The supercargo, Lee, was not to be blamed, for he told me that once he had taken time in port to capture by poisonous lures a number he calculated at eight thousand, and that within a month those who had escaped had repopulated the old schooner as before.  Then he despaired, and let them have sway.  To sleep or eat among them was not possible to me, and the voyage was a nightmare not relieved by an incident of the second night.

Capriata, whose feet were calloused from going bare for years, awoke from a deep slumber that had been aided by rum, to find that the cockroaches in his berth had eaten through the half inch or more of hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh.  With blasphemous and blood-chilling yells he bounded on deck, where he sat treating the wounds and cursing unrestrainedly for some time before joining Pere Olivier and me in democratic slumber on the bare boards.  Several weeks later his feet had not recovered from their envenomed sores.

When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay, the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which the first white men who saw the islands anchored over three hundred years ago.

Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to glut their taste for blood.  The standard of death the white flew then has never been lowered.  Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less than three hundred.  Consumption was first brought to the islands by one of these whalers, and made such alarming inroads on the people of Hanavave that most of the remainder forsook their homes and crossed to the island of Tahuata, to escape the devil the white man had let loose among them.

We sailed on very slowly after the mountains had robbed us of the breeze, and when daylight succeeded the false dawn, we dropped our mud hooks a thousand feet from the beach.  On it we could see a little wooden church and two dwellings, dwarfed to miniature by the grim pinnacles of rock, crude replicas of the towers of the Alhambra, slender minarets beside the giant cliffs, which were clothed with creeping plants in places and in places bare as the sides of a living volcano.

The fantastic and majestic assemblage of rock shapes on the shores of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras of his dreams.

The priest and I, with the supercargo, went ashore in a boat at six o’clock, and reached a beach as smooth and inviting as that of Atuona.  A canoe was waiting for Pere Olivier; he climbed into it at once, his black wet robe clinging to him, and called “Adios!” as his men paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say mass and hear confessions.