Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/240

 hundred natives to carry the portable houses, instruments, tents, and provisions. The natives were separated into parties, numbered, and loaded. It was three o’clock when we started, with our two hundred bearers  of burdens, forty hogs, a bullock, and a bullock-hunter,  fifty bearers of poe, twenty-five with calabashes, large  and small, others with iron pots, kettles, frying-pans, etc. Some were lightly and others heavily loaded, their burden being lashed to their backs, or carried on each end of  sticks balanced across their shoulders, which is their  usual mode of carrying burdens.

We encamped for supper about six o’clock at a village called Olaa, having traveled about eight miles. Here we waited until the moon arose, which was at midnight, when we again got under way, making Kapuanhi, or Flea village, about ten  Here they had  some of the largest, as well as some of the smallest, and  spryest fleas I have ever seen. I have been in a number of fleay regions, but never found them so numerous nor  knew them to bite so spitefully as here. Here we made quite a stop for breakfast and for rest, but the fleas gave  us no rest. Besides these tormentors there were mosquitoes of enormous size, scorpions, and centipedes. But the fleas "took the cake." The natives told us that the mosquitoes and fleas were brought to their  island by the first ships years and years before, and that  they had been "biting, flying, and hooping about" ever  since.

On leaving Kapuanhi we found the road very hard to travel. The next village was Kappaohee. Here we refreshed ourselves, took a siesta, and then got under