Steve hurried through this part of his diary.  So near to safety then, he had had not much thought for a record.  There was little more to tell, for after the lightning, the sharks, and the swordfish, they had had no unusual experiences.  They had made the voyage of nearly four thousand miles from the pit of water in which they had left the El Dorado, and were glad that they had not stayed behind on Easter Island.  Steve had only good words for the skipper’s skill as a seaman, but now that they were there, he would like to be assured of his wages.  The captain said he did not know what the owners would do about paying Steve for the time since the El Dorado sank.  He was sure she had gone down immediately, for, he said, he would not have left his ship had he not been certain she could not stay on the surface.  He contrasted his arrival in Papeete with his coming years before in the brig Lurline, when he brought the first phonograph to the South Seas.  Crowds had flocked to the quay to hear it, and it was taken in a carriage all about the island.

The superb courage of these men, their marvelous seamanship, and their survival of all the perils of their thousands of miles’ voyage were not lessened in interest or admiration by their personality.  But one realized daily, as one saw them chewing their quids, devouring rudely the courses served by Lovaina, or talking childishly of their future, that heroes are the creatures of opportunity.  It is true Steve and Alex were picked of all the crew for their sea knowledge and experience, their nerve and willingness, by the sturdy captain, and that he, too, was a man big in the primitive qualities, a viking, a companion for a Columbus; but—­they were peculiarly of their sept; types molded by the wind-swept spaces of the vasty deep, chiseled by the stress of storm and calm, of burning, glassy oceans, and the chilling, killing berg; men set apart from all the creeping children of the solid earth, and trained to seize the winds from heaven for their wings, to meet with grim contempt the embattled powers of sky and wave, and then, alas! on land to become the puny sport of merchant, crimp, and money-changer, and rum and trull.

Goeltz, Lying Bill, Llewellyn, and McHenry sat in the Cercle Bougainville with eager looks as I read them the diary of Steve Drinkwater.  The seamen held opinions of the failure of Captain Benson’s seamanship at certain points, and all knew the waters through which he had come.

“Many of the people of Mangareva came from Easter Island,” said Lying Bill.  “There was a French missionary brought a gang of them there.  ’E was Pere Roussel, and ’e ran away with ’em because Llewellyn’s bloody crowd ’ere tried to steal ’em and sell ’em.  They lived at Mangareva with ’im till he died a few years ago, and they never went back.”

Llewellyn lifted his dour eyes.  There was never such a dule countenance as his, dark naturally with his Welsh and Tahitian blood, and shaded by the gloom of his soul.  He looked regretfully at Captain Pincher.