Shortly after this the ships sailed, and it would have been well for Cook, who had been guilty of some very high-handed acts, if he had never returned. But they came back a week afterwards to find the island under the mysterious _tabu_--which is the Kanaka equivalent for an interdict, and by far the most sacred institution known to the Polynesians. Some of his marines broke this _tabu_ in the most flagrant fashion. In revenge one of the _Discovery’s_ cutters was stolen. When anything of this sort happened Captain Cook was accustomed to inveigle a chief or two on board his ship and keep them there till the thing stolen was restored. He tried to do this with the King of Hawai, but the people suspected his design, and at the critical moment news came that a canoe had been burnt and a chief killed. The King refused to go another step, and then Captain Cook, who was armed with a hanger and a double-barrelled gun, did a terribly foolish thing for such a man to do. [Illustration: MISSED HIM AND KILLED ANOTHER MAN BEHIND HIM.] He began to walk away to his boat, turning his back on the armed and angry natives. To do so was to invite certain death, and one of the warriors attacked him with his spear. He turned and shot at the man, missed him, and killed another man behind him. A shower of stones followed, and the marines fired on the natives. Cook appears now to have seen the seriousness of the situation, and signalled to those in the boat to stop firing. While he was doing this a chief ran up and drove his spear through his body. Some accounts say that it was an iron dagger, others that he was clubbed on the head simultaneously. At any rate he staggered forward and fell face downwards in the water, on which the natives “immediately leapt in after and kept him under for a few minutes, then hauled him out upon the rocks and beat his head against them several times, so that there is no doubt but that he quickly expired.” Such was the end of the great Circumnavigator, the greatest seaman of his time, and a man honoured wherever the science of navigation was known. It was a miserable end to such a brilliant career, miserable as was that of the great Magellan, who lost his life and the deathless honour of being the first sea-captain to sail round the world in just such a petty and ignoble squabble on the beach of a lonely islet in the Phillipines. But though his death was ignoble, it can detract nothing from the splendour of his life’s work. He was not perfect--no great man is--and it is only the mournful truth to say that the meanest and most unlovable trait in his character was the direct and culpable cause of his death. Among sailors this is already forgotten, and they only remember him, as they are well warranted in doing, as the greatest of English mariners, and the man who conquered their most terrible enemy and their deadliest destroyer. VII _LORD CLIVE_, _QUILL-DRIVER AND CONQUEROR_ VII LORD CLIVE