"For two days the wind blew, and every hour it increased. By the second night it was a fully developed hurricane whose velocity we had no means of measuring. The rain fell tremendously; the lightning was vivid, and almost continuous. The thunder followed the course of the storm; and altogether the noise was so great that we had to shout to one another to be understood. Our house shook like a rickety bird-cage, and many times it seemed to be half lifted from the ground; but it stood through the storm, and was the only one that did so.
"On the following morning the wind had died down to a moderate gale, and we could venture out. The picture that presented itself cannot possibly be described with anything like vividness. Cocoanut and bread-fruit trees by the thousand had been thrown down or stripped of their leaves; banana-plants were in the same condition; the grass was levelled, and covered with mud and water, and not a house in the neighborhood remained standing. In the cotton-fields not only were the leaves and bolls stripped from the plants, but in many places the plants had been torn up by the roots and lay in heaps. In Levuka many houses were blown down; vessels were driven ashore, or broken to pieces at their moorings; and the whole windward coast of the islands was strewn with wrecks. Many foreign vessels that were known to be in Feejee waters, or near the islands, were never heard of again, and they doubtless went down on that terrible night. At Macuata, on Vanua Levu, the wind lifted a small vessel bodily from the beach and blew it into a native village two or three hundred yards away!"
The story of the hurricane led to various anecdotes of the South Seas, and in this way the afternoon was passed until dinner-time. One man told how a ship on which he once sailed was driven before a hurricane and thrown upon a reef, where the waves dashed her to pieces. He was carried into the comparatively smooth lagoon inside the reef, and saved himself by swimming, all his companions being drowned. Fortunately for him, the islanders among whom he landed were not cannibals, or he would have been condemned at once to the oven. The cannibals of the South Pacific have always regarded people shipwrecked on their shores as special gifts or windfalls, just as the inhabitants of certain parts of the coast of the United States are said to have regarded the cargoes of wrecked ships less than a century ago. Of course he taught the natives many useful things, and eventually married the daughter of the chief, and became a chief himself when his father-in-law died.