the hearts of the inhabitants, who, not many years ago, cut off a big
bark and killed all hands with the exception of the second mate. The
survivor carried the news to his brothers. The captains of three
trading schooners returned with him to Lord Howe. They sailed their
vessels right into the lagoon and proceeded to preach the white man's
gospel that only white men shall kill white men and that the lesser
breeds must keep hands off. The schooners sailed up and down the
lagoon, harrying and destroying. There was no escape from the narrow
sand-circle, no bush to which to flee. The men were shot down at
sight, and there was no avoiding being sighted. The villages were
burned, the canoes smashed, the chickens and pigs killed, and the
precious cocoanut trees chopped down. For a month this continued, when
the schooner sailed away; but the fear of the white man had been
seared into the souls of the islanders and never again were they rash
enough to harm one.

Max Bunster was the one white man on Lord Howe, trading in the pay of
the ubiquitous Moongleam Soap Company. And the Company billeted him on
Lord Howe, because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most
out-of-the-way place to be found. That the Company did not get rid of
him was due to the difficulty of finding another man to take his
place. He was a strapping big German, with something wrong in his
brain. Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of his condition.
He was a bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage than any
savage on the island.

Being a coward, his brutality was of the cowardly order. When he first
went into the Company's employ, he was stationed on Savo. When a
consumptive colonial was sent to take his place, he beat him up with
his fists and sent him off a wreck in the schooner that brought him.