Quite six years had passed, and then I learnt, in a somewhat curious manner, what became of him. One day in Sydney, New South Wales, three captains and myself met for lunch at the Paragon Hotel, on Circular Quay. We were all engaged in the South Sea trade, and one of the company, who was a stranger to me, had just returned from the Solomon Islands, with which group and its murderous, cannibal people he was very familiar. (He was himself destined to be killed there with his ship's company in 1884.) He was a young man who had had some very narrow escapes and some very thrilling experiences, some of which he narrated.
We were talking of the massacre of Captain Ferguson and the crew of the Sydney trading steamer _Ripple_, by the natives of Bougainville Island in the Solomon Group, when our friend remarked--
"Ah, poor Ferguson ought to have been more careful. Why, the very chief of that village at Numa Numa--the man who cut him down with a tomahawk--had killed two other white men. Ferguson knew that, and yet would allow him to come aboard time after time with hundreds of his people, and gave him and them the run of his ship. I knew the fellow well. He told me to my face, the first time I met him, that he had killed and eaten two white men."
"Who were they?" I asked.
"One was a man trading for Captain MacLeod of New Caledonia; the other chap was some beachcombing fellow who had been kicked ashore at Numa Numa by his skipper. I heard he came from Samoa originally. Anyway the chief told me that as soon as the ship that had put the man ashore had sailed, he was speared through the back as he was drinking a coco-nut.
"When they stripped off his clothes to make him ready for the oven, they found he was tattoed, Samoan fashion, from the waist to the knees. Then, as he had red hair, they cut off his head and smoke-dried it, instead of eating it with the rest of the body; they kept it as an ornament for the stem of a big canoe. A white man's head is a great thing at any time for a canoe's figurehead in the Solomons, but a white man's head with red hair is a great _mana_" (mascotte).
Then I told him that I had known the man, and gave him his antecedents.
"Ah," he said, "I daresay if you had been there you would have felt as if you could have eaten a bit of the beggar yourself."
"I certainly do feel pleased that he's settled," I replied, as I thought of poor Red Bird's hand.