This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ...thence to the savage lands of New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, and the Solomon Group. No scheme was too wild, no quest too mad and dangerous for me--and others like me--to embark upon in those fierce days of excitement, when Honolulu was the rendezvous--and, alas! too often the grave--of all the restless wanderers and adventurers who there met together from the confines of the North and South Pacific--from Singapore and Yokohama in the west, from San Francisco, Panama and Valparaiso in the east, and from Melbourne, Sydney, New Zealand, and turbulent Fiji in the south. Wild, wild days indeed were those, and when men threw down a twenty-dollar gold piece on the bar of the " Fort House Hotel" in Honolulu, they cared not that it bore upon it, metaphorically, if not literally, the stain of blood. For there were cruel things done then in the South Seas--whole communities of natives being ruthlessly carried off to slavery in the cotton plantations of Fiji and the guano deposits of the Chincha Islands on the west coast of South America. One evening I fell into conversation with a bronzed, faced old man of over sixty years of age. His name was Hedriott, and for over a quarter of a century he had been master of sperm whalers, sailing out of New London, Connecticut; but he had now retired from whaling and settled in Honolulu, where he had built a nice country house. The quiet, aimless life, however, did not suit him--he was a widower and had no family--and he told me that he had just bought a small fore-and-aft schooner of ninety tons, and was contemplating making a trading voyage, or going into the shark-catching industry among the lowlying atolls of the North Pacific. I was at once interested, and, to make a long story short, agreed...