Read "Wednesday the Tenth" by Grant Allen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
On the eighteenth day out from Sydney, we were cruising under the lee of Erromanga -- of course you know Erromanga, an isolated island between the New Hebrides and the Loyalty group -- when suddenly our dusky Polynesian boy, Nassaline, who was at the masthead on the lookout, gave a surprised cry of "Boat ahoy! " and pointed with his skinny black finger to a dark dot away southward on the horizon, in the direction of Fiji.
I strained my eyes and saw -- well, a barrel or something. For myself, I should never have made out it was a boat at all, being somewhat slow of vision at great distances; but, bless your heart! these Kanaka lads have eyes like hawks for pouncing down upon a canoe or a sail no bigger than a speck afar off; so when Nassaline called out confidently, "Boat ahoy! " in his broken English, I took out my binocular, and focused it full on the spot towards which the skinny black finger pointed. Probably, thought I to myself, a party of natives, painted red, on the war-trail against their enemies in some neighboring island; or perhaps a "labor vessel," doing a veiled slave-trade in "indentured apprentices" for New Caledonia or the Queensland planters.