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Search the whole Pacific from Pylstaart, the southern sentinel of the Friendlies, to the one-time buccaneer-haunted, far-away Pelews; thence eastward through the white-beached coral atolls of the Carolines and Marshalls, and southwards to the cloud-capped Marquesas and the sandy stretches of the Paumotu and you will find no handsomer men or more graceful women than the light-skinned people of Rapa-nui.
It was six years since Brantley, with his companions in misery, had drifted ashore at lonely Vahitahi in the Paumotu Group, and the kindly-hearted people had gazed with pitying horror upon the dreadful beings that, muttering and gibbering to each other, lay in the bottom of the boat, and pointed with long talon-like fingers to their burnt and bloody thirst-tortured lips.
It was the holiday season, the New Year at hand, and, moreover, there was added cause for rejoicing in the safety of the Saint Michel, a French-owned inter-island steamship which had been missing six weeks. She had left one of the Paumotu atolls and failed to reach her next port, thirty miles away. Rumor had sent her to the bottom.
At Tahiti he married, and then for many years worked with other Marshall Islanders on Antimanao Plantation, where two children were born to him. The elder of these, when she was fifteen years of age, married a Frenchman trading in the Paumotu Islands. The other child, a boy, was drowned at sea.
When the American returned to the quarter-deck, Ryan introduced to him "Mr. Foster, my second mate," and added that in addition to the misfortune of losing twelve of his crew when coming through the Paumotu Group, his chief officer had accidentally shot himself, and shattered his collar-bone.
On the 22nd of July, 1828, the Sydney South Seaman, Indefatigable, eleven days out from the Port of Conception in Chili, was in lat 17? S. and about 127? E. long., six hundred miles distant from the nearest land the then almost unknown Paumotu Group, which Cook had well named the Dangerous Archipelago.
For some years after the abduction of the four unfortunate natives, Flemming had tried every possible means of ascertaining their fate, and at first thought that he would succeed, for within a few weeks after the visit of the barque to Anaa, there came news of similar outrages perpetrated by three vessels, through the Ellice, Line Islands and Paumotu Group.
On a certain island in the Paumotu Group, known on the charts as Chain Island, but called Anaa by the people themselves, lived a white man named Martin Flemming, one of those restless wanderers who range the Pacific in search of the fortune they always mean to gain, but which never comes to them, except in some few instances so few that they might be counted on one's fingers.
Only when old-timers were gathered, between steamships, when the schooners came in a drove from the Paumotu atolls, and gold and silver rang on the table at all hours, there was little restraint.
There, under the shadow of the Silent Faces of Stone, the brave and loving heart that dared so much is at peace for ever. One day a trading vessel lay becalmed off Tatakoto, in the Paumotu Archipelago, and the captain and supercargo, taking a couple of native sailors with them, went ashore at dawn to catch some turtle.
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