100 A MISSION TO VITI. 



intercourse with civilization, that he seemed to have 

 lost his reckoning, and was not quite sure whether he 

 had been sixteen, eighteen, or twenty years in the is- 

 lands. His story is full of adventure. Born in Lon- 

 don, he was early apprenticed, first to one then to ano- 

 ther trade, but his employers being all men with whom 

 he " could not agree," he left them in disgust, and 

 took to the sea. This brought him to the South Pa- 

 cific, where he discovered that the captains he had to 

 deal with were disagreeable men ; and, after exchanging 

 from vessel to vessel, he finally ran away at Tongatabu. 

 There, after twelve months' residence, amid many priva- 

 tions, partly caused by a great hurricane and its usual 

 successor, a general famine, he perceived the Tonguese 

 too were disagreeable people, and at once took passage 

 in a canoe for Fiji. Arriving in this group in distress 

 from heavy weather, the canoe was seized at the island 

 of Kadavu, and the crew condemned to be baked in the 

 oven thus finding the Kadavu people more disagree- 

 able even than the Tonguese. By strategy, however, 

 he succeeded in making his escape to Rewa, where he 

 remained some time with other white men. To one, 

 Charles Pickering, a celebrity of Fiji and the hero of 

 some capital anecdotes, he sold a pinchbeck watch that 

 only went when carried. Whence he got this precious 

 article, he says it is unnecessary to tell ; enough for the 

 history, that as soon as he received the price thereof 

 from Pickering, he jumped into a boat and started off 

 for some distant part of the islands, condemning the 

 white men as a disagreeable set of fellows. In his 

 wanderings he met one " Flash Bob," for whom he 



