years he could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to
bottom through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was stolen
by the bushmen, who cannot even swim and who are afraid of salt water.
Thereafter Mauki saw the sea only from a distance, through rifts in
the jungle and from open spaces on the high mountain sides. He became
the slave of old Fanfoa, head chief over a score of scattered
bush-villages on the range-lips of Malaita, the smoke of which, on
calm mornings, is about the only evidence the seafaring white men have
of the teeming interior population. For the whites do not penetrate
Malaita. They tried it once, in the days when the search was on for
gold, but they always left their heads behind to grin from the smoky
rafters of the bushmen's huts.

When Mauki was a young man of seventeen, Fanfoa got out of tobacco. He
got dreadfully out of tobacco. It was hard times in all his villages.
He had been guilty of a mistake. Suo was a harbor so small that a
large schooner could not swing at anchor in it. It was surrounded by
mangroves that overhung the deep water. It was a trap, and into the
trap sailed two white men in a small ketch. They were after recruits,
and they possessed much tobacco and trade goods, to say nothing of
three rifles and plenty of ammunition. Now there were no salt-water
men living at Suo, and it was there that the bushmen could come down
to the sea. The ketch did a splendid traffic. It signed on twenty
recruits the first day. Even old Fanfoa signed on. And that same day
the score of new recruits chopped off the two white men's head, killed
the boat's crew, and burned the ketch. Thereafter, and for three
months, there was tobacco and trade goods in plenty and to spare in
all the bush villages. Then came the man-of-war that threw shells for
miles into the hills, frightening the people out of their villages and
into the deeper bush. Next the man-of-war sent landing parties ashore.