Concerning Bully Hayes by Louis Becke

Three or four years passed by, during which time the writer cruised about from island to island in the North and South Pacific -- sometimes living ashore as a trader, sometimes voyaging to and fro among the many groups as supercargo or recruiter in the labour trader; and then one day the schooner, in which I then served as supercargo, reached Samoa, and there I accepted the dignified but unsatisfactory financial position of inter-island supercargo to a firm of merchants doing business in Apia, the distracted little capital of the Navigator's Island. At this time, the late Earl of Pembroke, the joint author with Dr. Kingsley of "South Sea Bubbles," was in Apia Harbour in his schooner yacht _Albatross_, and every day we expected to see the French Pacific Squadron steam into the port and capture the numerous German ships then laying at anchor there. But the gallant Admiral Clouet, who commanded, disdained such work as this -- he was willing and eager to fight any German warships that he could come across, but had no inclination for the inglorious task of seizing unarmed merchantmen.

For two years or so I remained in the employ of the trading firm. Hayes then lived in Apia -- or rather at Matautu, on the east side of Apia Harbour. When I say lived there, I mean that Samoa was his headquarters, for he was absent six months out of the twelve, cruising away in the North West Pacific among the Caroline and Marshall Groups. His house at Matautu Point was sweetly embowered in a grove of coco-nut and breadfruit trees, and here the so-called pirate exercised the most unbounded hospitality to the residents and to any captains (not Germans) visiting Samoa. Sometimes we would meet, and whenever we did he would urge me to come away with him on a cruise to the north-west; but duty tied me down to my own miserable little craft, a wretched little ketch of sixty tons register, that leaked like a basket and swarmed with myriads of cockroaches and quite a respectable number of centipedes and scorpions.