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Updated: June 7, 2025
He took her on board every succeeding ship, and remained for hours in the trade room while she spent the price of many tons of copra and pearl shell in filling a chest with purchases, saying, in her presumptuous way, "Give me twenty fathoms of this; give me forty fathoms of the other. This silk is good, lo! I will take a bolt."
The road had been good when the people were many, and was still the main road of the island, leading through the Valley of Hapaa. My steed was borrowed of T'yonny Howard, who, though he owned a valley, poured cement for day's wages. "What I do?" he asked, as if I held the answer. "Nobody to help me work there. I cannot make copra alone. Even here they bring men from other place do work.
Now they were come, bringing back the copra dried and sacked. Seven hundred francs they had received for a ton of it from Kriech, the German merchant of Taka-Uka, from whose own groves it had been stolen by the storms. On the morrow, their canoes laden with his goods, they would sail homeward.
Curses upon Saint Michel, threats of damage suits for fright and delay, laughable stories of the mistakes of the volunteer crew of the Noa-Noa; discussions of the price of copra, mingled with the chants of the native feasters and ribald tales.
I went along the same evening to talk it over with Tom Riley, the other trader in Manihiki, who, in spite of our being in opposition and all that, was more like my own born brother than a rival in business. We never let down the price of shell or copra on each other, and lined up shoulder to shoulder if a third party tried to break in, and so we had enough for both of us and a tidy bit over.
I'd 'a' still been King Gibney, Mac, with power o' life an' death over two thousand odd blackbirds, an' I'd 'a' had a beautiful wife an' a dozen kids maybe, with pigs an' chickens an' copra an' shell an' a big bungalow an' money. That's what I chucked away when I was young an' nobody to advise me." McGuffey made no comment on Mr. Gibney's outburst.
However, the government has an eye to the future of the country, as, besides being the main article of food in a country whose food supply is limited, the coconut tree means wealth to the country, when it gets more settled and the natives are able to do a large business in copra with the white traders.
One thing you all know as well as I do, and that is, that the Dutchmen will take your souls out of their cases if you owe them anything. As for the oil and copra I'll see to that. That's all I've got to say, and if any of you won't agree to this let him come on deck and try and convince me."
It was a good little station, and far better than I could have hoped for at the money I had to offer, with a new tin roof and a water tank and a copra shed with a cement floor, and an imported banana in an imported ton of earth to give a natty effect to the back view the front being all reef and dazzle and Pacific Ocean. Lonesome? Coffin-lid, nail-her-down, lonesome why, of course!
The use of this tank was to catch and store up rain water, which ran into it from the sloping top of a larger and taller structure standing partly alongside and partly back of the lesser structure. The larger building a shed it properly was; a sprawling wide-eaved barracks of a shed was for the storing of copra, the chief article for export produced on Good Friday Island.
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