Great Britain when an American naval captain, David Porter, seized
Nuka-hiva. A hundred years ago the Stars and Stripes floated over
the little hill above the bay, and American cannon upon it commanded
the village of Tai-o-hae. Beneath the verdure is still buried the
proclamation of Porter, with coins of the young republic, unless the
natives dug up the bottle after the destruction of the last of
Porter's forces. They witnessed the ceremony of its planting, which
must have appeared to them a ritual to please the powerful gods of
the whites. Unless respect for the _tapu_ placed on the bottle by
"Opotee" restrained them, they probably brought it to the light and
examined the magic under its cork.

The adventures of Porter here were as strange and romantic as those
of any of the hundreds of the gypsies of the sea who sailed this
tropic and spilled the blood of a people unused to their ways and
ignorant of their inventions and weapons of power.

Porter had left the United States in command of the frigate _Essex_,
to destroy British shipping, capture British ships, and British
sailors. Porter, son and nephew of American naval officers, destined
to be foster-father of Farragut, the first American admiral, and
father of the great Admiral Porter, was then in his early thirties
and loved a fight. He harried the British in the Atlantic, doubled
Cape Horn without orders, and did them evil on the high seas, and at
last, with many prisoners and with prize crews aboard his captures,
he made for the Marquesas to refresh his men, repair his ships, and
get water, food, and wood for the voyage home.

In Tai-o-hae Bay he moored his fleet, and was met by flocks of
friendly canoes and great numbers of the beautiful island women, who