The Takuo. 
r 59 
good rest on shore. For a “ furious calm,” 
as our captain called it, is a horrible thing to 
endure cooped up on board a small trading 
vessel of seventy tons, carrying an odoriferous 
cargo of copra (dried coconut), sharks’ fins, and 
whale oil. Two weeks before we had lost both 
our boats in the surf when struggling over 
the sweeping seas on the reef at Duperrey’s 
Island, and our skipper thought that we could 
buy at least one from the white trader living 
on Ngatik ; this was our main object in 
touching at such an isolated spot. 
An hour before sunset we were within a mile 
of the beach and saw the trader’s boat being 
launched and manned. In a quarter of an hour 
she came alongside, the trader jumped on 
deck, and then good-naturedly offered to let 
his boat’s crew tow us in to an anchorage before 
it became dark. A line was soon passed into 
the boat, and, aided by a light air now and 
then, we went along in fine style. 
Our visitor was a young, powerfully-built, 
deeply-bronzed American, named Harry Stirling. 
He was a great sportsman, and presently told 
us that we had come to Ngatik in good time, 
as the island was literally alive with pigeons— 
