Of the miseries and hardships of that voyage from Samoa to the Marshall Islands, I shall not speak. After a passage of forty-three days we reached Milli Lagoon, where we found Hayes awaiting us in the _Leonora_. The moment our anchor had touched bottom, I packed up my traps and told Hayes I had done with _The Williams_, and refused to go any further in her unless she was carried on the deck of another vessel. With his carpenter--a pig-eyed Chinaman--he made a survey of the vessel, and then told me that she was so rotten and unseaworthy that he would not take delivery of her. The captain, a gin-sodden little Dutchman, and the crew were given quarters on shore at the house of Hayes's local trader, where they were to remain till some passing ship gave them a passage back to Samoa. The ketch was then beached, as Hayes considered that she might eventually be patched up sufficiently to sell to the King of Arhnu, when the _Leonora_ returned from her cruise to the islands of the North-west Pacific, in six months' time. As I had received no salary from my employers for nearly twelve months (and did not expect any), I consented very cheerfully to this arrangement, and then agreed to sail with Hayes as supercargo. We sailed from Milli Lagoon for the Kingsmill Group a week later, and visited nearly every island in the cluster, buying coco-nut oil and other produce from the natives and the few scattered white traders. At Arorai, the southernmost island of the group, we found the natives in a state of famine owing to a long and disastrous drought. The condition of these poor people was truly pitiable to see, and the tears came to my eyes when I saw them, scarcely able to stand, crawling over our bulwarks, and eagerly seizing the biscuits and dishes of boiled rice that Hayes gave them with an unstinting hand. They begged us most piteously to take them away somewhere--they cared not where, Samoa, Fiji or Queensland--where they could work on the plantations and at least get food. Five of them ate so voraciously, despite all our endeavours to prevent it, that they died the following day. On the following morning, Hayes called several of the head men of the island into his cabin, and told them that if they were willing, he would take one hundred of the people--men, women, and children--to the German trading station and plantation at Ponape in the Caroline Islands. Here, he told them, they would have to work for three years for 5 dollars per month each. If, at the end of six months, they found that the Germans did not treat them well, he would bring them back again to their own island on his next voyage to Ponape. They accepted his offer with the strongest protestations of gratitude, and before noon we sailed with over a hundred of the poor people on board. Before we left, however, Hayes gave the remainder of the population nearly a ton of rice and several casks of biscuits. "You can pay me when the sky of brass has broken and the