We reached Honolulu in due season and discharged all our cargo, except the ambergris. The foremast hands saw every nook and corner of the beautiful town, which was peculiar in having both a tropical and an American air. The bathing was delightful, and its charm was only surpassed by watching from the shore the natives as they glided on the surface of the sea like tiny seaboats or dove with the ease and grace of the seafowl. Ohoo took me to his home, a rude little cottage with few of the modern conveniences, but the home of kind and pleasant people. His father was dead, but his mother, two sisters and a brother were my entertainers. I ate their simple and to me rather curious food, but was particularly pleased with the fish which was cooked between heated stones. They danced and sang their quaint songs, and I truly felt that I was in another world. Ohoo acted as interpreter, and the funny work he made of it promoted mirth and hilarity. I bade my new-made friends good-by, feeling that this brief experience was one of the most delightful episodes of the voyage. Our cargo discharged, and recruits taken aboard, we started for the coast of Japan on November 24, 1860. Whales were, and still are, plentiful in those waters, the first vessels to visit which were the _Syren_ and _Maro_ of Nantucket in 1820. Our cruise was to be a long one, and then we were to go north again. Of all the adventures of whalemen, none exceeds in daring and danger that of Ronald MacDonald, all the more remarkable because the daring was unnecessary and the danger voluntarily incurred. In 1826 the ship _Lady Adams_ disappeared near the coast of Japan, and it was surmised that she had struck a reef and that her crew, after reaching shore, had been murdered. Another vessel, named the _Lawrence_, was wrecked, and it was afterward learned that the second mate and seven of the crew, after landing, had been cruelly treated, one of the number having been tortured to death. It also appeared that the crew of another vessel, which stranded on the coast, received similar treatment, one of the men killing himself to escape further torment. While whalemen regarded the Japanese coast with terror, yet one day, when a whaler was cruising near that coast, MacDonald, a seaman, obtained his discharge, taking in lieu of his “lay” a boat equipped for landing and supplied with sundry books and certain utensils, and boldly made for shore. On his arrival he was stripped of everything, but, as it appeared to his captors that his outfit indicated good intentions, they did not torture him; so he began to teach them English.