The ship's company of the Hound had been long without seeing any but savage faces, and it was with much satisfaction that on entering a bay on the coast of Papua or New Guinea, they perceived a brig riding at anchor. She hoisted the stars and stripes, and presently her captain paid a visit to the Hound. A Scotch Highlander by birth, his name Stewart, he was a daring and unscrupulous dog as ever fired a round of grape into a mob of South Sea savages. He had the reputation of a tolerably fair dealer, but some of his articles of traffic were extraordinary and disgusting. He was once at Cook's Straits, New Zealand, when there was a great fight amongst the tribes. A feast was to follow, and to save land-carriage, the cannibals freighted Stewart's ship with the provisions for their horrible banquet. "He took on board upwards of two hundred dead bodies, cut up and well packed, with eighteen or twenty chiefs, sailed round, delivered his cargo, and received in payment a large quantity of dressed flax, which he afterwards brought to Sydney and sold at a satisfactory price." After this, people looked askance at him, and held their noses when he passed; but Stewart jingled his dollars, and said it was no one's business but his own, admitting, however, that it was "a stinking cargo." Like the Roman emperor, he denied that good coin could carry an evil smell. "Another trifling affair," Dr Coulter writes, "blemished his character." Cargoes of ebony, neither more nor less; slaves bought in Australasia, and sold to the Dutch and Chinese. Human flesh, quick or dead, was a favourite article of commerce with this respectable Highlandman. In those remote regions, however, men cannot always pick their society, and Coulter and Trainer were glad enough to meet this dealer in dead and live stock, who was an old acquaintance of both of them. They went on board his vessel and dined with him, and it was agreed that the brigand schooner should keep together as long as circumstances permitted. After several days' profitable trading, chiefly in ambergris, tortoiseshell, pearls, and birds of Paradise, and which ended, wonderful to say, without a skirmish with the natives, they coasted along the north shore of the island, and came to an anchor in Gilvink's Bay, at its westernmost extremity, alongside the "Eternal Safety," a Chinese trading junk. According to the custom of his countrymen in those seas, the Chinese skipper had told the Papuans all manner of lies about the Europeans, and had warned them against trading with them. Stewart discovered this by means of an old acquaintance, a Sandwich islander and expert cook, who gladly left the junk, where he received a larger allowance of rattan than he liked, to officiate in the caboose of the American brig. Once safe upon the Yankee's deck, Mr Sing vented his indignation against his late master in a volley of abuse, interspersed with comical and contemptuous gestures. The Chinaman actually