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Updated: June 7, 2025
Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar twenty thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years' lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and saw the opportunity.
On the culprit being set at liberty, the people were going away, when Towha called them back and addressed them, recapitulating what had been said to Otoo, condemning their present bad habits, and advising a reformation in future. The gracefulness of action and the attention with which he was heard showed that he was no mean orator.
As I learned afterward, he had got the hatch cover first, and, after some time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it with him, and had been kicked off for his pains. And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love creature, though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator.
He drove all his countrymen out of the ship; and when he saw me he desired if at any time I found a thief that I would order him to be tied up and punished with a severe flogging. This forenoon a man came on board with Captain Cook's picture which had been drawn by Mr. Webber in 1777 and left with Otoo. It was brought to me to be repaired.
On the 12th old Oberea, who had been supposed by Captain Wallis to be the queen of the island, came on board, and brought a present of pigs and fruit, and soon afterwards Otoo appeared with a retinue and a large quantity of provisions. Handsome presents were made in return, and the visitors were entertained in the evening with fireworks.
We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora. He lay on his back.
The number of men on board was estimated to be no less than 7,500, and it was ascertained this armada was intended for the subjugation of Eimeo which had lately rebelled against Otaheite. Cook was informed Otoo was waiting at the camp for him, but on going there he found he had not been there, and on looking for him again in the afternoon he was still invisible.
What could I do? I know what I did do. Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would come to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made me a better man. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians.
Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for me, and without my asking him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo, suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters.
He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion, and in the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is that, while he was no fighter, and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble when it started. And it was " 'Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went into action.
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