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Updated: May 21, 2025
A small, squat and dirty-looking trading steamer, with the name Motutapu painted in yellow letters on her bows and stern, lay at anchor off the native village of Utiroa on Drummond's Island in the Equatorial Pacific. She was about 800 tons burden, and her stained and rusty sides made her appear as if she had been out of port for two years instead of scarcely four months.
Jessop would give us away in any case over the cause of the fire, if he said nothing else. It's their lives or ours." "What is it to be?" muttered Hendry, drawing the steer oar inboard, and putting his eager, cruel eyes close to Chard's face. "This is what it must be. You and I, Louis, will be 'the only survivors of the "Motutapu" which took fire at sea.
The natives went first, the white men quickly followed, and clambered into the boat, which at once joined the two others, and then all three lay to, and their occupants watched the Motutapu drifting before the wind, with the red flames enveloping her from stern to stem.
The rest of their party the men from the Motutapu and the Pikirami people were busily employed in preparations for cooking, some making ready an oven of red-hot stones, others putting up fish and chickens in leaf wrappers, and Malua and two Pikirami youths of his own age were husking numbers of young drinking-nuts.
"Well, they mean it if we are fools enough to give them the chance of doing it. And by God, Louis, I tell you that it means hanging for us both; if not hanging, imprisonment for life in Darlinghurst Gaol. We shot the niggers, right enough, and every man of the crew of the Motutapu, from Oliver down to Carr's servant, will go dead against us." He paused a moment.
"I tell you that I'll keep the beggar in irons till he rots in them, or until Mr. Chard kicks him ashore." "Very well, sir," said Oliver quietly, placing his hand on the bridge rail to steady himself, for the Motutapu was now plunging and labouring in the heavy head sea, and Hendry was staggering about all over the bridge "very well. But I call on Mr.
For nearly ten minutes the mate and crew worked hard to subdue the fire, and all might have gone well had there been a sufficient head of steam to keep the ship head to wind and the donkey-engine going, but at the first alarm the drunken, cowardly firemen had refused duty and tried to rush one of the boats, and amidst the curses and blows which Carr and Atkins were showering upon them another mighty sea tumbled aboard for'ard, and the Motutapu was half-smothered again.
But though he paused but momentarily, it was fatal, for the instant the mate's back was turned the first man, with an oath of drunken defiance, cast off the fall and let it go with a run, just as the Motutapu was heaved up by a lofty sea, and rolled heavily to port.
What civilised country would afford protection to such fiendish and cruel murderers? Neither of them dare dream of ever putting foot on Australian soil again if a single one of the survivors of the Motutapu reached there before them. Then he thought of Hendry's wife and three fair daughters.
"Jack," he said, speaking in the familiar manner borne out of their past comradeship, "you know that I would do anything for you, don't you? But while I shall take good care of Tessa, I would rather she was going back home to Ponapé by any other ship than the Motutapu." "What is wrong with the ship, Harvey?" "Nothing. But the captain and supercargo are a pair of unmitigated scoundrels.
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