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There was a scraping of chairs and the door was flung open. A stout burly man in captain’s uniform stood in the doorway, his face purple with emotion and heat. Without a glance at me, he strode truculently across the room, while the A.D.C. sprang up and hastened to open the outer door. Captain Bligh gave him neither word nor glance as he brushed past. Next moment he was gone. The tired young A.D.C. closed the door, and turned to me with a faint smile. “Thank God!” he murmured devoutly, under his breath.

We came in sight of Tahiti on a morning in early April, passing to the north of Eimeo with a fine breeze at west by north. But the wind chopped around to the east as we approached the land, and we were all day long working up to Matavai Bay. My lieutenant, Mr. Cobden, must have had some inkling of what was passing in my mind, for he and the master saw to it that I was disturbed by no detail of the working of the ship.

Communication with Tahiti was all but impossible in those days, and not once, during the twenty years that had passed since I had embraced Tehani in the Pandora’s sick-bay, had I had word of her, or of our child. In 1796, having learned that the ship Duff was to sail for Tahiti with a cargo of missionaries,—the first in the South Sea,—I had been at some pains to make the acquaintance of one of those worthy men, and received his promise to search out my Indian wife and child, and send me word of them when the ship returned to England. But no letter came back to me. In Port Jackson, I had met and talked with some of these same missionaries, and told them of my orders to visit Tahiti and report on the condition of the people. Their accounts of the island were of a most melancholy nature. Considering their lives and those of their wives and children in danger, the missionaries had embarked for Port Jackson on a vessel providentially lying at anchor in Matavai Bay. They had spent twelve years on Tahiti, learned the language (they were kind enough to say that my dictionary had been of the greatest aid to them), and worked unremittingly at their task of preaching the Gospel. Yet not a single convert had been made. War, and the diseases introduced by the visits of European ships, had destroyed four fifths of the people, I was told, and the future of the island appeared dark indeed. As for Tehani, not one of the worthy missionaries had ever heard of her, nor set foot on Taiarapu, where I supposed her still to reside.