I bought the marbles--the whole box of them. They cost fifty francs, about four dollars American, as the exchange was then, but I considered the investment a good one. I knew that, no matter where I might be, to lift the lid of my box was to make an immediate and inexpensive journey back to one of the pleasantest periods of boyhood. Oro was awaiting me at the quay, and carried my small sea chest on board with an air of spurious fatigue. I gave him my purchase and told him to stow it away for me in the cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find it again until we were within view of Rutiaro. The _Caleb S. Winship_ was homeward bound then, from Tanao, where we had left Crichton, the English planter. Rutiaro lying on our course, it was decided to put in there in the hope that we might be able to replace our lost deck cargo of copra, washed overboard in a squall a few days previously.
Neither Findlay's _South Pacific Directory_ nor the _British Admiralty Sailing Directions_ had much to say about the atoll. Both agreed that the lagoon is nine miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887, the French surveying vessel, _St. Étienne_, found the tide running through a narrow pass at two knots per hour, the flood as swift as the ebb. It was further stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship, _Prince Edward_, anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from shore in front of the village, which is situated on the most westerly island; and that a few pigs and chickens were purchased at a nominal price from the inhabitants. With this information I had to be content in so far as my reading was concerned. There was nothing of a later date in either volume, and the impression I had was that the atoll, having been charted and briefly described, had remained unvisited, almost forgotten, for a period of thirty-one years.
This, of course, was not the case. Tinned beef and kerosene oil had followed the flag there as elsewhere in the world. Religion, in fact, had preceded it, leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black mother-hubbards still in evidence among the older generation. But skippers of small trading schooners are rarely correspondents of the hydrographic associations, and the "reports from the field" of itinerant missionaries are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals, so that Rutiaro is as little known to the world at large as it has always been. Findlay's general remarks about it were confined to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." It certainly looked lonely enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the archipelago, more than six hundred miles from the nearest steamship route, and that one infrequently traveled. I sought further information from Tino-a-Tino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American despite his Tahitian name. He had been trading in the Low Islands for twenty years, and during that time had created a voluminous literature with reference to their inhabitants. But it was all of an occupational nature and confined to the ledgers of the Inter-Island Trading Company. I found him at his usual task in the cabin, where he gave me some specimen compositions for criticism.