Seventeen years we were together.  He made me.  I should to-day be a supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.

“You spend your money, and you go out and get more,” he said one day.  “It is easy to get money now.  But when you get old, your money will be spent, and you will not be able to go out and get more.  I know, master.  I have studied the way of white men.  On the beaches are many old men who were young once, and who could get money just like you.  Now they are old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.

“The black boy is a slave on the plantations.  He gets twenty dollars a year.  He works hard.  The overseer does not work hard.  He rides a horse and watches the black boy work.  He gets twelve hundred dollars a year.  I am a sailor on the schooner.  I get fifteen dollars a month.  That is because I am a good sailor.  I work hard.  The captain has a double awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles.  I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar.  He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month.  I am a sailor.  He is a navigator.  Master, I think it would be very good for you to know navigation.”

Otoo spurred me on to it.  He sailed with me as second mate on my first schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself.  Later on it was: 

“The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and he is never free from the burden.  It is the owner who is better paid—­the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money over.”

“True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars—­an old schooner at that,” I objected.  “I should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars.”

“There be short ways for white men to make money,” he went on, pointing ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.

We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory-nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar.

“Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles,” he said.  “The flat land runs far back.  It is worth nothing now.  Next year—­who knows?—­or the year after, men will pay much money for that land.  The anchorage is good.  Big steamers can lie close up.  You can buy the land four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe, one hundred dollars.  Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of a ship.”

I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years, instead of two.  Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar—­twenty thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease at a nominal sum.  I owned the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to a company for half a fortune.  Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and saw the opportunity.  He was responsible for the salving of the Doncaster—­bought in at auction for a hundred pounds, and clearing three thousand after every expense was paid.  He led me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.