supercargoes, carrying tin boxes and taking orders like merchants'
bagmen, for goods "to arrive," exploited the Ellice, Kingsmill, and
Gilbert Groups. Bluff-bowed old wave-punchers like the SPEC, the LADY
ALICIA and the E. K. BATESON plunged their clumsy hulls into the
rolling swell of the mid-Pacific, carrying their "trade" of knives,
axes, guns, bad rum, and good tobacco, instead of, as now, white
umbrellas, paper boots and shoes, German sewing-machines and fancy
prints--"zephyrs," the smartly-dressed paper-collared supercargo of
to-day calls them, as he submits a card of patterns to Emilia, the
native teacher's wife, who, as the greatest Lady in the Land, must have
first choice.


* * * * *


In those days the sleek native missionary was an unknown quantity in
the Tokelaus and Kingsmills, and the local white trader answered all
requirements. He was generally a rough character--a runaway from some
Australian or American whaler, or a wandering Ishmael, who, for reasons
of his own, preferred living among the intractable, bawling, and
poverty-stricken people of the equatorial Pacific to dreaming away his
days in the monotonously happy valleys of the Society and Marquesas
Groups.


* * * * *


Such a man was Probyn, who dwelt on one of the low atolls of the Ellice