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 
