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MR. BARRAUD. "The Bay of Islands is quite in the north, and has been for the last thirty years the favorite resort of whale-ships. Upwards of thirty vessels have been anchored there at the same time; and at this bay the chief intercourse between European vessels and New Zealand has principally taken place.
I was also given moneys of the Government, for I was its servant, and charts of lands which the eyes of man had never dwelt upon, and messages. These messages were sealed, and protected shrewdly from the weather, and I was to deliver them to the whale-ships of the Arctic, ice-bound by the great Mackenzie. Never was there so great a river, forgetting only our own Yukon, the Mother of all Rivers.
Once the Dean had come rushing towards me, shouting at the top of his voice, 'The fleet! the fleet! meaning the whale-ships; but he might just as well have saved himself all that trouble, for 'the fleet' proved to be only a great group of icebergs; but when I told him so he would hardly believe it, until he became at last convinced that they were not moving.
"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best coat; mayhap, his watch he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season?
Having captured several whale-ships, he named one of them the Essex Junior, and having visited the Marquesas, where he exhibited his prowess against the natives, he reached Valparaiso about the 12th of January, 1814.
Fifty years ago, long before the first missionary ship sailed into the lagoon, five or six hundred people dwelt on Funâfala in peace and plenty now it holds but their bones, for they were doomed to fade and vanish before the breath of the white man and his civilisation and "benefits," which to the brown people mean death, and as the years went by, the remnant of the people on Funâfala and the other islets betook themselves to the main island after which the lagoon is named for there the whale-ships and trading schooners came to anchor, and there they live to this day, smitten with disease and fated to disappear altogether within another thirty years, and be no more known to man except in the dry pages of a book written by some learned ethnologist.
But the best company in Fayal was so much less interesting than the peasantry, that some of us persevered in studying the vernacular. To be sure, one finds English spoken by more of the peasants than of the small aristocracy of the island, so many of the former have spent some years in American whale-ships, and come back to settle down with their savings in their native village.
Here, among the strange hybrid population of natives, half-bloods, runaways from whale-ships, and Portuguese, he found employment at boat-building, and for another three years lived contentedly enough, working hard, and saving what little money he could.
And here the knowledge and traditions of a broken people begin and end. A soft, cool morning in November, 187-. Between Ducie and Pitcairn Islands two American whale-ships cruise lazily along to the gentle breath of the south-east trades, when the look-out from both vessels see a third sail bearing down upon them.
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