On the following day, we made our final costly error. The ships in the harbour weighed anchor and raised sail. We picked the one that seemed the newest and arranged with the skipper to take us along with him to Suva, on the main island Viti Levu. Of course, our plan was simply to sail a few miles out to sea with him and then take the ship ourselves after donning our uniforms and getting out all of our weapons. A sudden squall blew up and forced the vessels back to port. We returned with her. And now we should have taken her while she lay at anchor. The people ashore would have seen what was going on, but we could have held up the island and then put to sea, storm or no storm. That was our first impulse. We should have followed it. Always trust your first impulse--at any rate, if you go into the pirate business. It is the boldest and best. Instead, we chose a more cautious course. Prudence ceases to be a virtue when you are on an adventure like ours. We had been bold enough heretofore, and I have no satisfactory explanation for our caution now. It may have been that we were not quite ourselves. Our voyage down from the Societies and the Cooks to Fiji, with those days of hunger, thirst, and scurvy, had sapped our strength and vitality. Perhaps, although we felt quite well, we had not yet got back our full vigour of body and mind. Perhaps we were low on red corpuscles. At any rate, we resolved to wait until the following day and capture our ship when it had got out to sea. While we waited, another vessel arrived. She was a beauty, too, and would have delighted any seaman's eye as she came sailing into the harbour. She had just arrived, we were told, from Suva. She ran regularly among the islands, carrying merchandise to the traders. She was a handsome three-masted schooner with auxiliary motor power, new, clean, and trim, just the kind of ship we wanted. "By Joe," I said to my boys, "there's our ship." We immediately dismissed all idea of the old windjammer we had intended to capture, and devoted ourselves to this new beauty. A council of war was held, after which Kircheiss went to the captain of the vessel, which now had docked, and told him that we were Norwegians who, while making a cruise in a lifeboat, had missed our ship, which was taking coal from Australia to Suva. Could we not take passage with him to Suva instead of on the other slower old craft, so that we could get back to our own ship? We would pay regular rates for the passage. "All right," replied the captain, a jovial, unsuspecting fellow. "Come aboard at eight o'clock this evening. We sail in the morning." It was our plan again that, once aboard this lovely ship and out at sea, we would suddenly appear in our uniforms and hoist the German flag.