Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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“They feared that you would change your minds at the last moment,” Moetua replied.

“That is how I was caught,” said Prudence. “Mills went to my uncle with his pockets filled with nails, the largest kind; he must have had a score of them. My uncle’s eyes were hungry when he saw them. ‘You shall spend the night on the ship, with the white man,’ he told me. So he was given the nails and I went with Mills. When I awoke at daybreak, the vessel was at sea.”

“And you like him now, your man?” Hutia asked.

Prudence shrugged her shoulders. “He is well enough.”

“He is mad about you,” said Susannah. “That is plain.”

“He is like a father and a lover in one,” the girl replied. “I can do as I please with him.”

“For my part,” observed Moetua, “I would not change places with any of you. I prefer a husband of our own race. These white men are strange; their thoughts are not like ours. We can never understand them.”

“I do not find it so,” said Balhadi. “My man, Smith, might almost be one of us. I can read his thoughts even when his speech is not clear to me. White men are not very different from those of our blood.”