“You are only repeating the untruthful assertion of that clergyman,” he said accusingly.  “He put it in a pamphlet in French.  My people have had to do with Easter Island for forty years.  I lived there several years and, as you know, I made that island what it is now, a cattle and sheep ranch.  It is the strangest place, with the strangest history in the world.  If we knew who settled it originally and carved those stone gods the Dutch sailor spoke of, we would know more about the human race and its wanderings.

“The Peruvians murdered and stole the Easter Islanders.  Just before we took hold there, a gang of blackbirders from Peru went there and killed and took away many hundreds of them.  They sold them to the guano diggings in the Chincha Islands.  Only those escaped death or capture who hid in the dark caverns.  Nearly all those taken away died soon.  We then made contracts with some of those left, and took them to Tahiti to work.  It is true they died, too, most of them, but some you can find where McHenry lives half a mile from here at Patutoa.  We sold off the stock to Chileans, and that country owns the island now.

“I think the island had a superior race once.  There are immense platforms of stone, like the paepaes of the Marquesas, only bigger, and the stones are all fitted together without cement.  They built them on promontories facing the sea.  Some are three hundred feet long, and the walls thirty feet high.  On these platforms there were huge stone gods that have been thrown down; some were thirty-seven feet high, and they had redstone crowns, ten feet in diameter.  There were stone houses one hundred feet long, with walls five feet thick.  How they moved the stones no one knows, for, of course, these people there now were not the builders.  Some race of whom they knew nothing was there before them.

“They are one of the greatest mysteries in the world.  Easter is the queerest of all the Maori islands.  They had nothing like the other Maoris had in any of these islands, but they had plenty of stone, their lances were tipped with obsidian, and they were terrible fighters among themselves.  They had no trees, and so no canoes; and they depended on driftwood and the hibiscus for weapons.  They are all done for now.”

Captain Benson was still busied with his log when the steamship from New Zealand arrived to take the shipwrecked men away.  The El Dorado’s boat was stowed carefully on the deck of the liner.  I saw the skipper watching it as the deck-hands put chocks under it and made it fast against the rolling of the ship.  That boat deserved well of him, for its stanchness had stood between him and the maws of the sharks many days and nights.

I bade him and the two seamen good-by on the wharf.  The old man was full of his plan to exhibit the boat in a museum and of selling his account of his adventures to a magazine.

The crew left on Easter Island were rescued sooner than they had expected.  A British tramp, the Knight of the Garter, put into Easter Island for emergency repairs, having broken down.  The castaways left with her for Sydney, Australia, and from there reached San Francisco by the steamship Ventura, ten months after they had sailed away on the El Dorado.  That schooner was never sighted again.