would come and punish us, and there they were in the three schooners,
and our three villages were wiped out.

"And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners
from windward sailed down upon us in the middle of the lagoon. The
trade wind was blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us
down. And the rifles never ceased talking. We scattered like flying
fish before the bonita, and there were so many of us that we escaped
by thousands, this way and that, to the islands on the rim of the
atoll.

"And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon. In the
nighttime we slipped past them. But the next day, or in two days or
three days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward the
other end of the lagoon. And so it went. We no longer counted nor
remembered our dead. True, we were many and they were few. But what
could we do? I was in one of the twenty canoes filled with men who
were not afraid to die. We attacked the smallest schooner. They shot
us down in heaps. They threw dynamite into the canoes, and when the
dynamite gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And the rifles
never ceased talking. And those whose canoes were smashed were shot as
they swam away. And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and
yelled, "Yah! Yah! Yah!"

"Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl
was left alive. Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain,
or else heaped high with coral rock. We were twenty-five thousand on
Oolong before the three schooners came. Today we are five thousand.
After the schooners left, we were but three thousand, as you shall
see.