"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty
dollars a year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard.
He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve
hundred dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get
fifteen dollars a month. That is because I am a good sailor. I
work hard. The captain has a double awning and drinks beer out of
long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar.
He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He
is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good for you to
know navigation.

Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my
first schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than was I
myself. Later on it was:

"The captain is well paid, master, but the ship is in his keeping
and he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is
better paid, the owner who sits ashore with many servants and
turns his money over."

"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old
schooner at that," I objected. "I should be an old man before I
saved five thousand dollars. "

"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on,
pointing ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.

We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of
ivory-nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar.