They _did_ work their own way; and all day long, and day after day, for it took them several days to fill twenty casks. The battalion of women, in Indian file, could be seen on their winding way as they carried their burdens to the beach, inverted their cocoanut shells over the tunnel, and retraced their weary steps to the subterranean pool, while the men looked complacently on, and Dan, the contractor, lay drunk the best part of the time on fire-water of his own manufacture. As a consequence of his carelessness, he was obliged to fill four or five casks the second time, as we found the water salt on taking it on board, and the captain refused to pay the tobacco until he had fulfilled his contract. It was evident the women had gone astray in their wanderings, and filled some of their shells at the ocean instead of at the inland lake. The manufacture of intoxicating liquor follows close upon the advent of white men as settlers or dwellers among savage tribes; indeed the sight of a whiskey still would have been as satisfactory evidence to the shipwrecked mariner of the presence of civilized men, as, it is said, was that of the gallows. With a rude apparatus, a liquor is distilled from the sap of the cocoanut tree, which is warranted to "kill at as many yards" as any article of tangle-foot dispensed over the bar of the most notorious "chainlocker" in New York or London. The exhilarating cordial, known among seamen by the name of "dent" (the word being a contraction of the Spanish aguardiente), is smuggled on board at almost every island where a white man has located himself; and it is well known that Jack will "suck the monkey" in whatever form or wherever he presents himself, as well in the Pacific as at the West Indies. Here we parted company with our friends of the Leonidas, she being bound to Otaheite, to examine the head of her mainmast, which had been discovered to be rotten to a considerable depth. We worked slowly down to the westward, hauling to the wind during the night, and running off under easy sail in the daytime, so as to look the ground over carefully. We picked up another hundred barrels of oil before we reached the parallel of 160 degrees east, and as we had now twenty-one hundred, the remainder of our voyage was a sort of running cruise towards our last port and home.