remonstrated; in vain he talked of his wife and children; the captain
and his sailors laughed, promised him better of both sorts among his
kindred whites; and when he cursed their hardened hearts and cruel
treachery, they laughed again, and left him to his misery. At last, when
the protracted hurricane subsided, and the vessel's log-book proved that
she had been driven several degrees leeward of the Society Isles,
abandoned to a sullen despair, he ceased to accuse or to reproach; he
ceased even to speak on any subject, but cast himself into his lonely
berth during the day, that he might not be irritated to continued
unavailing madness, by the sight of the ingrates who had betrayed him.
To his straining eyes, nothing but the silvery line of the starlit sea
was on that distant horizon; but his heart's vision pierced farther,
and he beheld the sleepers in that home;--no, not the sleepers! His
disconsolate, his despairing wife, tearing her bright locks, and beating
the tender bosom he must no longer clasp to his own. His children--"Oh!
my babes!" cried he, and the cry of a father's heart for once pierced
the obdurate bosom of the captain, who, in that moment, had happened
to come upon the deck to examine the night. To ease his Otaheitan
benefactor, he declared he had thus carried him off, to share in the
honour of his expected discoveries. The unhappy chief, in then answering
him, begged, that if he had, indeed, any spark of honesty towards him,
he would prove it, by obeying his wish in one thing at least; and that
was, to set him on shore on the first European settlement they should
fall in with. "Do this," said he, "and I may yet believe you have
honour. For honour is a man's own act; a discovery is fortune's; and for
its advantages, did I stay, I should not have to thank you. But I want
none such. Set me on shore, and there I will follow my own destiny."

To this poor request, the iron-souled commander of the vessel, at last
consented; and in the course of some weeks after, Laonce was landed on