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Updated: June 4, 2025
Such hospitality was customary in those old Fijian days, when every cotton planter saw before him the shining portals of the City of Fortune inviting him to enter and be rich, and every trader and trading captain made money so easily that it was hard to spend it as quickly as it was made; and Manton's Hotel on Levuka beach was filled night after night with crowds of hilarious and excited people, and the popping of the champagne corks went on from dusk till dawn of the tropic day, and men talked and drank and talked and drank again, and told each other of the lucky strokes they had made; and sun-tanned skippers from the wild and murderous Solomons and the fever-stricken New Hebrides spoke of the cargoes of "blackbirds" they had sold at two hundred and fifty dollars a head, and dashed down a handful of yellow sovereigns on Manton's bar "for a drink all round."
The port doctor and Customs officer came on board and warmly greeted the captain of the Maritana for, apart from his being one of the wealthiest traders in the South Seas, John Brabant was essentially a man who made friends made them insensibly, and then his beautiful young wife was the acknowledged belle of the small European community in Fiji, and his house, when he returned from one of his trading voyages, was literally an open house, for every one traders, storekeepers, cotton planters, naval men or merchant skippers knew there was a welcome awaiting them in the big bungalow on the hillside at whatever time they called, day or night.
I hate your honey-mouthed, easy-going skippers, who simper out, `Please, my good men, have the goodness to brace round the foreyard when the ship's taken aback. No, no give me a man who knows how to command men. Depend on it. Duff, you'll like Captain Fleetwood before you've sailed with him a week, if you are worth your salt, mind you, though."
I am going to get the wife!... I yelled, all the watch on deck yelled. Crash!" Mr Powell gasped at the recollection. "It was a Belgian Green Star liner, the Westland," he went on, "commanded by one of those stop-for-nothing skippers. Flaherty was his name and I hope he will die without absolution. She cut half through the old Ferndale and after the blow there was a silence like death.
She saw exactly how much ice a skipper's wife cut in a community of skippers' wives. She was after higher game. She settled it finally that if she couldn't live in London, she'd stay aboard the ship all her life. "She got her way, but not all at once. One voyage she left the ship in Bombay and travelled across India, rejoining at Calcutta.
The master of a whaling vessel told me that off the north end of New Caledonia, there was, from 1868 till 1876, a pack of nine killers which were always attended by two threshers and a sword-fish. Not only he, but many other whaling skippers had seen this particular swordfish, year after year, joining the killers in attacks upon whales.
In the course of time, his home-bound skippers, sighting the white house on the headland and knowing that The Laird was apt to be up there watching, formed the habit of doing something that pleased their owner mightily.
The navigation of the river although impeded and rendered dangerous by the forts which Parma held along the banks was still open; and, so long as the price of corn in Antwerp remained three or four times as high as the sum for which it could be purchased in Holland and Zeeland, there were plenty of daredevil skippers ready to bring cargoes.
Much, more important, however, than siege, battle, or mutiny, to human civilization, were the steady movements of the Dutch skippers and merchants at this period.
The aviator and the commander of a destroyer know their steeds and have precedent to go by, while the skippers of the tanks had none. They went forth with a new kind of ship on a new kind of sea, whose waves were shell-craters, whose tempests sudden concentrations of shell fire.
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