KOCHE, KING OF PITT.

KOCHE, KING OF PITT.Koche, the subject of this memoir, was born on the remote island of Chatham, in the Southern Pacific Ocean. Forced by a cruel servitude to fly from his native island, he passed many years in absolute solitude on the little uninhabited island of Pitt, lying some miles distant from Chatham. Here he reigned undisputed master of the land and all it contained: whence the title of “King of Pitt” among those who knew him. His account of his native island and its inhabitants, together with his own adventures, show him to have been a man of an undaunted spirit, which no adverse fortune could bend, much less break; and had he been known to Carlyle, would have been placed by him among his heroes for worship and imitation; but, unluckily, Carlyle never heard of him.It is well, in order to understand the life and adventures of Koche, “King of Pitt,” to relate the history of the country and people from which he sprang, before going into the details of his career.Ware-kauri, one of the South Sea islands, called by the English, Chatham, lies several hundred miles to the eastward of New Zealand. Its history up to the year 1791 rests upon tradition, as prior to that date its inhabitants had not acquired, among their many accomplishments, the art of letters. Koche himself, from whose mouth this narrative has been taken, says that his people were from the earliest period inclined to peaceful pursuits, and subsisted chiefly upon fish and seal; that they enjoyed a democracy, and conducted their simple affairs by a council of notable men. He did not hesitate, however, to acknowledge that when at long intervals, covering a generation, a high and prolonged west wind drove a canoe-load of New Zealanders upon their shores, they forthwith and without ceremony slew them. But he justified this departure from their ordinary habits on the ground of public policy; as, had they received them in charity, and pursued the peaceful tenor of their way, their involuntary visitors would have ended by slayingand, moreover, devouring them; the first party of this sort who landed on the island having made it distinctly understood that men and women were their favorite articles of diet. But among themselves, the taking of life, he said, was unknown; and why should it not be, since they were not fond of men, as some people were, and never suffered for want of food; and on the sea-shore they found plenty of seal and birds, and, in the marshes and lakes of the interior, fish and fowl in abundance? No! the race of the Tuïti, his forefathers, were no man-eaters; they had become “missionaries,” or Christian, in the days of his father, and remained so ever since, such of them as had not been devoured or driven to death by the hated Zealander—at whose name his black eye flashed fire—who had made a slave-pen and shambles of his once happy island.Their tradition goes back to a first pair, man and woman, who appeared on the Isle of Rangi-haute, a score of miles to the southeast, called by the English, Pitt. It is a solitary volcanic mountain, lifting its truncated summit above the waters of the South Sea, whose waves have beaten in vain for untold centuries upon its rock-bound base. How the first pair came is unknown; whether brought by the Spirit from above, or created on the mountain, none could tell; the time was remote, and tradition was confused in going back to the origin of the human race, to the beginning of the world; the memory of man did not run beyond the apparition on Rangi-haute.But the history of the couple and of their children is handed down in the following legend: They lived upon the top of the mountain, from whence they caught and worshipped the first ray of the morning sun, and bowed in adoration to that luminary as he sank beneath the western wave. The ground was held sacred; and their descendants in after-days consecrated like spots, devoted alone to prayer and propitiation, on which no article of dress even could be placed, and from the desecration of one of which arose the destruction of the race.Trees clothed the slopes of the mountain, and everywhere among them, planted by the beneficent hand of the Creator, rose the karaka (bread-fruit) laden with golden fruit—the sole food of man, and source of perpetual youth and health. In after-days, it turned acrid, and fatal to life, until the pitying Creator taught his children, by immersion in boiling water and a running stream, to restore it in a measure to its pristine state.One day, a youth wandered down to the sea-shore among the birds that lined the rocks, and, seating himself near where an eagle was perched pluming his wing, they fell into conversation. The eagle complained that they could no longer soar into the high air, by reason of a spell cast over his tribe he believed by the Tuïti; his progenitors, he said, had sailed over the mountain at will, and preyed upon the living mako-mako, or honey-eater and the tuïs, or mocking-bird; while he could fly only in the heavy air along the beach, and was compelled to consort with sea-fowl, who held him in contempt; and to feed on garbage. The youth answered that the blood of the honey-eater and the mocking-bird had cried to the Creator, and brought down upon the eagle his banishment. The Tuïti warred neither with the Maker nor his children; they fed on fruit, and shed no blood: the eagle had banished himself. The king of birds, avoiding the issue, replied that in thegreat island to the northwest, which his friend had doubtless seen from the mountain, the woods were filled with beautiful birds, and fruit of every color, hanging over the dark, transparent waters of many lakes, while here—what a poor place! One solitary mountain, no lakes, and no fruit, save the karaka, which, sweet as it was, was bitter compared with the fruit which grew in the west. There was no man upon it to rule the great island. It called aloud for a master—a son of Tuïti—to go over. The youth listened to the tempter, and ambition elated his soul; he arose from the rock, and asked to be shown the path that led over the water. The eagle, looking at him askance, promised him wings to fly over, provided he would first render an easy service by taking him to the top of the mountain. On hearing this, the youth cast himself upon his face on the sand, trembling; where he lay for hours torn by the conflict between the good spirit of obedience, and the evil one of ambition, as they warred within him for the mastery. As the sun sank, his guardian angel fled discomfited, and he rose to his feet with a shudder, and, taking the eagle on his wrist, ascended the mountain, and in the dark cast him loose in the forbidden field. All night long the flutter and death-cry of birds smote upon his ear, and, when morning dawned, the song of the mako was mute, and the tuïs had ceased to mock.The people assembled in alarm. A child to whom its mother had given fruit fell dead; they gathered about its body in terror. The eagle hovered over them, and uttered his war-cry. The conscience-striken youth confessed. The day was passed in penitence and sorrow about the body of the child in the lap of its wailing mother. Hunger assailed them; they burned the remains on a funeral-pyre built of the fragrant kalamu, and, descending the mountain, fed upon the root of the fern, and drank from the living spring.The youth wandered by the shore, alone, stung with remorse, and, meeting the eagle, was taught by him to construct the korari, the model of all canoes, made in the likeness of a sledge, with a wicker-work of tough creepers, having a false bottom filled with buoyant kelp. He put to sea with his family, and landed on Ware-kauri, which he found, as the eagle had said, uninhabited by man, a continent in size compared to Rangi-haute; with undulating, fertile plains to the south, and lofty mountains in the north, sparkling with lakes of dark transparent water, and vocal with the song and bright with the plumage of birds. Filled with new joy, he sent back tidings to his kinsmen, and was followed by successive emigrations, until Rangi-haute was deserted save by a timid few who feared the sea. Thus came about the settlement of Ware-kauri: and to this extent is the tradition of the people.From this time on they had lived in single families, or in companies of two or three, moving from place to place as food became less plentiful, or as fancy or a love of change dictated; being careful, in pitching their new and fragile habitations, not to crowd upon established groups. In the sealing season, the families of the interior came down to the coast, and laid in from the rocks and reefs a supply of meat and skins; and when fishing on the shore became dull, or the birds wild with much hunting, the people of the sea bundled up their effects, and moved to the interior lakes, chiefly to the great Tewanga, filled with fish, and covered with wild fowl.They dressed in cloaks of sealskin. Their only weapon of offence or defence was a club, seldom used except in killing a seal. Tattooing was unknown. No ornaments were in use. The teeth of deceased relatives were burned with their bodies, not worn about the neck and wrist, as in New Zealand, where they commit the absurdity of placing the departed in a sitting posture in wooden boxes, after abstracting their teeth to deck the survivors, in the name of religion. The Tuïti burned their dead to avoid the fearful idea of prolonged decay. Man springs from the earth as the flower springs: they return him to his mother, as the fall fires, sweeping over the plain, return the flower; she drinks in with the rain the ashes of her children, man and flower, and sends them forth again after a season of repose to reign over and to beautify the land. The songs of the women were plaintive and sweet, rivalling those of the honey-eater, the mako-mako, who sang of love, and of the tuïs, or mocking-bird, that mimicked from every tree and bush, and filled the island with its false but beautiful notes.Thus had lived the race in peace and plenty for centuries beyond their simple means of computation, and thus were living, fearing no evil from without, save the landing of a stray storm-driven canoe from Zealand, when, towards the end of the last century, the sloop-of-warDiscoveryand its armed tenderChatham, commanded by Vancouver, made a voyage of discovery around the world, by command of his majesty. TheChatham, Captain William Henry Broughton, separated in a storm from her consort, discovered the island on Nov. 29, 1791, and took possession of it with the customary ceremonies, in the name of his majesty, as first discoverer.Broughton, as he approached the coast, saw a continued white sandbeach interspersed with cliffs of reddish clay, and mixed with black rocks. The country appeared very pleasant, with clearings here and there, and smoke arising above the trees. With his glass he perceived some people hauling up a canoe, and proceeded to the shore in a cutter. The natives, seated on the beach, invited the party to land, and approached and saluted them by meeting noses; and with great noise entered into an animated but unintelligible conversation by signs, gestures, and speech. They were a cheerful race, the conversation of the English frequently exciting them to bursts of laughter. The young wore feathers in their hair, and a few among them a necklace of mother-of-pearl. All were cleanly and neatly dressed. The woods, which grew in a luxuriant manner, afforded delightful shade, free of low limbs and underbrush, and in many places were formed into arbors by bending and interlacing the branches when young. The soil was rich, and the forests and beach alive with birds of various species, which appeared as though never molested.The surprise of the islanders, their exclamations, and admiration on beholding the strangers, could hardly be imagined. They pointed to the sun and then to Broughton, and inquired if he came from thence. In answer he gave them a dead bird, pointed out the cause of its death, fired his gun, and advanced upon them. All fled to the wood excepting one man, who stood his ground and offered battle. War was proclaimed. The hero was reinforced, and the sailors fell back to the beach, followed by fourteen men, armed with spears or driftwood picked up as they advanced. “When abreast ofthe boat,” says Broughton, “they became clamorous, talked loud to each other, and surrounded us. A young man strutted towards me in a menacing attitude, distorted his person, turned up his eyes, and made hideous faces and fierce gestures. As the boat came in, they began the attack. We fired. Johnson’s musket was knocked from his hand by a club. Our men were forced into the water, when the boat’s crew opened upon them and they fled, save one who fell on the beach with a ball through his breast. As we pushed off, a man came out of the woods, sat down by the deceased, and in a dismal howl uttered his lamentation.” He explains that in making the boast which brought on hostilities he merely wished to show the natives the superior effect of his firearms. This may be so, or it may be that in the laborious process of confirming his majesty’s title to the island, and in order to make assurance doubly sure, he had emptied more bottles to his majesty’s health than was good for him, and had fired to astonish the natives. Be this as it may, it was deeply to be regretted that the answer to a question indicating such deep respect should have been a warlike demonstration. But the Saxon knows but one way to colonize, and that leads the aborigines “into the blind cave of eternal night.”The father of Koche told him that as the ship was leaving the shore the atmosphere became dark, sultry, and gloomy, and thunder and lightning descended the mountain and pursued the retreating strangers into the sea. Meantime, the dead man lay on the white beach with a bullet through his heart. Civilization had paid the Tuïti its first visit.A council was held, and the fact that the slain was not carried off was considered proof that “the children of the sun” were not cannibals, and by some doubts were expressed as to their intent in landing. It was concluded, in the event of their return, to meet them with an emblem of peace. Accordingly, when in after years a sealer entered the bay of Waitangi and its boat touched the sands, the natives laid down their spears and clubs, a man advanced and placed one end of a grass plant in the hands of the captain, and, holding on to the other, made him a speech of welcome, threw over him his own cloak, and thus established a firm and lasting peace; and from thenceforward the fishermen who frequented the coast found them hospitable, cheerful friends, and willing assistants in their labor, and “love between them flourished like the palm.”On the quarter-deck of an American vessel traversing the Pacific Ocean, and chiefly at night, Koche related the sorrows of his race, the private and public wrongs that had reduced the Tuïti to a handful of slaves. Of his own mistreatment he made little account, relating his personal oppression in a spirit of fun and bravado, relieved occasionally by a flash of hate. In calm weather his broken narrative ran tersely, and was marked by humor and a lack of strong feeling; but when the storm-spirit arose, and washed the lower deck and enveloped the upper in spray, his voice grew hoarse, his eye flashed, and his white teeth from time to time came together with a clash that made the blood tingle.He said that one summer, about eighteen years before, a vessel in search of seal anchored in the small oval bay of Pohaute, overlooked by the Maunga Wakai Pai, a volcanic pyramid, the loftiest on the island, at the base of which he lived. With his family and friends, he went down togreet the new-comers, when, to the surprise of every one, there landed among the white men a New Zealand chief armed to the teeth. His hair, carefully combed and oiled, was tied up on the crown of his head, and surrounded by a fillet of white feathers, and from his ears protruded bunches of soft down. Evidently a man of power, accustomed to command, he inspired a mysterious dread, and would have been slain but for the protection he was under. The future darkened as he walked the beach, questioning the people on their politics and religion, manners and customs; and it was long remembered that he highly commended the veneration they entertained for sacred places, and walked off musing when in answer to his inquiry one was pointed out. It was Mate-oro, chief of the Nga-te Motunga, who had lately been defeated in battle by the Waï Kato, and driven with his tribe from the valley of the Komimi to the coast of New Zealand, from whence he had embarked for Ware-kauri, and appeared among the simple inhabitants as Satan in Paradise—the forerunner of troops of fiends.A red bluff beetled over the bay—a conglomerate of particles of colored clay, cemented by a carbonate of lime, embedded with dark shining nodules of iron, and traversed by dikes of basaltic lava. Its summit was sacred. One morning before sunrise, a native ascended to offer his devotions, and was horror-struck on beholding in the holy field an iron pot. He sped down to communicate the startling intelligence, and returned with a party of thirteen to verify the reported sacrilege. Koche, who was of the number, threw off his cloak, tore up a fragment of rock, and dashed the profane utensil to pieces. A party of sailors, with a couple of bull-dogs, guided by Mate-oro, pursued and overtook them. He shot dead one who turned and attempted an explanation; the remaining twelve were bound and hung by the feet from a tree, head downward, until nearly dead. The chief returned to New Zealand, assembled his people, represented the island as fertile and full of unarmed slaves, and recommended its subjugation. The brigLord Rodney, taking her pay in pigs, potatoes, and flax (and flame, later on!), in two trips landed the tribe, numbering eight hundred, on the fated isle. The natives offered no resistance to their fierce invaders armed with firelocks, and were duly parcelled out among their conquerors, and condemned to hard labor for life. No idea of moderation in the amount exacted was entertained. In a short time, they furnished thirty vessels annually with supplies. But the race began rapidly to run out, with bent backs and paralytic limbs. Skulls on the beach, pierced by musket balls or battered by clubs, told a tale to visitors their tyrants could not deny. Valuable as was their labor, in drunken orgies they were slain for food.Once cheerful, full of mirth and laughter, they became morose and taciturn. Koche, with many others, persistently refused to work; some died under, others yielded to, the lash; and he, who had been dragged by a rope to the field, and beaten in vain, and would neither yield nor give up the ghost, was taken by the chief to his house to break in. He continued moody, and maintained his independence so far as to execute only such commissions as pleased him, frequently courting death by mutely and stubbornly refusing to obey orders. Mate-oro seemed to respect his attitude to some extent, and employedhim to supply his table with sea-fish, giving him a canoe furnished with nets and lines for the purpose. The struggle between them now ceased, for this occupation gave Koche solitude and freedom when afloat, and opportunity to muse over the condition of himself and people. He soon came to the conclusion that it was useless to attempt an insurrection, the population being unarmed, dispirited, and under an iron subjugation. But for his single self, he was resolved on resistance to the last, and, as his boat tossed on the wave, he brooded over many schemes for the destruction of his would-be master. A personal conflict was most in accordance with his disposition, and many a time he was tempted, unarmed as he was, to close in a death-struggle, out of which, doubtless, he would have come victorious, if uninterrupted; for though but little above the middle height, he was broad and deep-chested, with sinews of iron, and capable of immense exertion; and, above all, was animated by a spirit that would have revelled in the fight. But followed as the chief was, fair play was not to be looked for, and he reluctantly abandoned his favored purpose. His thoughts often wandered to the cradle of his race, now uninhabited, to which he had made a visit with his father in youth, where he felt assured he would find a harbor of refuge, if Mate-oro could be first despatched. Whilst in the midst of such reflections one afternoon, he drew up from the ocean a fish seldom taken—the mo-eeka, pleasant to the taste, but a virulent poison, a small portion of which when eaten producing a deathly sickness, and a full meal, death. His massive face beamed with satisfaction, and his dark eye glistened as he unhooked and dropped it into the boat, contrary to the custom, which was to kill and throw it back into the sea. On landing, he placed his dangerous prize in a small salt-water pool near the beach, into which, as he caught them, he placed others, until a large mess was collected. This he brought home one night when the wind blew from the northwest, and persuaded the cook to serve up for the morning meal. Directing her to throw the offal to the wood-hogs, he disappeared, and soon after midnight reached the east coast, seized a canoe, and put to sea. The cook, who had her more immediate grudge to gratify, regaled the favorite dogs with the heads and entrails; and this deviation from orders frustrated the amiable purpose of her co-conspirator. The howls of his four-footed companions in the night, followed by their death in the morning, told the suspicious Indian a tale of poison, which a visit to the kitchen confirmed. A portion of the breakfast thrown to a stray dog promptly finished him.Koche was sought for high and low, the island ransacked in vain; no trace of him was found, and the conclusion was arrived at that he had thrown himself into the sea. The chief had taken up a hatchet to kill his cook, but she sullenly asserted she had never seen a mo-eeka before, and was believed and spared, partly because the fish was rare and seldom brought to land when taken, and partly because her good cooking tickled his palate.Prior to this attempt to treat him to the mo-eeka, Mate-oro had swept the Isle of Rangi-haute of its inhabitants. The number of captives had proved much smaller than had been anticipated, amounting in all to ten families, and barely repaid the trouble and risk of the voyage.When Koche, on the day following the episode of the poison-fish—thelast, as he flattered himself, of Mate-oro—ascended the mountain of Pitt, and stood upon a throne—“He was monarch of all he surveyed,His rights there were none to dispute:From the centre all round to the sea,He was lord of the fowl and the brute.”His first care was to make a royal progress over his dominion, in which he fully expected to reign to the termination of his life. He felt no fear of invasion, having traversed Ware-kauri, and effected his embarkation unseen. No motive existed sufficiently strong to induce one, in the face of the difficulties of a return trip against the wind, unless it might be revenge on the part of Mate-oro, who was dead, and had ceased to trouble him. Of domestic foes he had none. The Norway rat, a deserter from a seal-ship, was the only quadruped on the island; and the seal and sea-lion, the only amphibious animals that had ever frequented the coast, had long since been extirpated, and the sealers came there no more. All looked favorable for a quiet reign.Near an old seal camp, he found growing some wild wheat, which he cultivated after a manner, and which, with wild celery, water-cresses, fern-root, and karaka, left him nothing to desire in the way of vegetable food. On the shore, he found crabs and lobsters, and the echini (sea-eggs) in the hollows of the rock; and at times, to supplement his feast, the sea threw up her orange-colored pear. The blue petrel had their habitations in the woods, in the ground under the roots of trees, and in crevices of rocks, and were speared at night as they flew about in numbers with a noise like the croaking of frogs. They passed the day at sea-fishing, and not one was to be seen until dark put a stop to their pursuit, when they returned to land, and fluttered and croaked for hours before retiring to rest. But the subject that gave its sovereign least trouble was the dark-brown water-hen, of the size of a barnyard fowl, which inhabited the skirts of the woods, and fed on the beach. It was unable to fly, and made no attempt to escape when approached, but stood its ground, and bowed, like a pious Turk, to its fate.At the base of the mountain, near a strong spring, he formed a summer-house—an arbor of the trees and shrubs of aromatic myrtle—and, besides supplying his wants, did little else but wander over the isle during the summer season; but, when winter came, he retired to a cave in the mountain, from which he expelled the bats, and devoted his leisure to making the utensils of the chase, toilet, and kitchen. He manufactured baskets, nets, and lines of twisted fibre, fish-hooks of mother-of-pearl, knives of sharp quartz, razors of shell, and mats for bedding and cloaks.He covered his fish alive in red-hot ashes, and, when cooked, peeled off the skin, and ate the flesh from the ribs. He cooked his meat in an oven, of which he had one at each residence, and several at points on the shore. It consisted of a hole in the ground lined with stone, in which he built a fire, and placed pebbles and stones. His game, after the ordinary cleaning, was scrubbed with sand on the outside, and well washed inside and out. Hot pebbles were placed in the belly and shaken in under the breast, and green aromatic leaves stuffed in upon them. The oven was then cleared of fire and pebbles, and lined with green leaves, and the game placed in the bottom. The fat was washed, and placed with hot pebbles in a vessel of bark, and beside it the blood, tiedin a leaf, and propped with hot stones. Then came a layer of such vegetables as were in season or at hand, and the whole was spread over with leaves, on which the remaining hot stones were placed, covered in turn with leaves, and filled in with sod and earth. After an interval according to the size of the mess, it was taken out, spread upon a cloth of the glossy leaves of the karaka, and eaten hot.No king fared better, and no one that ever reigned passed his days in equal quietude and peace. No opposing politicians were there to vex his soul with diverse counsels, and make the worse appear to him the better reason; no blood of fellow-men weighed down his spirit; no friends clamored for reward, or silent enemies shrank from punishment.He knew neither hunger, thirst, nor cold, nor fear, nor jealousy, and approached as near as it lay in fallen man to the estate of our renowned ancestor in the garden before the presentation of Eve. He was content, wanting no Eve, or Cain, or Abel. And for ten solitary years his wish was gratified: he was unapproached, and reigned unchallenged.In 1839, the captain of a vessel from Sidney offered to buy of Mate-oro a portion of the island of Ware-kauri that lay about the bay of Waitangi, then owned and possessed by a branch of the tribe commanded by Nga-te-Toma. The terms were agreed upon, payment to be made on delivery. But the Nga-te-Toma could not be prevailed upon to deliver their possessions of black loam on demand, the more especially as Mate-oro was to handle the purchase-money. War was declared, and the contumacious Te-Toma were driven in the following spring into their stronghold near the beach, and regularly invested.At this juncture, the barkCuba, having on board one Dieffenbach, a naturalist, dropped anchor in the bay, entered into negotiations with both parties, and, moved by the spirit of Christian charity, ended by taking off the Te-Toma at night in boats to their ship—first the women and children, followed by the naked warriors, stained with ochre, armed, feathered, and equipped. The last to leave set fire to the huts and abandoned property. The flames gave the alarm to their opponents, who rushed through the fort to the beach, where they arrived just too late, and presented, illuminated by the burning village in the background, a vivid picture of baffled rage, going through the war-dance with fearful yells and contortions. But they danced in vain, though the exercise may have afforded them a melancholy gratification. TheCubaforthwith put to sea, and landed her human freight on the northeastern shore among friends; but not until she had taken from them deeds in fee of all their possessions in the west. Then, judging wisely that Mate-oro would be found in no mood at that moment to discuss their lately acquired title, she put to sea and bore down on Rangi-haute, being the first vessel to cross the channel since Koche passed over in his canoe ten years before.Dieffenbach landed with a party, and in botanizing the isle was led to the bower by a small spiral column of white smoke that arose from the oven. No inhabitant was to be seen. The summer-house was ransacked of nets, pearl-hooks, knives, and baskets; the oven opened, and a spread of roast duck, hen, and karaka highly relished. The dark, transparent water of the spring reflected the faces of the robbers, as they bent over to drink, with a distinctness of outline unattainable by the white water of otherlands; but when Koche returned to his habitation, which he did when the ship was well at sea, the reflection had vanished from his mirror, the dinner from his oven, and the furniture from his bower. As from a rock he watched the receding bark, freighted with his peace of mind, he hoped and prayed she would pass Ware-kauri without touching; but she ran in nevertheless, communicated with her friends, and related the visit to the isle. The news that Rangi-haute was inhabited soon reached Mate-oro, who read the riddle at once, and soon after went over in person in pursuit of his quondam slave.The party landed before noon, and, separating, closed in upon the bower from different directions to find it empty. They soon, however, struck a fresh trail, which led them down the coast to a small inlet, in which it disappeared. Finding it did not issue on the opposite side, they ascended either bank, watching closely for signs, until the bed of the stream dwindled to a rivulet and entered a thicket; when the trail was taken up and followed with difficulty through bushes and underwood, matted with vines, until it failed totally. Circuits were made, and much time wasted in fruitless search, but the thread was lost, when the leader suddenly ordered the party back on the trail to the mouth of the inlet, which they crossed, and moved down the beach looking for footprints in the sand. Late in the afternoon they arrived opposite a coral rock that stood out a mile in the sea. The water was smooth, and a man swam out to reconnoitre. They watched him until he disappeared behind the rock, which presented a bluff to the shore, and waited patiently to hear from him, but an hour had elapsed and he made no sign. The general opinion was that he had been devoured by a shark. Mate-oro thought otherwise. He sent back a couple of men with orders to bring down the boat at daybreak, set a watch on the beach, built a fire, and went into camp.A favorable breeze springing up, the boat came in early, took aboard the party, and rowed out. In a deep fissure in the rock, from which he was unable to extricate himself, they found the Indian who had swum out the evening before. He told them that when he turned, and was about to land, he was seized by the foot and drawn under the water, and, being tired and out of breath, almost instantly lost consciousness.When he recovered he found himself in utter darkness, and thought he had passed into the spirit-land and was imbedded in a mountain for punishment. After a time he had looked up and seen the stars, but could make nothing of his condition. He had seen or heard no one, but as well as he could recollect, the grasp on his ankle felt like the hand of a man. Several pieces of fresh broken coral were found, but no footprints.The party hastened ashore, and, leaving a man with the boat, moved down the beach, and an hour later struck the trail coming out of the water, and pursued it up a frightful chasm in the mountain, apparently without an outlet. But as they neared the head they discovered the point at which the trail began the ascent, and abandoning their dogs, the men, after much difficulty and danger, gained the summit; when, to their inexpressible astonishment, the trail led them directly back to their camp on the beach—on reaching which they found their boatman lying on the sand bound hand and foot with a running vine, gagged, and stunnedby a blow on the head, and the boat gone.The rage of Mate-oro was excessive, and expended itself upon the ill-starred boatman, whom he ordered to be tossed into the surf—a step he speedily regretted and attempted to rectify; but when dragged out to be cross-questioned, the body could return no answer; its shade had quitted it, and was paddling a phantom canoe over the Stygian river to the shadowy fishing-grounds.The pursuers, full of wrath, set to work and built a korari, in which, when the wind became favorable, they made their way home, calling down maledictions upon the head of the rebellious runaway. During their stay they scoured the island for Koche, and kept a lookout for their lost boat, but saw nothing of either.To the eastward of the southern point of Rangi-haute, and five miles distant, lies the islet of Ranga-tira, consisting of a single mount of moderate elevation, from two to three miles across at the base, behind which Koche took shelter in his captured boat. The same favoring breeze that brought down his enemies in the morning, enabled him in a short run to double the “tira,” and land upon her little beach of forty yards, quite out of sight and reach.Had the fugitive been content to take up his permanent habitation here, all might doubtless have gone well; but the islet was too small to offer a place of concealment, and he feared an unsuccessful search on the larger island would be followed by one on the smaller, in which event escape would be impossible. For this and other reasons, in which the question of food entered, but a cat-like attachment to his old haunts ruled, he returned in the night after an absence of a month, and, reconnoitring, found the coast clear. He had resumed his old habits, adding to them a bright lookout to the northwest, when one morning at daybreak, some months later, he discovered three canoes close in to shore. He instantly struck into a deep ravine, and hoped by doubling to gain time to reach and launch his boat. But he had hardly got fairly off before his trail was taken up, and after a hot chase, in ascending a dark defile, the dogs brought him to bay, and, turning, he took up a rock and dashed out the brains of the foremost, and was in deadly conflict with the pack, bleeding and faint, when a Zealander came up with a club and felled him to the ground. When he recovered his senses they were dragging him down the mountain by a rope tied about the waist, torn with stones and briers, and bathed in blood; but even then, until they reached the white beach, soon stained red, he caught at every root, and projecting stone, and bush, and log, and held on with such tenacity that they were compelled to beat his hands to force them to relax. He lay on the sand bound hand and foot all night, with parched mouth and throat, so bitten by the black sand-fly that by noon on the following day he was swollen out of the semblance of man.When taken back to Ware-kauri he was confined and watched closely, taunted with the title of “King of Pitt Island,” fed and watered, but not bodily ill-used. When sufficiently recovered and ordered to work, he stood mute under two days’ lashing, seeking death; but his master, who felt his honor enlisted in the contest, had resolved to break, not kill him; and no provocation could wring from him the death-stroke. Perceiving this on the third morning, Koche setto work when ordered, and from thence performed the labor of two men; apparently completely subjugated. From the fight with the dogs in the defile he had not uttered a word; now he became cheerful and talkative.In the fourth year of his renewed captivity, all watch upon him having been removed, he was one evening among the slaves, employed in paddling out canoe-loads of provisions to a whale-ship that was lifting her anchor to sail. He boarded, and hid away in the hold unnoticed; and the ship was clearing the harbor, when Mate-oro came out and instituted search. He was found and dragged on deck, but broke from his captors and sprang overboard. The ship’s boat gave chase, overhauled him, and, as Mate-oro rose up in the bow to lay hands on him, he dived, and, coming up behind, unshipped their rudder, and in the gathering dark reached the headland and disappeared. He made his way by forest paths to the eastern coast, where, finding an abandoned and broken canoe, he stuffed her with kelp, and put to sea; by daylight he had sunk her below the eastern horizon, and at nightfall ran her on the beach of Rangi-haute.Koche was himself again. He breathed anew the air of freedom, and his soul exulted. Taught in his little school of adversity, he knew that vigilance would be the price of his liberty, and determined to exercise it, and carried out his resolution as well, perhaps, as any man since the sun first shed on Eden his delightful beams—that sun which shone upon him in his frail canoe that day for the last time for two dark years; and on which, of his own free will, he never would have looked again.After picking up what food he could find upon the beach, and breaking up and burying his canoe in a sand dune, he crossed the mountain, and, plunging into an obscure thicket, almost impenetrable, crawled into a crevice surrounded by jagged fragments of volcanic rock. The spot was almost absolutely inaccessible, and the danger of approach would have appalled a spirit less dauntless than his—not bent on liberty or death. He had breasted his way to it in the glare of day when perambulating his dominion; he now entered it with speed and safety a fugitive at midnight.In his retreat, he made and used no instrument whatever—no spear, or snare, or knife, or line, or net. He never once approached the shore, or left the circle of his crags and dense surrounding thicket. At dusk he peered from his sepulchre, and watched the birds take up their roosts upon the overtopping trees and bushes, and climbed up and caught them in the night, and ate them raw. Hunger at first assailed him; but his eye, becoming adjusted to the dark, marked down his prey with unerring certainty, and he was soon able to drive and keep the wolf from his den; and a water-drip in the rock quenched his thirst. At dawn he sank into the earth, leaving behind no trace, no print of foot, no trail; and when the sun uprose,“The mists were curl’dBack from a solitary world.”The annals of his dark reign are soon told. Sleeping one day down in the impenetrable darkness, he was startled by the deep bay of a bloodhound; and his prophetic soul told him that the day of his second dethronement had dawned, and his night of freedom passed. Mate-oro had searched the isle in vain, and givenup the hunt, when Gobiah, a New Zealand son of Belial, brought over a slave-hunter whose deep hate penetrated the impenetrable, and ran the fugitive to earth.Expectation in Ware-kauri was on tiptoe during the absence of the hunting-party; and on its return with the captive king a curious crowd assembled on the beach to greet them. As the boat came through the surf with Mate-oro on the prow and Koche bound at his feet, a shout went up in honor of the chief, followed by derisive howling for the “King of Pitt.” The march across the island was triumphal. Crowds flocked to gaze upon the principal figures. The New Zealanders praised their persevering chief, and called upon the “king” to burst his bonds. The Tuïti, apart, with sullen and downcast looks, felt their faint hearts beat quick as they caught a glance of their indomitable countryman, stimulated by the sunlight, erect and proud, by whom the taunts of the malignant masters were passing as the idle wind.Gobiah and the hound shared the honors of the day, and all went merry as a marriage-bell.The capture, with its varying and contradictory details, was the sensation of the period, and would have filled the columns of a newspaper, had one existed, for a month. It subsided in due course, and Koche, after another futile attempt to get himself despatched, went to work as before with vigor and good cheer. His sovereign character was now universally recognized, and he was invariably addressed by his title in full. He accepted it in good humor, tinged with a little pride. The Zealanders looked upon him with secret respect, while by his own people he was regarded as one who, had their lot been less hopeless, would have proved the leader and saviour of the nation.Two years elapsed, when an American vessel, ready for sea, was boarded by Mate-oro, and a demand made for the fugitive king. The ship was searched from deck to keel, but no trace of him found. Unwilling to anger the fierce chief, who still declared he was aboard, she lay over a day, and the search was renewed with like effect. In the afternoon she stood out to sea, and at nightfall her hull was down, and the island had disappeared, all save one volcanic peak that rose like a pyramid above the waves. Then Koche came out from the fore-chains, in which he had in some mysterious manner buried himself, and caught a last glance of his native mountain as it sank for ever from his view.

KOCHE, KING OF PITT.Koche, the subject of this memoir, was born on the remote island of Chatham, in the Southern Pacific Ocean. Forced by a cruel servitude to fly from his native island, he passed many years in absolute solitude on the little uninhabited island of Pitt, lying some miles distant from Chatham. Here he reigned undisputed master of the land and all it contained: whence the title of “King of Pitt” among those who knew him. His account of his native island and its inhabitants, together with his own adventures, show him to have been a man of an undaunted spirit, which no adverse fortune could bend, much less break; and had he been known to Carlyle, would have been placed by him among his heroes for worship and imitation; but, unluckily, Carlyle never heard of him.It is well, in order to understand the life and adventures of Koche, “King of Pitt,” to relate the history of the country and people from which he sprang, before going into the details of his career.Ware-kauri, one of the South Sea islands, called by the English, Chatham, lies several hundred miles to the eastward of New Zealand. Its history up to the year 1791 rests upon tradition, as prior to that date its inhabitants had not acquired, among their many accomplishments, the art of letters. Koche himself, from whose mouth this narrative has been taken, says that his people were from the earliest period inclined to peaceful pursuits, and subsisted chiefly upon fish and seal; that they enjoyed a democracy, and conducted their simple affairs by a council of notable men. He did not hesitate, however, to acknowledge that when at long intervals, covering a generation, a high and prolonged west wind drove a canoe-load of New Zealanders upon their shores, they forthwith and without ceremony slew them. But he justified this departure from their ordinary habits on the ground of public policy; as, had they received them in charity, and pursued the peaceful tenor of their way, their involuntary visitors would have ended by slayingand, moreover, devouring them; the first party of this sort who landed on the island having made it distinctly understood that men and women were their favorite articles of diet. But among themselves, the taking of life, he said, was unknown; and why should it not be, since they were not fond of men, as some people were, and never suffered for want of food; and on the sea-shore they found plenty of seal and birds, and, in the marshes and lakes of the interior, fish and fowl in abundance? No! the race of the Tuïti, his forefathers, were no man-eaters; they had become “missionaries,” or Christian, in the days of his father, and remained so ever since, such of them as had not been devoured or driven to death by the hated Zealander—at whose name his black eye flashed fire—who had made a slave-pen and shambles of his once happy island.Their tradition goes back to a first pair, man and woman, who appeared on the Isle of Rangi-haute, a score of miles to the southeast, called by the English, Pitt. It is a solitary volcanic mountain, lifting its truncated summit above the waters of the South Sea, whose waves have beaten in vain for untold centuries upon its rock-bound base. How the first pair came is unknown; whether brought by the Spirit from above, or created on the mountain, none could tell; the time was remote, and tradition was confused in going back to the origin of the human race, to the beginning of the world; the memory of man did not run beyond the apparition on Rangi-haute.But the history of the couple and of their children is handed down in the following legend: They lived upon the top of the mountain, from whence they caught and worshipped the first ray of the morning sun, and bowed in adoration to that luminary as he sank beneath the western wave. The ground was held sacred; and their descendants in after-days consecrated like spots, devoted alone to prayer and propitiation, on which no article of dress even could be placed, and from the desecration of one of which arose the destruction of the race.Trees clothed the slopes of the mountain, and everywhere among them, planted by the beneficent hand of the Creator, rose the karaka (bread-fruit) laden with golden fruit—the sole food of man, and source of perpetual youth and health. In after-days, it turned acrid, and fatal to life, until the pitying Creator taught his children, by immersion in boiling water and a running stream, to restore it in a measure to its pristine state.One day, a youth wandered down to the sea-shore among the birds that lined the rocks, and, seating himself near where an eagle was perched pluming his wing, they fell into conversation. The eagle complained that they could no longer soar into the high air, by reason of a spell cast over his tribe he believed by the Tuïti; his progenitors, he said, had sailed over the mountain at will, and preyed upon the living mako-mako, or honey-eater and the tuïs, or mocking-bird; while he could fly only in the heavy air along the beach, and was compelled to consort with sea-fowl, who held him in contempt; and to feed on garbage. The youth answered that the blood of the honey-eater and the mocking-bird had cried to the Creator, and brought down upon the eagle his banishment. The Tuïti warred neither with the Maker nor his children; they fed on fruit, and shed no blood: the eagle had banished himself. The king of birds, avoiding the issue, replied that in thegreat island to the northwest, which his friend had doubtless seen from the mountain, the woods were filled with beautiful birds, and fruit of every color, hanging over the dark, transparent waters of many lakes, while here—what a poor place! One solitary mountain, no lakes, and no fruit, save the karaka, which, sweet as it was, was bitter compared with the fruit which grew in the west. There was no man upon it to rule the great island. It called aloud for a master—a son of Tuïti—to go over. The youth listened to the tempter, and ambition elated his soul; he arose from the rock, and asked to be shown the path that led over the water. The eagle, looking at him askance, promised him wings to fly over, provided he would first render an easy service by taking him to the top of the mountain. On hearing this, the youth cast himself upon his face on the sand, trembling; where he lay for hours torn by the conflict between the good spirit of obedience, and the evil one of ambition, as they warred within him for the mastery. As the sun sank, his guardian angel fled discomfited, and he rose to his feet with a shudder, and, taking the eagle on his wrist, ascended the mountain, and in the dark cast him loose in the forbidden field. All night long the flutter and death-cry of birds smote upon his ear, and, when morning dawned, the song of the mako was mute, and the tuïs had ceased to mock.The people assembled in alarm. A child to whom its mother had given fruit fell dead; they gathered about its body in terror. The eagle hovered over them, and uttered his war-cry. The conscience-striken youth confessed. The day was passed in penitence and sorrow about the body of the child in the lap of its wailing mother. Hunger assailed them; they burned the remains on a funeral-pyre built of the fragrant kalamu, and, descending the mountain, fed upon the root of the fern, and drank from the living spring.The youth wandered by the shore, alone, stung with remorse, and, meeting the eagle, was taught by him to construct the korari, the model of all canoes, made in the likeness of a sledge, with a wicker-work of tough creepers, having a false bottom filled with buoyant kelp. He put to sea with his family, and landed on Ware-kauri, which he found, as the eagle had said, uninhabited by man, a continent in size compared to Rangi-haute; with undulating, fertile plains to the south, and lofty mountains in the north, sparkling with lakes of dark transparent water, and vocal with the song and bright with the plumage of birds. Filled with new joy, he sent back tidings to his kinsmen, and was followed by successive emigrations, until Rangi-haute was deserted save by a timid few who feared the sea. Thus came about the settlement of Ware-kauri: and to this extent is the tradition of the people.From this time on they had lived in single families, or in companies of two or three, moving from place to place as food became less plentiful, or as fancy or a love of change dictated; being careful, in pitching their new and fragile habitations, not to crowd upon established groups. In the sealing season, the families of the interior came down to the coast, and laid in from the rocks and reefs a supply of meat and skins; and when fishing on the shore became dull, or the birds wild with much hunting, the people of the sea bundled up their effects, and moved to the interior lakes, chiefly to the great Tewanga, filled with fish, and covered with wild fowl.They dressed in cloaks of sealskin. Their only weapon of offence or defence was a club, seldom used except in killing a seal. Tattooing was unknown. No ornaments were in use. The teeth of deceased relatives were burned with their bodies, not worn about the neck and wrist, as in New Zealand, where they commit the absurdity of placing the departed in a sitting posture in wooden boxes, after abstracting their teeth to deck the survivors, in the name of religion. The Tuïti burned their dead to avoid the fearful idea of prolonged decay. Man springs from the earth as the flower springs: they return him to his mother, as the fall fires, sweeping over the plain, return the flower; she drinks in with the rain the ashes of her children, man and flower, and sends them forth again after a season of repose to reign over and to beautify the land. The songs of the women were plaintive and sweet, rivalling those of the honey-eater, the mako-mako, who sang of love, and of the tuïs, or mocking-bird, that mimicked from every tree and bush, and filled the island with its false but beautiful notes.Thus had lived the race in peace and plenty for centuries beyond their simple means of computation, and thus were living, fearing no evil from without, save the landing of a stray storm-driven canoe from Zealand, when, towards the end of the last century, the sloop-of-warDiscoveryand its armed tenderChatham, commanded by Vancouver, made a voyage of discovery around the world, by command of his majesty. TheChatham, Captain William Henry Broughton, separated in a storm from her consort, discovered the island on Nov. 29, 1791, and took possession of it with the customary ceremonies, in the name of his majesty, as first discoverer.Broughton, as he approached the coast, saw a continued white sandbeach interspersed with cliffs of reddish clay, and mixed with black rocks. The country appeared very pleasant, with clearings here and there, and smoke arising above the trees. With his glass he perceived some people hauling up a canoe, and proceeded to the shore in a cutter. The natives, seated on the beach, invited the party to land, and approached and saluted them by meeting noses; and with great noise entered into an animated but unintelligible conversation by signs, gestures, and speech. They were a cheerful race, the conversation of the English frequently exciting them to bursts of laughter. The young wore feathers in their hair, and a few among them a necklace of mother-of-pearl. All were cleanly and neatly dressed. The woods, which grew in a luxuriant manner, afforded delightful shade, free of low limbs and underbrush, and in many places were formed into arbors by bending and interlacing the branches when young. The soil was rich, and the forests and beach alive with birds of various species, which appeared as though never molested.The surprise of the islanders, their exclamations, and admiration on beholding the strangers, could hardly be imagined. They pointed to the sun and then to Broughton, and inquired if he came from thence. In answer he gave them a dead bird, pointed out the cause of its death, fired his gun, and advanced upon them. All fled to the wood excepting one man, who stood his ground and offered battle. War was proclaimed. The hero was reinforced, and the sailors fell back to the beach, followed by fourteen men, armed with spears or driftwood picked up as they advanced. “When abreast ofthe boat,” says Broughton, “they became clamorous, talked loud to each other, and surrounded us. A young man strutted towards me in a menacing attitude, distorted his person, turned up his eyes, and made hideous faces and fierce gestures. As the boat came in, they began the attack. We fired. Johnson’s musket was knocked from his hand by a club. Our men were forced into the water, when the boat’s crew opened upon them and they fled, save one who fell on the beach with a ball through his breast. As we pushed off, a man came out of the woods, sat down by the deceased, and in a dismal howl uttered his lamentation.” He explains that in making the boast which brought on hostilities he merely wished to show the natives the superior effect of his firearms. This may be so, or it may be that in the laborious process of confirming his majesty’s title to the island, and in order to make assurance doubly sure, he had emptied more bottles to his majesty’s health than was good for him, and had fired to astonish the natives. Be this as it may, it was deeply to be regretted that the answer to a question indicating such deep respect should have been a warlike demonstration. But the Saxon knows but one way to colonize, and that leads the aborigines “into the blind cave of eternal night.”The father of Koche told him that as the ship was leaving the shore the atmosphere became dark, sultry, and gloomy, and thunder and lightning descended the mountain and pursued the retreating strangers into the sea. Meantime, the dead man lay on the white beach with a bullet through his heart. Civilization had paid the Tuïti its first visit.A council was held, and the fact that the slain was not carried off was considered proof that “the children of the sun” were not cannibals, and by some doubts were expressed as to their intent in landing. It was concluded, in the event of their return, to meet them with an emblem of peace. Accordingly, when in after years a sealer entered the bay of Waitangi and its boat touched the sands, the natives laid down their spears and clubs, a man advanced and placed one end of a grass plant in the hands of the captain, and, holding on to the other, made him a speech of welcome, threw over him his own cloak, and thus established a firm and lasting peace; and from thenceforward the fishermen who frequented the coast found them hospitable, cheerful friends, and willing assistants in their labor, and “love between them flourished like the palm.”On the quarter-deck of an American vessel traversing the Pacific Ocean, and chiefly at night, Koche related the sorrows of his race, the private and public wrongs that had reduced the Tuïti to a handful of slaves. Of his own mistreatment he made little account, relating his personal oppression in a spirit of fun and bravado, relieved occasionally by a flash of hate. In calm weather his broken narrative ran tersely, and was marked by humor and a lack of strong feeling; but when the storm-spirit arose, and washed the lower deck and enveloped the upper in spray, his voice grew hoarse, his eye flashed, and his white teeth from time to time came together with a clash that made the blood tingle.He said that one summer, about eighteen years before, a vessel in search of seal anchored in the small oval bay of Pohaute, overlooked by the Maunga Wakai Pai, a volcanic pyramid, the loftiest on the island, at the base of which he lived. With his family and friends, he went down togreet the new-comers, when, to the surprise of every one, there landed among the white men a New Zealand chief armed to the teeth. His hair, carefully combed and oiled, was tied up on the crown of his head, and surrounded by a fillet of white feathers, and from his ears protruded bunches of soft down. Evidently a man of power, accustomed to command, he inspired a mysterious dread, and would have been slain but for the protection he was under. The future darkened as he walked the beach, questioning the people on their politics and religion, manners and customs; and it was long remembered that he highly commended the veneration they entertained for sacred places, and walked off musing when in answer to his inquiry one was pointed out. It was Mate-oro, chief of the Nga-te Motunga, who had lately been defeated in battle by the Waï Kato, and driven with his tribe from the valley of the Komimi to the coast of New Zealand, from whence he had embarked for Ware-kauri, and appeared among the simple inhabitants as Satan in Paradise—the forerunner of troops of fiends.A red bluff beetled over the bay—a conglomerate of particles of colored clay, cemented by a carbonate of lime, embedded with dark shining nodules of iron, and traversed by dikes of basaltic lava. Its summit was sacred. One morning before sunrise, a native ascended to offer his devotions, and was horror-struck on beholding in the holy field an iron pot. He sped down to communicate the startling intelligence, and returned with a party of thirteen to verify the reported sacrilege. Koche, who was of the number, threw off his cloak, tore up a fragment of rock, and dashed the profane utensil to pieces. A party of sailors, with a couple of bull-dogs, guided by Mate-oro, pursued and overtook them. He shot dead one who turned and attempted an explanation; the remaining twelve were bound and hung by the feet from a tree, head downward, until nearly dead. The chief returned to New Zealand, assembled his people, represented the island as fertile and full of unarmed slaves, and recommended its subjugation. The brigLord Rodney, taking her pay in pigs, potatoes, and flax (and flame, later on!), in two trips landed the tribe, numbering eight hundred, on the fated isle. The natives offered no resistance to their fierce invaders armed with firelocks, and were duly parcelled out among their conquerors, and condemned to hard labor for life. No idea of moderation in the amount exacted was entertained. In a short time, they furnished thirty vessels annually with supplies. But the race began rapidly to run out, with bent backs and paralytic limbs. Skulls on the beach, pierced by musket balls or battered by clubs, told a tale to visitors their tyrants could not deny. Valuable as was their labor, in drunken orgies they were slain for food.Once cheerful, full of mirth and laughter, they became morose and taciturn. Koche, with many others, persistently refused to work; some died under, others yielded to, the lash; and he, who had been dragged by a rope to the field, and beaten in vain, and would neither yield nor give up the ghost, was taken by the chief to his house to break in. He continued moody, and maintained his independence so far as to execute only such commissions as pleased him, frequently courting death by mutely and stubbornly refusing to obey orders. Mate-oro seemed to respect his attitude to some extent, and employedhim to supply his table with sea-fish, giving him a canoe furnished with nets and lines for the purpose. The struggle between them now ceased, for this occupation gave Koche solitude and freedom when afloat, and opportunity to muse over the condition of himself and people. He soon came to the conclusion that it was useless to attempt an insurrection, the population being unarmed, dispirited, and under an iron subjugation. But for his single self, he was resolved on resistance to the last, and, as his boat tossed on the wave, he brooded over many schemes for the destruction of his would-be master. A personal conflict was most in accordance with his disposition, and many a time he was tempted, unarmed as he was, to close in a death-struggle, out of which, doubtless, he would have come victorious, if uninterrupted; for though but little above the middle height, he was broad and deep-chested, with sinews of iron, and capable of immense exertion; and, above all, was animated by a spirit that would have revelled in the fight. But followed as the chief was, fair play was not to be looked for, and he reluctantly abandoned his favored purpose. His thoughts often wandered to the cradle of his race, now uninhabited, to which he had made a visit with his father in youth, where he felt assured he would find a harbor of refuge, if Mate-oro could be first despatched. Whilst in the midst of such reflections one afternoon, he drew up from the ocean a fish seldom taken—the mo-eeka, pleasant to the taste, but a virulent poison, a small portion of which when eaten producing a deathly sickness, and a full meal, death. His massive face beamed with satisfaction, and his dark eye glistened as he unhooked and dropped it into the boat, contrary to the custom, which was to kill and throw it back into the sea. On landing, he placed his dangerous prize in a small salt-water pool near the beach, into which, as he caught them, he placed others, until a large mess was collected. This he brought home one night when the wind blew from the northwest, and persuaded the cook to serve up for the morning meal. Directing her to throw the offal to the wood-hogs, he disappeared, and soon after midnight reached the east coast, seized a canoe, and put to sea. The cook, who had her more immediate grudge to gratify, regaled the favorite dogs with the heads and entrails; and this deviation from orders frustrated the amiable purpose of her co-conspirator. The howls of his four-footed companions in the night, followed by their death in the morning, told the suspicious Indian a tale of poison, which a visit to the kitchen confirmed. A portion of the breakfast thrown to a stray dog promptly finished him.Koche was sought for high and low, the island ransacked in vain; no trace of him was found, and the conclusion was arrived at that he had thrown himself into the sea. The chief had taken up a hatchet to kill his cook, but she sullenly asserted she had never seen a mo-eeka before, and was believed and spared, partly because the fish was rare and seldom brought to land when taken, and partly because her good cooking tickled his palate.Prior to this attempt to treat him to the mo-eeka, Mate-oro had swept the Isle of Rangi-haute of its inhabitants. The number of captives had proved much smaller than had been anticipated, amounting in all to ten families, and barely repaid the trouble and risk of the voyage.When Koche, on the day following the episode of the poison-fish—thelast, as he flattered himself, of Mate-oro—ascended the mountain of Pitt, and stood upon a throne—“He was monarch of all he surveyed,His rights there were none to dispute:From the centre all round to the sea,He was lord of the fowl and the brute.”His first care was to make a royal progress over his dominion, in which he fully expected to reign to the termination of his life. He felt no fear of invasion, having traversed Ware-kauri, and effected his embarkation unseen. No motive existed sufficiently strong to induce one, in the face of the difficulties of a return trip against the wind, unless it might be revenge on the part of Mate-oro, who was dead, and had ceased to trouble him. Of domestic foes he had none. The Norway rat, a deserter from a seal-ship, was the only quadruped on the island; and the seal and sea-lion, the only amphibious animals that had ever frequented the coast, had long since been extirpated, and the sealers came there no more. All looked favorable for a quiet reign.Near an old seal camp, he found growing some wild wheat, which he cultivated after a manner, and which, with wild celery, water-cresses, fern-root, and karaka, left him nothing to desire in the way of vegetable food. On the shore, he found crabs and lobsters, and the echini (sea-eggs) in the hollows of the rock; and at times, to supplement his feast, the sea threw up her orange-colored pear. The blue petrel had their habitations in the woods, in the ground under the roots of trees, and in crevices of rocks, and were speared at night as they flew about in numbers with a noise like the croaking of frogs. They passed the day at sea-fishing, and not one was to be seen until dark put a stop to their pursuit, when they returned to land, and fluttered and croaked for hours before retiring to rest. But the subject that gave its sovereign least trouble was the dark-brown water-hen, of the size of a barnyard fowl, which inhabited the skirts of the woods, and fed on the beach. It was unable to fly, and made no attempt to escape when approached, but stood its ground, and bowed, like a pious Turk, to its fate.At the base of the mountain, near a strong spring, he formed a summer-house—an arbor of the trees and shrubs of aromatic myrtle—and, besides supplying his wants, did little else but wander over the isle during the summer season; but, when winter came, he retired to a cave in the mountain, from which he expelled the bats, and devoted his leisure to making the utensils of the chase, toilet, and kitchen. He manufactured baskets, nets, and lines of twisted fibre, fish-hooks of mother-of-pearl, knives of sharp quartz, razors of shell, and mats for bedding and cloaks.He covered his fish alive in red-hot ashes, and, when cooked, peeled off the skin, and ate the flesh from the ribs. He cooked his meat in an oven, of which he had one at each residence, and several at points on the shore. It consisted of a hole in the ground lined with stone, in which he built a fire, and placed pebbles and stones. His game, after the ordinary cleaning, was scrubbed with sand on the outside, and well washed inside and out. Hot pebbles were placed in the belly and shaken in under the breast, and green aromatic leaves stuffed in upon them. The oven was then cleared of fire and pebbles, and lined with green leaves, and the game placed in the bottom. The fat was washed, and placed with hot pebbles in a vessel of bark, and beside it the blood, tiedin a leaf, and propped with hot stones. Then came a layer of such vegetables as were in season or at hand, and the whole was spread over with leaves, on which the remaining hot stones were placed, covered in turn with leaves, and filled in with sod and earth. After an interval according to the size of the mess, it was taken out, spread upon a cloth of the glossy leaves of the karaka, and eaten hot.No king fared better, and no one that ever reigned passed his days in equal quietude and peace. No opposing politicians were there to vex his soul with diverse counsels, and make the worse appear to him the better reason; no blood of fellow-men weighed down his spirit; no friends clamored for reward, or silent enemies shrank from punishment.He knew neither hunger, thirst, nor cold, nor fear, nor jealousy, and approached as near as it lay in fallen man to the estate of our renowned ancestor in the garden before the presentation of Eve. He was content, wanting no Eve, or Cain, or Abel. And for ten solitary years his wish was gratified: he was unapproached, and reigned unchallenged.In 1839, the captain of a vessel from Sidney offered to buy of Mate-oro a portion of the island of Ware-kauri that lay about the bay of Waitangi, then owned and possessed by a branch of the tribe commanded by Nga-te-Toma. The terms were agreed upon, payment to be made on delivery. But the Nga-te-Toma could not be prevailed upon to deliver their possessions of black loam on demand, the more especially as Mate-oro was to handle the purchase-money. War was declared, and the contumacious Te-Toma were driven in the following spring into their stronghold near the beach, and regularly invested.At this juncture, the barkCuba, having on board one Dieffenbach, a naturalist, dropped anchor in the bay, entered into negotiations with both parties, and, moved by the spirit of Christian charity, ended by taking off the Te-Toma at night in boats to their ship—first the women and children, followed by the naked warriors, stained with ochre, armed, feathered, and equipped. The last to leave set fire to the huts and abandoned property. The flames gave the alarm to their opponents, who rushed through the fort to the beach, where they arrived just too late, and presented, illuminated by the burning village in the background, a vivid picture of baffled rage, going through the war-dance with fearful yells and contortions. But they danced in vain, though the exercise may have afforded them a melancholy gratification. TheCubaforthwith put to sea, and landed her human freight on the northeastern shore among friends; but not until she had taken from them deeds in fee of all their possessions in the west. Then, judging wisely that Mate-oro would be found in no mood at that moment to discuss their lately acquired title, she put to sea and bore down on Rangi-haute, being the first vessel to cross the channel since Koche passed over in his canoe ten years before.Dieffenbach landed with a party, and in botanizing the isle was led to the bower by a small spiral column of white smoke that arose from the oven. No inhabitant was to be seen. The summer-house was ransacked of nets, pearl-hooks, knives, and baskets; the oven opened, and a spread of roast duck, hen, and karaka highly relished. The dark, transparent water of the spring reflected the faces of the robbers, as they bent over to drink, with a distinctness of outline unattainable by the white water of otherlands; but when Koche returned to his habitation, which he did when the ship was well at sea, the reflection had vanished from his mirror, the dinner from his oven, and the furniture from his bower. As from a rock he watched the receding bark, freighted with his peace of mind, he hoped and prayed she would pass Ware-kauri without touching; but she ran in nevertheless, communicated with her friends, and related the visit to the isle. The news that Rangi-haute was inhabited soon reached Mate-oro, who read the riddle at once, and soon after went over in person in pursuit of his quondam slave.The party landed before noon, and, separating, closed in upon the bower from different directions to find it empty. They soon, however, struck a fresh trail, which led them down the coast to a small inlet, in which it disappeared. Finding it did not issue on the opposite side, they ascended either bank, watching closely for signs, until the bed of the stream dwindled to a rivulet and entered a thicket; when the trail was taken up and followed with difficulty through bushes and underwood, matted with vines, until it failed totally. Circuits were made, and much time wasted in fruitless search, but the thread was lost, when the leader suddenly ordered the party back on the trail to the mouth of the inlet, which they crossed, and moved down the beach looking for footprints in the sand. Late in the afternoon they arrived opposite a coral rock that stood out a mile in the sea. The water was smooth, and a man swam out to reconnoitre. They watched him until he disappeared behind the rock, which presented a bluff to the shore, and waited patiently to hear from him, but an hour had elapsed and he made no sign. The general opinion was that he had been devoured by a shark. Mate-oro thought otherwise. He sent back a couple of men with orders to bring down the boat at daybreak, set a watch on the beach, built a fire, and went into camp.A favorable breeze springing up, the boat came in early, took aboard the party, and rowed out. In a deep fissure in the rock, from which he was unable to extricate himself, they found the Indian who had swum out the evening before. He told them that when he turned, and was about to land, he was seized by the foot and drawn under the water, and, being tired and out of breath, almost instantly lost consciousness.When he recovered he found himself in utter darkness, and thought he had passed into the spirit-land and was imbedded in a mountain for punishment. After a time he had looked up and seen the stars, but could make nothing of his condition. He had seen or heard no one, but as well as he could recollect, the grasp on his ankle felt like the hand of a man. Several pieces of fresh broken coral were found, but no footprints.The party hastened ashore, and, leaving a man with the boat, moved down the beach, and an hour later struck the trail coming out of the water, and pursued it up a frightful chasm in the mountain, apparently without an outlet. But as they neared the head they discovered the point at which the trail began the ascent, and abandoning their dogs, the men, after much difficulty and danger, gained the summit; when, to their inexpressible astonishment, the trail led them directly back to their camp on the beach—on reaching which they found their boatman lying on the sand bound hand and foot with a running vine, gagged, and stunnedby a blow on the head, and the boat gone.The rage of Mate-oro was excessive, and expended itself upon the ill-starred boatman, whom he ordered to be tossed into the surf—a step he speedily regretted and attempted to rectify; but when dragged out to be cross-questioned, the body could return no answer; its shade had quitted it, and was paddling a phantom canoe over the Stygian river to the shadowy fishing-grounds.The pursuers, full of wrath, set to work and built a korari, in which, when the wind became favorable, they made their way home, calling down maledictions upon the head of the rebellious runaway. During their stay they scoured the island for Koche, and kept a lookout for their lost boat, but saw nothing of either.To the eastward of the southern point of Rangi-haute, and five miles distant, lies the islet of Ranga-tira, consisting of a single mount of moderate elevation, from two to three miles across at the base, behind which Koche took shelter in his captured boat. The same favoring breeze that brought down his enemies in the morning, enabled him in a short run to double the “tira,” and land upon her little beach of forty yards, quite out of sight and reach.Had the fugitive been content to take up his permanent habitation here, all might doubtless have gone well; but the islet was too small to offer a place of concealment, and he feared an unsuccessful search on the larger island would be followed by one on the smaller, in which event escape would be impossible. For this and other reasons, in which the question of food entered, but a cat-like attachment to his old haunts ruled, he returned in the night after an absence of a month, and, reconnoitring, found the coast clear. He had resumed his old habits, adding to them a bright lookout to the northwest, when one morning at daybreak, some months later, he discovered three canoes close in to shore. He instantly struck into a deep ravine, and hoped by doubling to gain time to reach and launch his boat. But he had hardly got fairly off before his trail was taken up, and after a hot chase, in ascending a dark defile, the dogs brought him to bay, and, turning, he took up a rock and dashed out the brains of the foremost, and was in deadly conflict with the pack, bleeding and faint, when a Zealander came up with a club and felled him to the ground. When he recovered his senses they were dragging him down the mountain by a rope tied about the waist, torn with stones and briers, and bathed in blood; but even then, until they reached the white beach, soon stained red, he caught at every root, and projecting stone, and bush, and log, and held on with such tenacity that they were compelled to beat his hands to force them to relax. He lay on the sand bound hand and foot all night, with parched mouth and throat, so bitten by the black sand-fly that by noon on the following day he was swollen out of the semblance of man.When taken back to Ware-kauri he was confined and watched closely, taunted with the title of “King of Pitt Island,” fed and watered, but not bodily ill-used. When sufficiently recovered and ordered to work, he stood mute under two days’ lashing, seeking death; but his master, who felt his honor enlisted in the contest, had resolved to break, not kill him; and no provocation could wring from him the death-stroke. Perceiving this on the third morning, Koche setto work when ordered, and from thence performed the labor of two men; apparently completely subjugated. From the fight with the dogs in the defile he had not uttered a word; now he became cheerful and talkative.In the fourth year of his renewed captivity, all watch upon him having been removed, he was one evening among the slaves, employed in paddling out canoe-loads of provisions to a whale-ship that was lifting her anchor to sail. He boarded, and hid away in the hold unnoticed; and the ship was clearing the harbor, when Mate-oro came out and instituted search. He was found and dragged on deck, but broke from his captors and sprang overboard. The ship’s boat gave chase, overhauled him, and, as Mate-oro rose up in the bow to lay hands on him, he dived, and, coming up behind, unshipped their rudder, and in the gathering dark reached the headland and disappeared. He made his way by forest paths to the eastern coast, where, finding an abandoned and broken canoe, he stuffed her with kelp, and put to sea; by daylight he had sunk her below the eastern horizon, and at nightfall ran her on the beach of Rangi-haute.Koche was himself again. He breathed anew the air of freedom, and his soul exulted. Taught in his little school of adversity, he knew that vigilance would be the price of his liberty, and determined to exercise it, and carried out his resolution as well, perhaps, as any man since the sun first shed on Eden his delightful beams—that sun which shone upon him in his frail canoe that day for the last time for two dark years; and on which, of his own free will, he never would have looked again.After picking up what food he could find upon the beach, and breaking up and burying his canoe in a sand dune, he crossed the mountain, and, plunging into an obscure thicket, almost impenetrable, crawled into a crevice surrounded by jagged fragments of volcanic rock. The spot was almost absolutely inaccessible, and the danger of approach would have appalled a spirit less dauntless than his—not bent on liberty or death. He had breasted his way to it in the glare of day when perambulating his dominion; he now entered it with speed and safety a fugitive at midnight.In his retreat, he made and used no instrument whatever—no spear, or snare, or knife, or line, or net. He never once approached the shore, or left the circle of his crags and dense surrounding thicket. At dusk he peered from his sepulchre, and watched the birds take up their roosts upon the overtopping trees and bushes, and climbed up and caught them in the night, and ate them raw. Hunger at first assailed him; but his eye, becoming adjusted to the dark, marked down his prey with unerring certainty, and he was soon able to drive and keep the wolf from his den; and a water-drip in the rock quenched his thirst. At dawn he sank into the earth, leaving behind no trace, no print of foot, no trail; and when the sun uprose,“The mists were curl’dBack from a solitary world.”The annals of his dark reign are soon told. Sleeping one day down in the impenetrable darkness, he was startled by the deep bay of a bloodhound; and his prophetic soul told him that the day of his second dethronement had dawned, and his night of freedom passed. Mate-oro had searched the isle in vain, and givenup the hunt, when Gobiah, a New Zealand son of Belial, brought over a slave-hunter whose deep hate penetrated the impenetrable, and ran the fugitive to earth.Expectation in Ware-kauri was on tiptoe during the absence of the hunting-party; and on its return with the captive king a curious crowd assembled on the beach to greet them. As the boat came through the surf with Mate-oro on the prow and Koche bound at his feet, a shout went up in honor of the chief, followed by derisive howling for the “King of Pitt.” The march across the island was triumphal. Crowds flocked to gaze upon the principal figures. The New Zealanders praised their persevering chief, and called upon the “king” to burst his bonds. The Tuïti, apart, with sullen and downcast looks, felt their faint hearts beat quick as they caught a glance of their indomitable countryman, stimulated by the sunlight, erect and proud, by whom the taunts of the malignant masters were passing as the idle wind.Gobiah and the hound shared the honors of the day, and all went merry as a marriage-bell.The capture, with its varying and contradictory details, was the sensation of the period, and would have filled the columns of a newspaper, had one existed, for a month. It subsided in due course, and Koche, after another futile attempt to get himself despatched, went to work as before with vigor and good cheer. His sovereign character was now universally recognized, and he was invariably addressed by his title in full. He accepted it in good humor, tinged with a little pride. The Zealanders looked upon him with secret respect, while by his own people he was regarded as one who, had their lot been less hopeless, would have proved the leader and saviour of the nation.Two years elapsed, when an American vessel, ready for sea, was boarded by Mate-oro, and a demand made for the fugitive king. The ship was searched from deck to keel, but no trace of him found. Unwilling to anger the fierce chief, who still declared he was aboard, she lay over a day, and the search was renewed with like effect. In the afternoon she stood out to sea, and at nightfall her hull was down, and the island had disappeared, all save one volcanic peak that rose like a pyramid above the waves. Then Koche came out from the fore-chains, in which he had in some mysterious manner buried himself, and caught a last glance of his native mountain as it sank for ever from his view.

Koche, the subject of this memoir, was born on the remote island of Chatham, in the Southern Pacific Ocean. Forced by a cruel servitude to fly from his native island, he passed many years in absolute solitude on the little uninhabited island of Pitt, lying some miles distant from Chatham. Here he reigned undisputed master of the land and all it contained: whence the title of “King of Pitt” among those who knew him. His account of his native island and its inhabitants, together with his own adventures, show him to have been a man of an undaunted spirit, which no adverse fortune could bend, much less break; and had he been known to Carlyle, would have been placed by him among his heroes for worship and imitation; but, unluckily, Carlyle never heard of him.

It is well, in order to understand the life and adventures of Koche, “King of Pitt,” to relate the history of the country and people from which he sprang, before going into the details of his career.

Ware-kauri, one of the South Sea islands, called by the English, Chatham, lies several hundred miles to the eastward of New Zealand. Its history up to the year 1791 rests upon tradition, as prior to that date its inhabitants had not acquired, among their many accomplishments, the art of letters. Koche himself, from whose mouth this narrative has been taken, says that his people were from the earliest period inclined to peaceful pursuits, and subsisted chiefly upon fish and seal; that they enjoyed a democracy, and conducted their simple affairs by a council of notable men. He did not hesitate, however, to acknowledge that when at long intervals, covering a generation, a high and prolonged west wind drove a canoe-load of New Zealanders upon their shores, they forthwith and without ceremony slew them. But he justified this departure from their ordinary habits on the ground of public policy; as, had they received them in charity, and pursued the peaceful tenor of their way, their involuntary visitors would have ended by slayingand, moreover, devouring them; the first party of this sort who landed on the island having made it distinctly understood that men and women were their favorite articles of diet. But among themselves, the taking of life, he said, was unknown; and why should it not be, since they were not fond of men, as some people were, and never suffered for want of food; and on the sea-shore they found plenty of seal and birds, and, in the marshes and lakes of the interior, fish and fowl in abundance? No! the race of the Tuïti, his forefathers, were no man-eaters; they had become “missionaries,” or Christian, in the days of his father, and remained so ever since, such of them as had not been devoured or driven to death by the hated Zealander—at whose name his black eye flashed fire—who had made a slave-pen and shambles of his once happy island.

Their tradition goes back to a first pair, man and woman, who appeared on the Isle of Rangi-haute, a score of miles to the southeast, called by the English, Pitt. It is a solitary volcanic mountain, lifting its truncated summit above the waters of the South Sea, whose waves have beaten in vain for untold centuries upon its rock-bound base. How the first pair came is unknown; whether brought by the Spirit from above, or created on the mountain, none could tell; the time was remote, and tradition was confused in going back to the origin of the human race, to the beginning of the world; the memory of man did not run beyond the apparition on Rangi-haute.

But the history of the couple and of their children is handed down in the following legend: They lived upon the top of the mountain, from whence they caught and worshipped the first ray of the morning sun, and bowed in adoration to that luminary as he sank beneath the western wave. The ground was held sacred; and their descendants in after-days consecrated like spots, devoted alone to prayer and propitiation, on which no article of dress even could be placed, and from the desecration of one of which arose the destruction of the race.

Trees clothed the slopes of the mountain, and everywhere among them, planted by the beneficent hand of the Creator, rose the karaka (bread-fruit) laden with golden fruit—the sole food of man, and source of perpetual youth and health. In after-days, it turned acrid, and fatal to life, until the pitying Creator taught his children, by immersion in boiling water and a running stream, to restore it in a measure to its pristine state.

One day, a youth wandered down to the sea-shore among the birds that lined the rocks, and, seating himself near where an eagle was perched pluming his wing, they fell into conversation. The eagle complained that they could no longer soar into the high air, by reason of a spell cast over his tribe he believed by the Tuïti; his progenitors, he said, had sailed over the mountain at will, and preyed upon the living mako-mako, or honey-eater and the tuïs, or mocking-bird; while he could fly only in the heavy air along the beach, and was compelled to consort with sea-fowl, who held him in contempt; and to feed on garbage. The youth answered that the blood of the honey-eater and the mocking-bird had cried to the Creator, and brought down upon the eagle his banishment. The Tuïti warred neither with the Maker nor his children; they fed on fruit, and shed no blood: the eagle had banished himself. The king of birds, avoiding the issue, replied that in thegreat island to the northwest, which his friend had doubtless seen from the mountain, the woods were filled with beautiful birds, and fruit of every color, hanging over the dark, transparent waters of many lakes, while here—what a poor place! One solitary mountain, no lakes, and no fruit, save the karaka, which, sweet as it was, was bitter compared with the fruit which grew in the west. There was no man upon it to rule the great island. It called aloud for a master—a son of Tuïti—to go over. The youth listened to the tempter, and ambition elated his soul; he arose from the rock, and asked to be shown the path that led over the water. The eagle, looking at him askance, promised him wings to fly over, provided he would first render an easy service by taking him to the top of the mountain. On hearing this, the youth cast himself upon his face on the sand, trembling; where he lay for hours torn by the conflict between the good spirit of obedience, and the evil one of ambition, as they warred within him for the mastery. As the sun sank, his guardian angel fled discomfited, and he rose to his feet with a shudder, and, taking the eagle on his wrist, ascended the mountain, and in the dark cast him loose in the forbidden field. All night long the flutter and death-cry of birds smote upon his ear, and, when morning dawned, the song of the mako was mute, and the tuïs had ceased to mock.

The people assembled in alarm. A child to whom its mother had given fruit fell dead; they gathered about its body in terror. The eagle hovered over them, and uttered his war-cry. The conscience-striken youth confessed. The day was passed in penitence and sorrow about the body of the child in the lap of its wailing mother. Hunger assailed them; they burned the remains on a funeral-pyre built of the fragrant kalamu, and, descending the mountain, fed upon the root of the fern, and drank from the living spring.

The youth wandered by the shore, alone, stung with remorse, and, meeting the eagle, was taught by him to construct the korari, the model of all canoes, made in the likeness of a sledge, with a wicker-work of tough creepers, having a false bottom filled with buoyant kelp. He put to sea with his family, and landed on Ware-kauri, which he found, as the eagle had said, uninhabited by man, a continent in size compared to Rangi-haute; with undulating, fertile plains to the south, and lofty mountains in the north, sparkling with lakes of dark transparent water, and vocal with the song and bright with the plumage of birds. Filled with new joy, he sent back tidings to his kinsmen, and was followed by successive emigrations, until Rangi-haute was deserted save by a timid few who feared the sea. Thus came about the settlement of Ware-kauri: and to this extent is the tradition of the people.

From this time on they had lived in single families, or in companies of two or three, moving from place to place as food became less plentiful, or as fancy or a love of change dictated; being careful, in pitching their new and fragile habitations, not to crowd upon established groups. In the sealing season, the families of the interior came down to the coast, and laid in from the rocks and reefs a supply of meat and skins; and when fishing on the shore became dull, or the birds wild with much hunting, the people of the sea bundled up their effects, and moved to the interior lakes, chiefly to the great Tewanga, filled with fish, and covered with wild fowl.

They dressed in cloaks of sealskin. Their only weapon of offence or defence was a club, seldom used except in killing a seal. Tattooing was unknown. No ornaments were in use. The teeth of deceased relatives were burned with their bodies, not worn about the neck and wrist, as in New Zealand, where they commit the absurdity of placing the departed in a sitting posture in wooden boxes, after abstracting their teeth to deck the survivors, in the name of religion. The Tuïti burned their dead to avoid the fearful idea of prolonged decay. Man springs from the earth as the flower springs: they return him to his mother, as the fall fires, sweeping over the plain, return the flower; she drinks in with the rain the ashes of her children, man and flower, and sends them forth again after a season of repose to reign over and to beautify the land. The songs of the women were plaintive and sweet, rivalling those of the honey-eater, the mako-mako, who sang of love, and of the tuïs, or mocking-bird, that mimicked from every tree and bush, and filled the island with its false but beautiful notes.

Thus had lived the race in peace and plenty for centuries beyond their simple means of computation, and thus were living, fearing no evil from without, save the landing of a stray storm-driven canoe from Zealand, when, towards the end of the last century, the sloop-of-warDiscoveryand its armed tenderChatham, commanded by Vancouver, made a voyage of discovery around the world, by command of his majesty. TheChatham, Captain William Henry Broughton, separated in a storm from her consort, discovered the island on Nov. 29, 1791, and took possession of it with the customary ceremonies, in the name of his majesty, as first discoverer.

Broughton, as he approached the coast, saw a continued white sandbeach interspersed with cliffs of reddish clay, and mixed with black rocks. The country appeared very pleasant, with clearings here and there, and smoke arising above the trees. With his glass he perceived some people hauling up a canoe, and proceeded to the shore in a cutter. The natives, seated on the beach, invited the party to land, and approached and saluted them by meeting noses; and with great noise entered into an animated but unintelligible conversation by signs, gestures, and speech. They were a cheerful race, the conversation of the English frequently exciting them to bursts of laughter. The young wore feathers in their hair, and a few among them a necklace of mother-of-pearl. All were cleanly and neatly dressed. The woods, which grew in a luxuriant manner, afforded delightful shade, free of low limbs and underbrush, and in many places were formed into arbors by bending and interlacing the branches when young. The soil was rich, and the forests and beach alive with birds of various species, which appeared as though never molested.

The surprise of the islanders, their exclamations, and admiration on beholding the strangers, could hardly be imagined. They pointed to the sun and then to Broughton, and inquired if he came from thence. In answer he gave them a dead bird, pointed out the cause of its death, fired his gun, and advanced upon them. All fled to the wood excepting one man, who stood his ground and offered battle. War was proclaimed. The hero was reinforced, and the sailors fell back to the beach, followed by fourteen men, armed with spears or driftwood picked up as they advanced. “When abreast ofthe boat,” says Broughton, “they became clamorous, talked loud to each other, and surrounded us. A young man strutted towards me in a menacing attitude, distorted his person, turned up his eyes, and made hideous faces and fierce gestures. As the boat came in, they began the attack. We fired. Johnson’s musket was knocked from his hand by a club. Our men were forced into the water, when the boat’s crew opened upon them and they fled, save one who fell on the beach with a ball through his breast. As we pushed off, a man came out of the woods, sat down by the deceased, and in a dismal howl uttered his lamentation.” He explains that in making the boast which brought on hostilities he merely wished to show the natives the superior effect of his firearms. This may be so, or it may be that in the laborious process of confirming his majesty’s title to the island, and in order to make assurance doubly sure, he had emptied more bottles to his majesty’s health than was good for him, and had fired to astonish the natives. Be this as it may, it was deeply to be regretted that the answer to a question indicating such deep respect should have been a warlike demonstration. But the Saxon knows but one way to colonize, and that leads the aborigines “into the blind cave of eternal night.”

The father of Koche told him that as the ship was leaving the shore the atmosphere became dark, sultry, and gloomy, and thunder and lightning descended the mountain and pursued the retreating strangers into the sea. Meantime, the dead man lay on the white beach with a bullet through his heart. Civilization had paid the Tuïti its first visit.

A council was held, and the fact that the slain was not carried off was considered proof that “the children of the sun” were not cannibals, and by some doubts were expressed as to their intent in landing. It was concluded, in the event of their return, to meet them with an emblem of peace. Accordingly, when in after years a sealer entered the bay of Waitangi and its boat touched the sands, the natives laid down their spears and clubs, a man advanced and placed one end of a grass plant in the hands of the captain, and, holding on to the other, made him a speech of welcome, threw over him his own cloak, and thus established a firm and lasting peace; and from thenceforward the fishermen who frequented the coast found them hospitable, cheerful friends, and willing assistants in their labor, and “love between them flourished like the palm.”

On the quarter-deck of an American vessel traversing the Pacific Ocean, and chiefly at night, Koche related the sorrows of his race, the private and public wrongs that had reduced the Tuïti to a handful of slaves. Of his own mistreatment he made little account, relating his personal oppression in a spirit of fun and bravado, relieved occasionally by a flash of hate. In calm weather his broken narrative ran tersely, and was marked by humor and a lack of strong feeling; but when the storm-spirit arose, and washed the lower deck and enveloped the upper in spray, his voice grew hoarse, his eye flashed, and his white teeth from time to time came together with a clash that made the blood tingle.

He said that one summer, about eighteen years before, a vessel in search of seal anchored in the small oval bay of Pohaute, overlooked by the Maunga Wakai Pai, a volcanic pyramid, the loftiest on the island, at the base of which he lived. With his family and friends, he went down togreet the new-comers, when, to the surprise of every one, there landed among the white men a New Zealand chief armed to the teeth. His hair, carefully combed and oiled, was tied up on the crown of his head, and surrounded by a fillet of white feathers, and from his ears protruded bunches of soft down. Evidently a man of power, accustomed to command, he inspired a mysterious dread, and would have been slain but for the protection he was under. The future darkened as he walked the beach, questioning the people on their politics and religion, manners and customs; and it was long remembered that he highly commended the veneration they entertained for sacred places, and walked off musing when in answer to his inquiry one was pointed out. It was Mate-oro, chief of the Nga-te Motunga, who had lately been defeated in battle by the Waï Kato, and driven with his tribe from the valley of the Komimi to the coast of New Zealand, from whence he had embarked for Ware-kauri, and appeared among the simple inhabitants as Satan in Paradise—the forerunner of troops of fiends.

A red bluff beetled over the bay—a conglomerate of particles of colored clay, cemented by a carbonate of lime, embedded with dark shining nodules of iron, and traversed by dikes of basaltic lava. Its summit was sacred. One morning before sunrise, a native ascended to offer his devotions, and was horror-struck on beholding in the holy field an iron pot. He sped down to communicate the startling intelligence, and returned with a party of thirteen to verify the reported sacrilege. Koche, who was of the number, threw off his cloak, tore up a fragment of rock, and dashed the profane utensil to pieces. A party of sailors, with a couple of bull-dogs, guided by Mate-oro, pursued and overtook them. He shot dead one who turned and attempted an explanation; the remaining twelve were bound and hung by the feet from a tree, head downward, until nearly dead. The chief returned to New Zealand, assembled his people, represented the island as fertile and full of unarmed slaves, and recommended its subjugation. The brigLord Rodney, taking her pay in pigs, potatoes, and flax (and flame, later on!), in two trips landed the tribe, numbering eight hundred, on the fated isle. The natives offered no resistance to their fierce invaders armed with firelocks, and were duly parcelled out among their conquerors, and condemned to hard labor for life. No idea of moderation in the amount exacted was entertained. In a short time, they furnished thirty vessels annually with supplies. But the race began rapidly to run out, with bent backs and paralytic limbs. Skulls on the beach, pierced by musket balls or battered by clubs, told a tale to visitors their tyrants could not deny. Valuable as was their labor, in drunken orgies they were slain for food.

Once cheerful, full of mirth and laughter, they became morose and taciturn. Koche, with many others, persistently refused to work; some died under, others yielded to, the lash; and he, who had been dragged by a rope to the field, and beaten in vain, and would neither yield nor give up the ghost, was taken by the chief to his house to break in. He continued moody, and maintained his independence so far as to execute only such commissions as pleased him, frequently courting death by mutely and stubbornly refusing to obey orders. Mate-oro seemed to respect his attitude to some extent, and employedhim to supply his table with sea-fish, giving him a canoe furnished with nets and lines for the purpose. The struggle between them now ceased, for this occupation gave Koche solitude and freedom when afloat, and opportunity to muse over the condition of himself and people. He soon came to the conclusion that it was useless to attempt an insurrection, the population being unarmed, dispirited, and under an iron subjugation. But for his single self, he was resolved on resistance to the last, and, as his boat tossed on the wave, he brooded over many schemes for the destruction of his would-be master. A personal conflict was most in accordance with his disposition, and many a time he was tempted, unarmed as he was, to close in a death-struggle, out of which, doubtless, he would have come victorious, if uninterrupted; for though but little above the middle height, he was broad and deep-chested, with sinews of iron, and capable of immense exertion; and, above all, was animated by a spirit that would have revelled in the fight. But followed as the chief was, fair play was not to be looked for, and he reluctantly abandoned his favored purpose. His thoughts often wandered to the cradle of his race, now uninhabited, to which he had made a visit with his father in youth, where he felt assured he would find a harbor of refuge, if Mate-oro could be first despatched. Whilst in the midst of such reflections one afternoon, he drew up from the ocean a fish seldom taken—the mo-eeka, pleasant to the taste, but a virulent poison, a small portion of which when eaten producing a deathly sickness, and a full meal, death. His massive face beamed with satisfaction, and his dark eye glistened as he unhooked and dropped it into the boat, contrary to the custom, which was to kill and throw it back into the sea. On landing, he placed his dangerous prize in a small salt-water pool near the beach, into which, as he caught them, he placed others, until a large mess was collected. This he brought home one night when the wind blew from the northwest, and persuaded the cook to serve up for the morning meal. Directing her to throw the offal to the wood-hogs, he disappeared, and soon after midnight reached the east coast, seized a canoe, and put to sea. The cook, who had her more immediate grudge to gratify, regaled the favorite dogs with the heads and entrails; and this deviation from orders frustrated the amiable purpose of her co-conspirator. The howls of his four-footed companions in the night, followed by their death in the morning, told the suspicious Indian a tale of poison, which a visit to the kitchen confirmed. A portion of the breakfast thrown to a stray dog promptly finished him.

Koche was sought for high and low, the island ransacked in vain; no trace of him was found, and the conclusion was arrived at that he had thrown himself into the sea. The chief had taken up a hatchet to kill his cook, but she sullenly asserted she had never seen a mo-eeka before, and was believed and spared, partly because the fish was rare and seldom brought to land when taken, and partly because her good cooking tickled his palate.

Prior to this attempt to treat him to the mo-eeka, Mate-oro had swept the Isle of Rangi-haute of its inhabitants. The number of captives had proved much smaller than had been anticipated, amounting in all to ten families, and barely repaid the trouble and risk of the voyage.

When Koche, on the day following the episode of the poison-fish—thelast, as he flattered himself, of Mate-oro—ascended the mountain of Pitt, and stood upon a throne—

“He was monarch of all he surveyed,His rights there were none to dispute:

From the centre all round to the sea,He was lord of the fowl and the brute.”

His first care was to make a royal progress over his dominion, in which he fully expected to reign to the termination of his life. He felt no fear of invasion, having traversed Ware-kauri, and effected his embarkation unseen. No motive existed sufficiently strong to induce one, in the face of the difficulties of a return trip against the wind, unless it might be revenge on the part of Mate-oro, who was dead, and had ceased to trouble him. Of domestic foes he had none. The Norway rat, a deserter from a seal-ship, was the only quadruped on the island; and the seal and sea-lion, the only amphibious animals that had ever frequented the coast, had long since been extirpated, and the sealers came there no more. All looked favorable for a quiet reign.

Near an old seal camp, he found growing some wild wheat, which he cultivated after a manner, and which, with wild celery, water-cresses, fern-root, and karaka, left him nothing to desire in the way of vegetable food. On the shore, he found crabs and lobsters, and the echini (sea-eggs) in the hollows of the rock; and at times, to supplement his feast, the sea threw up her orange-colored pear. The blue petrel had their habitations in the woods, in the ground under the roots of trees, and in crevices of rocks, and were speared at night as they flew about in numbers with a noise like the croaking of frogs. They passed the day at sea-fishing, and not one was to be seen until dark put a stop to their pursuit, when they returned to land, and fluttered and croaked for hours before retiring to rest. But the subject that gave its sovereign least trouble was the dark-brown water-hen, of the size of a barnyard fowl, which inhabited the skirts of the woods, and fed on the beach. It was unable to fly, and made no attempt to escape when approached, but stood its ground, and bowed, like a pious Turk, to its fate.

At the base of the mountain, near a strong spring, he formed a summer-house—an arbor of the trees and shrubs of aromatic myrtle—and, besides supplying his wants, did little else but wander over the isle during the summer season; but, when winter came, he retired to a cave in the mountain, from which he expelled the bats, and devoted his leisure to making the utensils of the chase, toilet, and kitchen. He manufactured baskets, nets, and lines of twisted fibre, fish-hooks of mother-of-pearl, knives of sharp quartz, razors of shell, and mats for bedding and cloaks.

He covered his fish alive in red-hot ashes, and, when cooked, peeled off the skin, and ate the flesh from the ribs. He cooked his meat in an oven, of which he had one at each residence, and several at points on the shore. It consisted of a hole in the ground lined with stone, in which he built a fire, and placed pebbles and stones. His game, after the ordinary cleaning, was scrubbed with sand on the outside, and well washed inside and out. Hot pebbles were placed in the belly and shaken in under the breast, and green aromatic leaves stuffed in upon them. The oven was then cleared of fire and pebbles, and lined with green leaves, and the game placed in the bottom. The fat was washed, and placed with hot pebbles in a vessel of bark, and beside it the blood, tiedin a leaf, and propped with hot stones. Then came a layer of such vegetables as were in season or at hand, and the whole was spread over with leaves, on which the remaining hot stones were placed, covered in turn with leaves, and filled in with sod and earth. After an interval according to the size of the mess, it was taken out, spread upon a cloth of the glossy leaves of the karaka, and eaten hot.

No king fared better, and no one that ever reigned passed his days in equal quietude and peace. No opposing politicians were there to vex his soul with diverse counsels, and make the worse appear to him the better reason; no blood of fellow-men weighed down his spirit; no friends clamored for reward, or silent enemies shrank from punishment.

He knew neither hunger, thirst, nor cold, nor fear, nor jealousy, and approached as near as it lay in fallen man to the estate of our renowned ancestor in the garden before the presentation of Eve. He was content, wanting no Eve, or Cain, or Abel. And for ten solitary years his wish was gratified: he was unapproached, and reigned unchallenged.

In 1839, the captain of a vessel from Sidney offered to buy of Mate-oro a portion of the island of Ware-kauri that lay about the bay of Waitangi, then owned and possessed by a branch of the tribe commanded by Nga-te-Toma. The terms were agreed upon, payment to be made on delivery. But the Nga-te-Toma could not be prevailed upon to deliver their possessions of black loam on demand, the more especially as Mate-oro was to handle the purchase-money. War was declared, and the contumacious Te-Toma were driven in the following spring into their stronghold near the beach, and regularly invested.

At this juncture, the barkCuba, having on board one Dieffenbach, a naturalist, dropped anchor in the bay, entered into negotiations with both parties, and, moved by the spirit of Christian charity, ended by taking off the Te-Toma at night in boats to their ship—first the women and children, followed by the naked warriors, stained with ochre, armed, feathered, and equipped. The last to leave set fire to the huts and abandoned property. The flames gave the alarm to their opponents, who rushed through the fort to the beach, where they arrived just too late, and presented, illuminated by the burning village in the background, a vivid picture of baffled rage, going through the war-dance with fearful yells and contortions. But they danced in vain, though the exercise may have afforded them a melancholy gratification. TheCubaforthwith put to sea, and landed her human freight on the northeastern shore among friends; but not until she had taken from them deeds in fee of all their possessions in the west. Then, judging wisely that Mate-oro would be found in no mood at that moment to discuss their lately acquired title, she put to sea and bore down on Rangi-haute, being the first vessel to cross the channel since Koche passed over in his canoe ten years before.

Dieffenbach landed with a party, and in botanizing the isle was led to the bower by a small spiral column of white smoke that arose from the oven. No inhabitant was to be seen. The summer-house was ransacked of nets, pearl-hooks, knives, and baskets; the oven opened, and a spread of roast duck, hen, and karaka highly relished. The dark, transparent water of the spring reflected the faces of the robbers, as they bent over to drink, with a distinctness of outline unattainable by the white water of otherlands; but when Koche returned to his habitation, which he did when the ship was well at sea, the reflection had vanished from his mirror, the dinner from his oven, and the furniture from his bower. As from a rock he watched the receding bark, freighted with his peace of mind, he hoped and prayed she would pass Ware-kauri without touching; but she ran in nevertheless, communicated with her friends, and related the visit to the isle. The news that Rangi-haute was inhabited soon reached Mate-oro, who read the riddle at once, and soon after went over in person in pursuit of his quondam slave.

The party landed before noon, and, separating, closed in upon the bower from different directions to find it empty. They soon, however, struck a fresh trail, which led them down the coast to a small inlet, in which it disappeared. Finding it did not issue on the opposite side, they ascended either bank, watching closely for signs, until the bed of the stream dwindled to a rivulet and entered a thicket; when the trail was taken up and followed with difficulty through bushes and underwood, matted with vines, until it failed totally. Circuits were made, and much time wasted in fruitless search, but the thread was lost, when the leader suddenly ordered the party back on the trail to the mouth of the inlet, which they crossed, and moved down the beach looking for footprints in the sand. Late in the afternoon they arrived opposite a coral rock that stood out a mile in the sea. The water was smooth, and a man swam out to reconnoitre. They watched him until he disappeared behind the rock, which presented a bluff to the shore, and waited patiently to hear from him, but an hour had elapsed and he made no sign. The general opinion was that he had been devoured by a shark. Mate-oro thought otherwise. He sent back a couple of men with orders to bring down the boat at daybreak, set a watch on the beach, built a fire, and went into camp.

A favorable breeze springing up, the boat came in early, took aboard the party, and rowed out. In a deep fissure in the rock, from which he was unable to extricate himself, they found the Indian who had swum out the evening before. He told them that when he turned, and was about to land, he was seized by the foot and drawn under the water, and, being tired and out of breath, almost instantly lost consciousness.

When he recovered he found himself in utter darkness, and thought he had passed into the spirit-land and was imbedded in a mountain for punishment. After a time he had looked up and seen the stars, but could make nothing of his condition. He had seen or heard no one, but as well as he could recollect, the grasp on his ankle felt like the hand of a man. Several pieces of fresh broken coral were found, but no footprints.

The party hastened ashore, and, leaving a man with the boat, moved down the beach, and an hour later struck the trail coming out of the water, and pursued it up a frightful chasm in the mountain, apparently without an outlet. But as they neared the head they discovered the point at which the trail began the ascent, and abandoning their dogs, the men, after much difficulty and danger, gained the summit; when, to their inexpressible astonishment, the trail led them directly back to their camp on the beach—on reaching which they found their boatman lying on the sand bound hand and foot with a running vine, gagged, and stunnedby a blow on the head, and the boat gone.

The rage of Mate-oro was excessive, and expended itself upon the ill-starred boatman, whom he ordered to be tossed into the surf—a step he speedily regretted and attempted to rectify; but when dragged out to be cross-questioned, the body could return no answer; its shade had quitted it, and was paddling a phantom canoe over the Stygian river to the shadowy fishing-grounds.

The pursuers, full of wrath, set to work and built a korari, in which, when the wind became favorable, they made their way home, calling down maledictions upon the head of the rebellious runaway. During their stay they scoured the island for Koche, and kept a lookout for their lost boat, but saw nothing of either.

To the eastward of the southern point of Rangi-haute, and five miles distant, lies the islet of Ranga-tira, consisting of a single mount of moderate elevation, from two to three miles across at the base, behind which Koche took shelter in his captured boat. The same favoring breeze that brought down his enemies in the morning, enabled him in a short run to double the “tira,” and land upon her little beach of forty yards, quite out of sight and reach.

Had the fugitive been content to take up his permanent habitation here, all might doubtless have gone well; but the islet was too small to offer a place of concealment, and he feared an unsuccessful search on the larger island would be followed by one on the smaller, in which event escape would be impossible. For this and other reasons, in which the question of food entered, but a cat-like attachment to his old haunts ruled, he returned in the night after an absence of a month, and, reconnoitring, found the coast clear. He had resumed his old habits, adding to them a bright lookout to the northwest, when one morning at daybreak, some months later, he discovered three canoes close in to shore. He instantly struck into a deep ravine, and hoped by doubling to gain time to reach and launch his boat. But he had hardly got fairly off before his trail was taken up, and after a hot chase, in ascending a dark defile, the dogs brought him to bay, and, turning, he took up a rock and dashed out the brains of the foremost, and was in deadly conflict with the pack, bleeding and faint, when a Zealander came up with a club and felled him to the ground. When he recovered his senses they were dragging him down the mountain by a rope tied about the waist, torn with stones and briers, and bathed in blood; but even then, until they reached the white beach, soon stained red, he caught at every root, and projecting stone, and bush, and log, and held on with such tenacity that they were compelled to beat his hands to force them to relax. He lay on the sand bound hand and foot all night, with parched mouth and throat, so bitten by the black sand-fly that by noon on the following day he was swollen out of the semblance of man.

When taken back to Ware-kauri he was confined and watched closely, taunted with the title of “King of Pitt Island,” fed and watered, but not bodily ill-used. When sufficiently recovered and ordered to work, he stood mute under two days’ lashing, seeking death; but his master, who felt his honor enlisted in the contest, had resolved to break, not kill him; and no provocation could wring from him the death-stroke. Perceiving this on the third morning, Koche setto work when ordered, and from thence performed the labor of two men; apparently completely subjugated. From the fight with the dogs in the defile he had not uttered a word; now he became cheerful and talkative.

In the fourth year of his renewed captivity, all watch upon him having been removed, he was one evening among the slaves, employed in paddling out canoe-loads of provisions to a whale-ship that was lifting her anchor to sail. He boarded, and hid away in the hold unnoticed; and the ship was clearing the harbor, when Mate-oro came out and instituted search. He was found and dragged on deck, but broke from his captors and sprang overboard. The ship’s boat gave chase, overhauled him, and, as Mate-oro rose up in the bow to lay hands on him, he dived, and, coming up behind, unshipped their rudder, and in the gathering dark reached the headland and disappeared. He made his way by forest paths to the eastern coast, where, finding an abandoned and broken canoe, he stuffed her with kelp, and put to sea; by daylight he had sunk her below the eastern horizon, and at nightfall ran her on the beach of Rangi-haute.

Koche was himself again. He breathed anew the air of freedom, and his soul exulted. Taught in his little school of adversity, he knew that vigilance would be the price of his liberty, and determined to exercise it, and carried out his resolution as well, perhaps, as any man since the sun first shed on Eden his delightful beams—that sun which shone upon him in his frail canoe that day for the last time for two dark years; and on which, of his own free will, he never would have looked again.

After picking up what food he could find upon the beach, and breaking up and burying his canoe in a sand dune, he crossed the mountain, and, plunging into an obscure thicket, almost impenetrable, crawled into a crevice surrounded by jagged fragments of volcanic rock. The spot was almost absolutely inaccessible, and the danger of approach would have appalled a spirit less dauntless than his—not bent on liberty or death. He had breasted his way to it in the glare of day when perambulating his dominion; he now entered it with speed and safety a fugitive at midnight.

In his retreat, he made and used no instrument whatever—no spear, or snare, or knife, or line, or net. He never once approached the shore, or left the circle of his crags and dense surrounding thicket. At dusk he peered from his sepulchre, and watched the birds take up their roosts upon the overtopping trees and bushes, and climbed up and caught them in the night, and ate them raw. Hunger at first assailed him; but his eye, becoming adjusted to the dark, marked down his prey with unerring certainty, and he was soon able to drive and keep the wolf from his den; and a water-drip in the rock quenched his thirst. At dawn he sank into the earth, leaving behind no trace, no print of foot, no trail; and when the sun uprose,

“The mists were curl’dBack from a solitary world.”

The annals of his dark reign are soon told. Sleeping one day down in the impenetrable darkness, he was startled by the deep bay of a bloodhound; and his prophetic soul told him that the day of his second dethronement had dawned, and his night of freedom passed. Mate-oro had searched the isle in vain, and givenup the hunt, when Gobiah, a New Zealand son of Belial, brought over a slave-hunter whose deep hate penetrated the impenetrable, and ran the fugitive to earth.

Expectation in Ware-kauri was on tiptoe during the absence of the hunting-party; and on its return with the captive king a curious crowd assembled on the beach to greet them. As the boat came through the surf with Mate-oro on the prow and Koche bound at his feet, a shout went up in honor of the chief, followed by derisive howling for the “King of Pitt.” The march across the island was triumphal. Crowds flocked to gaze upon the principal figures. The New Zealanders praised their persevering chief, and called upon the “king” to burst his bonds. The Tuïti, apart, with sullen and downcast looks, felt their faint hearts beat quick as they caught a glance of their indomitable countryman, stimulated by the sunlight, erect and proud, by whom the taunts of the malignant masters were passing as the idle wind.

Gobiah and the hound shared the honors of the day, and all went merry as a marriage-bell.

The capture, with its varying and contradictory details, was the sensation of the period, and would have filled the columns of a newspaper, had one existed, for a month. It subsided in due course, and Koche, after another futile attempt to get himself despatched, went to work as before with vigor and good cheer. His sovereign character was now universally recognized, and he was invariably addressed by his title in full. He accepted it in good humor, tinged with a little pride. The Zealanders looked upon him with secret respect, while by his own people he was regarded as one who, had their lot been less hopeless, would have proved the leader and saviour of the nation.

Two years elapsed, when an American vessel, ready for sea, was boarded by Mate-oro, and a demand made for the fugitive king. The ship was searched from deck to keel, but no trace of him found. Unwilling to anger the fierce chief, who still declared he was aboard, she lay over a day, and the search was renewed with like effect. In the afternoon she stood out to sea, and at nightfall her hull was down, and the island had disappeared, all save one volcanic peak that rose like a pyramid above the waves. Then Koche came out from the fore-chains, in which he had in some mysterious manner buried himself, and caught a last glance of his native mountain as it sank for ever from his view.

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