The men had stamped down the nests and driven the birds from the galley, so that I could now enter without contest.  One door had been already blocked with rice; the place was in part darkness, full of a foul stale smell, and a cloud of nasty flies; it had been left, besides, in some disorder, or else the birds, during their time of tenancy, had knocked the things about; and the floor, like the deck before we washed it, was spread with pasty filth.  Against the wall, in the far corner, I found a handsome chest of camphor-wood bound with brass, such as Chinamen and sailors love, and indeed all of mankind that plies in the Pacific.  From its outside view I could thus make no deduction; and, strange to say, the interior was concealed.  All the other chests, as I have said already, we had found gaping open, and their contents scattered abroad; the same remark we found to apply afterwards in the quarters of the seamen; only this camphor-wood chest, a singular exception, was both closed and locked.

I took an axe to it, readily forced the paltry Chinese fastening, and, like a Custom-House officer, plunged my hands among the contents.  For some while I groped among linen and cotton.  Then my teeth were set on edge with silk, of which I drew forth several strips covered with mysterious characters.  And these settled the business, for I recognised them as a kind of bed-hanging popular with the commoner class of the Chinese.  Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of an extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus for smoking opium, with a liberal provision of the drug.  Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos.  Amalu?  Or had Jos. stolen the chest before he proceeded to ship under a false name and domicile?  It was possible, as anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded as a solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog.  For why should this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the others were rummaged or removed? and where had Jos. come by that second chest, with which (according to the clerk at the What Cheer) he had started for Honolulu?

“And how have YOU fared?” inquired the captain, whom I found luxuriously reclining in our mound of litter.  And the accent on the pronoun, the heightened colour of the speaker’s face, and the contained excitement in his tones, advertised me at once that I had not been alone to make discoveries.

“I have found a Chinaman’s chest in the galley,” said I, “and John (if there was any John) was not so much as at the pains to take his opium.”

Nares seemed to take it mighty quietly.  “That so?” said he.  “Now, cast your eyes on that and own you’re beaten!” And with a formidable clap of his open hand he flattened out before me, on the deck, a pair of newspapers.

I gazed upon them dully, being in no mood for fresh discoveries.