We did so; he jumped out on the ledge of rock, and with a single "good-by" to us, he rushed up to meet the two natives half-way. They seemed to greet each other as former acquaintances might, and the three disappeared over the brow of the hill together, as we pulled out at the mouth of the bay. This was the last that any one of us ever saw of our "government man;" but some two years afterwards, I read, by accident, in a Sydney newspaper, an account of a smart and bloody skirmish between the English troops and the Maori tribes, and among the slain had been found the body of a white man, tattooed in the face like a chief of rank, and it was recognized as that of a desperado long known in the colonial settlements as Galway Mike. Thus read the statement in the Gazette, and this is all I know of his history.
The passage across the South Pacific Ocean is monotonous and barren of incident. From New Zealand to Cape Horn we had rugged weather and strong winds, for the most part fair for running on our course, at times blowing, day after day, with the regularity of trades, again hauling a few points so as to trim for it on the other quarter, and in one or two instances increasing to a gale, so violent as to compel us to heave to for the safety of the ship. As we approached Cape Horn we again encountered the cutting hail squalls which seem almost peculiar to this part of the world, but with the wind aft, we did not mind them so much as when outward bound. Rolling off before the westerly gales with sufficient press of canvas on the ship to keep her well clear of the mountainous seas in chase of her, with everything well secured, and careful men at the wheel, we laughed at the weather now, and wondered at our own progress, as we counted off five, six, or seven degrees of longitude each day, and reckoned how many more days at this rate of sailing ere we should have room to edge away to the northward and begin to steal towards a milder climate. Degrees of longitude are short ones in this latitude, and we seem to be "putting a girdle round about the earth," if not, like Puck, "in forty minutes," yet still at a rate that appears to us marvellous, as we find our clock nearly half an hour behind the sun each day at meridian, and push her ahead to keep her up to our flying rate of progress.