Last evening our pigs fought like dogs, biting each other and rushing about the deck like mad. The noise they made was more like barking than grunting or squealing. The cook has cut his leg; Mr. Hird has a bad cold; the engineer, Mr. Stoddard, is sneezing, and Louis feels as though he had caught the cold also; the captain still very bad; he caught more cold last night. Lloyd's wounds, from the reef on Tin Jack's island much better. I bound them with soap and sugar first and then covered them with iodoform.
We have been to two settlements to-day and are now returning to the first. At the second Tom Day came on board and had a meal; also Captain Smith. Our coal is very low; hardly any left, in fact, and we are all burning with curiosity as to where we are going next--to the Hebrides, Fiji--or perhaps to Brisbane. Spent the evening talking to Tom Day. He told many tales of Bishop Patterson and of hunts for necklace teeth. A father who has good teeth often leaves them as a heritage to his children. They are worth a great deal--or were. He has known many murders for teeth. My necklace seems a gruesome possession.
_13th._--Left Noukanau in the morning; arrived at Piru at eleven o'clock; left at one, Monday morning, for Onoatoa. Louis had a long talk there with Frank Villiero. Land here is divided into large and small lots; the large, one and a half acres, the small, half an acre. There are never any smaller divisions. A large lot is quite enough for a family to live on. Some great families own many lots and have picked as many as fifteen hundred nuts in one month. Pieces of land are confiscated for theft, or murder, by those who suffer loss through the crime. A piece of land so taken from a murderer can be regained by the criminal pouring a bottle of oil over the body of the man he has murdered. But this is never done if the person fined bears malice or enmity toward the dead man. The island was formerly in a far more prosperous state owing to the fact that a large proportion of the inhabitants were then kept as slaves.
The duties of the "old men" (the democratic islands are supposed to be ruled by the "old men," who meet in a body to make laws) are really the demarcation and recording of lands; they can go back for generations in the division of island lands. The population of Piru is about twenty-five hundred; the police, at present, number about one thousand men uniformed in blue jumpers, jean trousers, and a wisp of red on the arm. There are three districts, each being patrolled at night by the police, who call the roll of every grown person, and must be answered. The fines go one half to the teacher (for his private benefit) one fourth to the old men, one fourth to the police. Villiero has seen a policeman receive no more than ten cocoanuts for a whole year's work, and he must find his own uniform of which he is not proud. Every portion of the island is owned and the demarcations owned. They are a mean lot here; their fights mere broils, and very little feeling is shown for each other. A canoe drifted away, or a man dead, is almost instantly forgotten. Little or no sour toddy is drunk since the missionaries came. Mr. Clark, the missionary from Samoa, told them that on Sundays when a ship came up to the island they must allow a couple of men to take the trader off; formerly these boatmen were always fined.