322 NIMROD OF THE SEA; OR, 



and many poor wrecks of white humanity drift about the 

 streets, a scandal to the boasted civilization with which we 

 would supplant heathen customs. The traders find profit 

 in vice, and they stand constantly opposed to the efforts 

 of the missionary to check an evil which threatens the 

 very existence of the people. In a low hole I saw a man 

 acting as fiddler and master of ceremonies to a dancing 

 squad of half-drunken sailors. Once he considered himself 

 a gentleman, and had sailed master of a large East India- 

 man. 



Late one night I went down to the pier to take a canoe 

 for the ship, and there I found an old man in the familiar 

 garb of the Quaker, striving to send his unaccustomed voice 

 across the waters in hailing an English schooner which lay 

 far beyond. My younger lungs weye placed at his disposal, 

 and in a few minutes his boat was on its way ashore to take 

 him off. This was Daniel Wheeler, sent out, I. believe, by 

 the Yearly Meeting of Friends in London, to examine and 

 report upon the missionary labors on the islands of the Pa- 

 cific. The good old man was evidently surprised at hearing 

 the plain language of Friends from the rough sailor at his 

 side ; and on learning that I actually " belonged to meeting," 

 and hailed from Philadelphia, he cautiously beat about the 

 bush to learn to which persuasion I belonged. A manifest 

 frigidity stole over his manner when he learned that I hailed 

 from the camp of Elias Hicks, and I wondered a little that 

 the devil of sectarianism should reach so far as the Sand- 

 wich Islands, and come between two lone men on that silent 

 night on the coral pier of Honolulu. Daniel did not know 

 that in his withdrawal of interest and sympathy he had in a 

 degree performed an auto-da-fe. I found that he was la- 

 boring under the prevailing error that the American whal- 

 ing sailor is entirely beyond the pale of God's mercy, and, 

 as he expressed it, is " God-defying, Heaven -abandoned." I 



