Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/192

 we thought, taught the savages a lesson which they would not be likely soon to forget. Arriving on board the schooner we "spliced the mainbrace" and partook of a  lunch strongly resembling gun-flints and mahogany. Our ship’s bread was extraordinarily hard, and in small pieces about the size of a flint, and our salt junk was as  hard and dry as a piece of old mahogany. Jack before the mast can, at a glance, determine to a certainty whether  the so-called "beef" set before him is really bovine or  horse flesh. Old Jack Weaver, after taking an observation of the sun with the thigh-bone of a horse, soliloquized as follows:



We returned to Mbua Bay, arriving at midnight. The next morning the chief came on board our ship and demanded the two chiefs whom we had captured at Sour  Laib, saying that they were their prisoners, and that they  wanted to roast and eat them as a sacrifice to the gods. The request was not granted. A few days afterward the commodore learned that they belonged to another town,  and that they swam off to assist us. We gave them some presents and sent them home. In the afternoon we got under way and proceeded farther up the bay, coming to  anchor in twenty-eight fathoms of water off Waimea, or  the boiling springs.