OF THE SOUTH SEAS 189 



down; some were thirty-seven feet high, and they had 

 redstone crowns, ten feet in diameter. There were 

 stone houses one hundred feet long, with walls five feet 

 thick. How they moved the stones no one knows, for, 

 of course, these people there now were not the builders. 

 Some race of whom they knew nothing was there be- 

 fore them. 



"They are one of the greatest mysteries in the world. 

 Easter is the queerest of all the Maori islands. They 

 had nothing like the other Maoris had in any of these 

 islands, but they had plenty of stone, their lances were 

 tipped with obsidian, and they were terrible fighters 

 among themselves. They had no trees, and so no 

 canoes; and they depended on driftwood and the hibis- 

 cus for weapons. They are all done for now." 



Captain Benson was still busied with his log when 

 the steamship from New Zealand arrived to take the 

 shipwrecked men away. The El Dorado's boat was 

 stowed carefully on the deck of the liner. I saw the 

 skipper watching it as the deck-hands put chocks under 

 it and made it fast against the rolling of the ship. That 

 boat deserved well of him, for its stanchness had stood 

 between him and the maws of the sharks many days and 

 nights. 



I bade him and the two seamen good-by on the wharf. 

 The old man was full of his plan to exhibit the boat in 

 a museum and of selling his account of his adventures 

 to a magazine. 



The crew left on Easter Island were rescued sooner 

 than they had expected. A British tramp, the Knight 

 of the Garter, put into Easter Island for emergency 

 repairs, having broken down. The castaways left with 



