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Time, however, soon wore away these feelings. Williams not only got over his bereavement easily, but soon began to wish for another wife. It was, of course, impossible to obtain one righteously in the circumstances; he therefore resolved to take the wife of Talaloo the Otaheitan. It must not be supposed that all Williams', comrades supported him in this wicked design.
Meanwhile Charlie Christian and Otaheitan Sally and the staggerer wended their way overland to the same rendezvous slowly remarkably slowly. They had so much to talk about; not of politics, you may be sure, nor yet of love, for they were somewhat shy of that, being, so to speak, new to it.
Then again as to the disinterestedness of the Otaheitan devotees, Dr Hawkesworth egregiously blunders as if it were conceivable, or any way natural, that they or any other people could possibly serve their divinities without entertaining the hope that they should be served by them in turn. This were to exceed even Homer in his exaggerating human nature at the expence of the gods.
We return to the Bounty, and solicit the reader's attention to a plump brown ball which rolls about that vessel's deck, exhibiting a marked tendency to gravitate towards the lee scuppers. This brown ball is Sally, the Otaheitan infant.
To women of civilised lands this might have been a serious accident, but to these Otaheitan ladies it was a mere trifle. Each had been able to swim like a duck from earliest childhood. Indeed, it was evident that some of their own little ones were equally gifted, for several of them, led by Sally, plunged into the surf and went out to meet their parents as they swam ashore.
For about two years, while they all worked at the building of the houses and at cultivating the ground, the Otaheitan men toiled without a murmur. But when Williams, who had lost his wife, insisted that he would take one of theirs or leave the island in one of the 'Bounty's' boats, the other Englishmen, who did not want to part with him, compelled one of the Otaheitans to give his wife to him.
In their beautiful island of the sea, where the lordly banyans grow, and where the feathery cocoanut palms stand boldly along the cliffs, or here and there fringe the rocky beach for in this temperate climate just without the tropics there are but few trees and vegetables that will not grow there, unknown for many years to the world, and far away from its busy jar and fret, the simple and kindly natures that these children of Pitcairn Island must have inherited from their Otaheitan mothers were trained to an almost perfect sense of duty and piety by old John Adams.
The solitary seaman still had his Otaheitan wife and the bright children of the mutineers around him, and the death of Young had drawn out his heart more powerfully than ever towards these, but they could not in any degree fill the place of one who could talk intelligently of home, of Old England, of British battles fought and won, of ships and men, and things that might have belonged, as far as the women and children were concerned, to another world.
Their features are almost identical, so that portraits of a New Zealander or Otaheitan will often serve accurately to represent a Papuan or Timorese, the darker colour and more frizzly hair of the latter being the only differences. They are both tall races. They agree in their love of art and the style of their decorations.
She had learnt Otaheitan, she lectured about the bread-fruit, and she played upon a barbarous thrum-thrum, the only musical instrument in those savage wastes, ironically called the Society Islands, because there is no society. She was dreadful.
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