for relief, work went on steadily on the Minota.
Her water-tanks were emptied, and spars, sails, and ballast started shoreward.There were lively times on board when the Minota rolled one bilge down and then the other, a score of men leaping for life and legs as the trade-boxes, booms, and eighty-pound pigs of iron ballast rushed across from rail to rail and back again.The poor pretty harbour yacht! Her decks and running rigging were a raffle.
Down below everything was disrupted.The cabin floor had been torn up to get at the ballast, and rusty bilge-water swashed and splashed.A bushel of limes, in a mess of flour and water, charged about like so many sticky dumplings escaped from a half-cooked stew.
In the inner cabin, Nakata kept guard over our rifles and ammunition.
Three hours from the time our messenger started, a whale-boat, pressing along under a huge spread of canvas, broke through the thick of a shrieking squall to windward.It was Captain Keller, wet with rain and spray, a revolver in belt, his boat's crew fully armed, anchors and hawsers heaped high amidships, coming as fast as wind could drive--the white man, the inevitable white man, coming to a white man's rescue.
The vulture line of canoes that had waited so long broke and disappeared as quickly as it had formed.The corpse was not dead after all.We now had three whale-boats, two plying steadily between the vessel and shore, the other kept busy running out anchors, rebending parted hawsers, and recovering the lost anchors.
Later in the afternoon, after a consultation, in which we took into consideration that a number of our boat's crew, as well as ten of the recruits, belonged to this place, we disarmed the boat's crew.
This, incidently, gave them both hands free to work for the vessel.
The rifles were put in the charge of five of Mr.Caulfeild's mission boys.And down below in the wreck of the cabin the missionary and his converts prayed to God to save the Minota.It was an impressive scene! the unarmed man of God praying with cloudless faith, his savage followers leaning on their rifles and mumbling amens.The cabin walls reeled about them.The vessel lifted and smashed upon the coral with every sea.From on deck came the shouts of men heaving and toiling, praying, in another fashion, with purposeful will and strength of arm.
That night Mr.Caulfeild brought off a warning.One of our recruits had a price on his head of fifty fathoms of shell-money and forty pigs.Baffled in their desire to capture the vessel, the bushmen decided to get the head of the man.When killing begins, there is no telling where it will end, so Captain Jansen armed a whale-boat and rowed in to the edge of the beach.Ugi, one of his boat's crew, stood up and orated for him.Ugi was excited.Captain Jansen's warning that any canoe sighted that night would be pumped full of lead, Ugi turned into a bellicose declaration of war, which wound up with a peroration somewhat to the following effect: "You kill my captain, I drink his blood and die with him!"The bushmen contented themselves with burning an unoccupied mission house, and sneaked back to the bush.The next day the Eugenie sailed in and dropped anchor.Three days and two nights the Minota pounded on the reef; but she held together, and the shell of her was pulled off at last and anchored in smooth water.There we said good-bye to her and all on board, and sailed away on the Eugenie, bound for Florida Island.{1}