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see at once that a better spot could not be wished for. There was good shelter, sound anchorage, a nobby landing, and plenty of wood, besides which Moeraki was a very pretty place, and above all there were plenty of fish about. So we thought it a good spec to join Hughes.

“There were three partners in the affair: Hughes and a man named Thompson, and Sivatt, a cooper. The cooper was a very important man in all whaling parties, for d’ye see, we always get the staves down in ‘shooks’ You know what shooks are? Yes, bundles of staves, and he had to rattle them together, and this took him all his time. I’ve seen any amount of those chaps that would put together their twenty tuns a day single-handed. Well, as I was going to say, we were all on a ‘lay.’ You know what a Jay is, I suppose? If you are on a 100th, when a 100 tons are got you get one, and when you are on a lay they find you: that’s the difference between a lay and going shares. If you are on shares you find yourself, but of course you get a bigger chance than in a lay. The men get different interests according to agreement. A pulling hand will get, say, one share, a steerer one and a-half, and a headsman two shares—just as is agreed on. As I said, there were three partners in the spec, and the rest of us were on a lay—six of us white men and six Maoris that we brought with us from Otago. They were fine strapping fellows. We had our eyes open in getting them to join the party. You see, we got on very well with the Maoris, but there was just a chance that that state of things wouldn’t last for ever, and it seemed to us that we had a double chance of securing a peaceful and quiet time by having these chaps with us. They were sons of chiefs, and if the worst did come to the worst we had them with us, don’t you see?

“Hughes was the head man of our party. We