Mr. Henderson and Louis went on shore; while they were away I tried to make a Mexican sauce, called _salsa_, with the chillis from Samoa and the onions from the Nuieue graves. The chillis burned my hands dreadfully, and the sauce turned out to be too hot to be used except as a flavouring for soups, for which it was excellent.
Mr. Henderson and Louis came back with some return labour boys for Danger Island. One who had signed to serve five years had been waiting another three for a vessel to take him home. He was once disappointed, and nearly died of it. I am thankful he had this opportunity.[7] I can see a horse eating grass on the island, and Louis has seen a carriage.
[7] The "labour boys" do, sometimes, die of homesickness. A black boy called Arriki whom we hired from the German firm, did so die after we left Samoa. The man to whom he was assigned by the German firm told me that both Arriki and a friend of his began to droop and become sullen, and then went quite mad; soon after they died at about the same time from no apparent disease, but he said he knew the symptoms--"just plain homesickness for a cannibal island." Arriki, in a moment of confidence, once described to me his life in his own land. It seemed to consist of flight from one unsafe spot to another, with death hunting on every hand. Both his father and mother had been killed and eaten, with the most of his friends; and yet Arriki died of homesickness.
_4th._--Ran through a light squall in the night and sighted Danger Island at four in the morning. At the first landing is a place in the reef where people upset in boats are sucked under, never to be seen again. Our Quiros passengers are in a wild state of excitement; ladies on the after hatch slipping on their clean shifts, and the comb going from hand to hand. The eight-year exile clutched Louis's hand, and in a voice trembling with emotion ejaculated "coco nuk." As we drew nearer the three islands of the group began to detach themselves. Danger Island, or Pukapuka, is the only one inhabited. It is governed by a king who allows none of his subjects to gather cocoanuts without his royal permission, and as he seldom lets any one have more than is sufficient for his food, very little copra is made. Here the nuts, contrary to the usual custom, are dried in the shell to prevent cockroaches from devouring the meat, and consequently the copra is very fine and white; but the quantity made is so small that it does not pay to keep a trader on the island.