318 Wild Life in Southern Seas. 
competition that assailed them in their business 
lessened their prestige with the natives more and 
more every day. And so, as the new men came 
in and opened “ shops ” in Fiji, and Tonga, and 
Samoa, and the Hervey Groups, and the sailing 
vessels were replaced by dirty, frowsy-looking 
steamers with loudly dressed supercargoes, 
who came ashore with boxes of “ sample 
lines,” the old-time traders disappeared one 
by one. 
Westward and northward they sailed to the 
sandy Gilberts and Marshalls, and the distant, 
wooded Carolines, seeking a new resting-place 
among the wild people of those far-off island 
clusters, even as Fenimore Cooper’s gaunt old 
trapper set his feet to the westward away from 
the settlements and the rush and clamour and 
greed of civilisation. And in the Carolines and 
Pelews, and on the isolated lagoon islands of 
the Equatorial Pacific, they will linger for 
perhaps another twenty years or so amid their 
half-caste and quarter-caste descendants and their 
brown-skinned native associates, and then the 
new style of trader-supercargo will be upon 
them in his noisy steamer with his umbrella 
and boxes of “ lines,” and tanned boots and 
