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Hannah for that was his name had then returned to the Carolines for his family, and brought them to Samoa, from whence he thought he could get a passage down to the New Hebrides in one of the two German brigs then engaged in the Kanaka labour trade 'black-birding, as it was called. But one, the Iserbrook had been burnt in Sydney Harbour, and the other was away at Valparaiso.

Merry times, indeed, had those who ran the labour vessels then in the trade, when Queensland rivalled the Hawaiian Islands in the exciting business of "black-birding," and when Captain William Henry Hayes, of Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. vulgarly called "Bully" Hayes came twice a year to fair Samoa with full cargoes of oil, copra, and brown-skinned kanakas, all obtained on the stalwart captain's peculiar time-payment system.

Ever he struggled to combat the fever, to live, to continue to live, to grow strong and stronger against the day when he would be strong enough to dare the grass-lands and the belted jungle beyond, and win to the beach, and to some labour-recruiting, black-birding ketch or schooner, and on to civilization and the men of civilization, to whom he could give news of the message from other worlds that lay, darkly worshipped by beastmen, in the black heart of Guadalcanal's midmost centre.

After that she was in some dreadful black-birding business in a far quarter of the South Pacific; and after that her name changed finally to the Glarus poached seals for a syndicate of Dutchmen who lived in Tacoma, and who afterward built a club-house out of what she earned. And after that we got her. We got her, I say, through Ryder's South Pacific Exploitation Company.