Lance O'Neill may not have come out of the fight safely if Captain Wetherall had not appeared carrying a loaded rifle. The apparition of a man, supposed to have been effectively killed with a club before making such an undignified entry to the cabin, so unnerved the savages that they broke away and dived overboard.
Yells and cries from the shore drew the attention of the visitors, and through their glasses Wetherall and Lance O'Neill observed the other O'Neill and his two companions fighting desperately with a crowd of savages. Even while they looked, before they could rush to a boat to go ashore and render assistance, the three shore men were knocked down to the beach where they lay quite still, and the victorious natives hauled their boat high up the beach.
Concluding that the super cargo and his companions were dead, Wetherall decided to clear out. The cook clambered aboard, and the five men set to raise the anchor. The anchor, however, had probably become stuck in a coral crevice; they could not break its hold and were in the end obliged to slip it by unshackling it. Having hoisted the headsails, the ship slowly came round, enabling a course to be set and more canvas put on. Lance O'Neill then thought he heard a faint cry and, mounting the rigging, he saw through his glasses a man swimming desperately after the ship. Every possible measure then was taken to slow down the Margaret Chessel, and a boat was lowered to return and pick up the swimmer, who proved to be O'Neill's brother and not much worse for a severe crack on the head. He had come to in time to see the savages standing watching the ship getting away, and he had taken the opportunity presented by the distraction to run past them and into the sea.
6.
Efforts to recruit labour in the circumstances described above tend to draw aside the curtain on what, even in its most favourable aspects, was a brutal labour system and in its worst aspects was nothing more than slavery. The methods employed by Wetherall in this uncontrolled labour trade were gentle in comparison with those adopted by many others of his sort; indeed America had recently staged a civil war on this question.
The Captain urged his son and Francis Cobbold to abandon their ambition of growing cotton and to return with him to Levuka. Fully realising the futility of further effort, Cobbold agreed with young Wetherall to accept the offer of transportation and consequently the remainder of their goods were brought on board. From them one case of brandy and two of port wine were given to Wetherall in payment.
The two lads now found themselves on a ship short of food and short of men to handle her, and Wetherall decided to put in to Black Beach, on the island of Tanna. It was a place notorious for the murderous instinct of the natives but O'Neill, despite his recent experience at Api, volunteered to take a boat ashore to trade with the natives for enough food to take them part of the way to the home port. The Fijians rowed the boat, and Cobbold went along with a rifle in order to protect the super cargo while engaged in barter.
"If they rush me," O'Neill explained grimly, though still with an eager twinkle in his eyes, "you drop the first man coming at me and leave me to get to the boat the best way I can. In no circumstances come right ashore for me. Make no mistake about dropping the first one who rushes."
Once he was landed with the trade chest, the Fijians pulled the boat a little way off the beach. Cobbold set in the stern, the rifle pointed at the gathering of savages halted a short distance from the super cargo. They were well armed and by no means friendly and, in view of what he had gone through, it speaks well of O'Neill's courage and coolness in that he calmly opened negotiations for trade with the backing only of a boy of seventeen armed with a single-shot rifle. In the event of a rush to kill him and capture his trade chest, Cobbold could only hope to stop one, since the affair would be all over before he could re- load, and O'Neill would be either dead or swimming out to the boat and doing his best to dodge a flight of arrows.
Without haste, and certainly with no sign of perturbation, he traded for several pigs, coconuts and yams, and eventually the boat was backed to the shore and the provisions transferred to it, Cobbold continuing to cover O'Neill's retreat.
Thus was a most ticklish piece of business successfully concluded, and thus did Francis Cobbold take his departure from Sandwich Island in the New Hebrides.
CHAPTER FIVE
1871
Stormy Days and Wild Men
1.
The fine weather continued all the way from Sandwich Island to Levuka Harbour, but it was then at the beginning of the hurricane season and the Fiji Archipelago lies well within the hurricane belt.
The toll of lives and ships taken by the Fiji hurricanes is very heavy. Several days before reaching Levuka, Wetherall sensed a potential weather change. The day the Margaret Chessel dropped anchor in Levuka Harbour, the peculiarly leaden sky and the long, oily rollers sweeping by from the south-east told him that the hurricane was coming.
It was towards the end of February 1871 when Francis Cobbold went ashore and once again put up at the Albion Hotel; there were seventeen or eighteen vessels in Levuka Harbour. The enormous Mr Unwin showed his fatherly interest, and his daughter - seeing the ravages of malaria - served him with her best culinary efforts. The hurricane struck Levuka one morning, coming out of the south-west with a rising scream of wind and a wall of white water at its foot. Of the anchored vessels all but three were driven ashore and wrecked, the three fortunate ships being the Margaret Chessel, the Meteor Barge - a regular trader from Sydney - and a steamer that only escaped by steaming hard up to her anchors.
Houses were flattened as though built of cards: others were whirled away. The Albion Hotel rocked like a boat at sea and was one of the few buildings of any consequence that escaped destruction. Cobbold saw the ships come piling ashore, watched house after house being destroyed, and witnessed palm trees growing on the brow of a hill being whirled away like wisps of straw. It was one of the worst hurricanes experienced during the settlement of the white man in the Archipelago, its entire centre having passed over the western part of the group.
When life at Levuka again became normal, the lads brought their remaining goods ashore and settled their account with Doig with part of them. They deposited the balance with the British Consul - a Mr Marsh who had recently arrived. For some time they waited for Pilbrow to turn up and, when he failed to do so, they dissolved the partnership.
2.
During this time the schooner Swallow came into Levuka Harbour, commanded by Captain Bartlett, who for most of his life had been a mate on a whaling ship. 'Bluenose' Bartlett was old, tough and bitter, powerfully built and of medium height, a heavy drinker and, to use an Australian aphorism, a hard case. However, despite the man's apparently wild nature, Francis Cobbold found a certain amount to admire in him, and after several weeks of slight acquaintance he agreed to sail with Bartlett on his next cruise.
Meanwhile O'Neill - the ex-naval officer - had left the Margaret Chessel and been appointed to the command of King Cakobau's Royal Yacht. She was formerly a well-known crack Sydney craft, and had been brought to Fiji by a businessman who had decided that a place without bailiffs would be ideally suitable for him. O'Neill had to go to the island of Taveuni on the King's business and, since that island was just over a day's sail from Levuka, Cobbold accepted the invitation to accompany him to fill in time until the Swallow was again ready to go to sea.
The cruise continued beyond Taveuni, and eventually Cobbold became anxious that he would miss the Swallow. Accordingly he took passage in a trading cutter bound for Levuka where, to his consternation, he was informed that Bartlett had left.
That was a fortunate miss for him, since if he had sailed on the Swallow he might well have left his bones on a New Hebridean island where savages attacked the ship in the night. They had swum out from the shore and had gained a footing on the deck before