“What do you do here, Mr. Mannini?”164 said the captain.
“Oh, we play cards, get drunk, smoke—do anything we’re a mind to.”
“Don’t you want to come aboard and work?”
“Aole! aole make make makou i ka hana. Now, got plenty money; no good, work. Mamule, money pau—all gone. Ah! very good, work!—maikai, hana hana nui!”
“But you’ll spend all your money in this way,” said the captain.
“Aye! me know that. By-’em-by money pau—all gone; then Kanaka work plenty.”
This was a hopeless case, and the captain left them, to wait patiently until their money was gone.
We discharged our hides and tallow, and in about a week were ready to set sail again for the windward. We unmoored, and got everything ready, when the captain made another attempt upon the oven. This time he had more regard to the “mollia tempora fandi,”165 and succeeded very well. He got Mr. Mannini in his interest, and as the shot was getting low in the locker, prevailed upon him and three others to come on board with their chests and baggage, and sent a hasty summons to me and the boy to come ashore with our things, and join the gang at the hide house. This was unexpected to me; but anything in the way of variety I liked; so we got ready, and were pulled ashore. I stood on the beach while the brig got underway, and watched her until she rounded the point, and then went up to the hide house to take up my quarters for a few months.
XIX
The Sandwich Islanders—Hide curing—Woodcutting—Rattlesnakes—Newcomers.
Here was a change in my life as complete as it had been sudden. In the twinkling of an eye, I was transformed from a sailor into a “beachcomber” and a hide curer; yet the novelty and the comparative independence of the life were not unpleasant. Our hide house was a large building, made of rough boards, and intended to hold forty thousand hides. In one corner of it, a small room was parted off, in which four berths were made, where we were to live, with mother earth for our floor. It contained a table, a small locker for pots, spoons, plates, etc., and a small hole cut to let in the light. Here we put our chests, threw our bedding into the berths, and took up our quarters. Over our head was another small room, in which Mr. Russell lived, who had charge of the hide house; the same man who was for a time an officer of the Pilgrim. There he lived in solitary grandeur; eating and sleeping alone (and these were his principal occupations), and communing with his own dignity. The boy was to act as cook; while myself, a giant of a Frenchman named Nicholas, and four Sandwich Islanders, were to cure the hides. Sam, the Frenchman, and myself, lived together in the room, and the four Sandwich Islanders worked and ate with us, but generally slept at the oven. My new messmate, Nicholas, was the most immense man that I had ever seen in my life. He came on the coast in a vessel which was afterwards wrecked, and now let himself out to the different houses to cure hides. He was considerably over six feet, and of a frame so large that he might have been shown for a curiosity. But the most remarkable thing about him was his feet. They were so large that he could not find a pair of shoes in California to fit him, and was obliged to send to Oahu for a pair; and when he got them, he was compelled to wear them down at the heel. He told me once, himself, that he was wrecked in an American brig on the Goodwin Sands, and was sent up to London, to the charge of the American consul, without clothing to his back or shoes to his feet, and was obliged to go about London streets in his stocking feet three or four days, in the month of January, until the consul could have a pair of shoes made for him. His strength was in proportion to his size, and his ignorance to his strength—“strong as an ox, and ignorant as strong.” He neither knew how to read nor write. He had been to sea from a boy, and had seen all kinds of service, and been in every kind of vessel: merchantmen, men-of-war, privateers, and slavers; and from what I could gather from his accounts of himself, and from what he once told
