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calmer by the hour, the wind now a steady, heavy blow, a good, roaring, following wind to sail with.
    The damaged Rangaroa was way off course, somewhere south southwest of the fabled Fiji islands, discovered and named the Cannibal Isles by Captain Bligh on his way back to England after the Bounty mutineers had set him adrift in an open boat without charts or compass.
    The British had ignored the Cannibal Isles until 1860, when they were annexed by the governor of New South Wales, Sir Hercules Robinson. Fiji then became nominally a British colony. But in fact it was the possession of the Australian descendants of the gang of military criminals who had stolen that huge island out of the real sovereignty of the British Empire by yet another mutiny against the same Bligh, when he was governor of the Australian penal colony.
    With the end of slavery in the United States in the wake of the Civil War, the small clique that owned most of Australia saw the opportunity to further enrich themselves. By using slaves from the south Pacific islands, they grew sugar and cotton more cheaply than could be matched elsewhere in the world.
    A gang of missionary traders armed Cakabau, the chief of the tiny ninety-acre island of Bau, and declared him king of Fiji. Cakabau then gratefully ceded the whole of Fiji to Britain, and Sir Hercules Robinson and the Whitehall government obligingly ratified the deal, legitimatizing the reign of the bloodthirsty cannibal chief. By 1867 his regime had become infamous for the killing and eating of his subjects and the enslavement of those whom he was too sated to eat.
    The Rangaroa was carrying cargo for Levuka, the cannibal monarch's capital, and Larsen knew that it was safe to put into port there. There was no telling just what sort of reception they might get on any of the other Cannibal Isles.
    But just now there was no telling where any such island might be.
    Studying the navigation chart, Larsen looked irritable, and at the same time amused. "Look at this, will you?" he said, pounding the chart with a finger as thick as a small belaying pin. "It says here: 'Some reports of a small group of islands in this vicinity.' For Christ's sake, what sort of sailing direction do ye call that?"
    "Things is different in these parts," said Liam, who was studying the chart with him. "It was around these parts that Gulliver discovered Brobdignag, and not too far away he found Lilliput."
    He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he would not be at all surprised to glance out the porthole and see a man standing in the sea and towering over the schooner, or another only a few inches tall, dancing on the head of a belaying pin.
    "Bah, fairy tales," snorted Ulf. "ships have gone looking for dose islands and found nutting. Just fairy tales."
    "Fiction anyway," said Larsen. "I've read Swift's book."
    "Have ye now?" Liam chuckled. "Then read this." He laid on the chart table an open copy of the Pacific Islands Pilot of 1864. "These reports is not from a dotty old Irish priest like Swift, but from hard-nosed English insurance men."
    Larsen picked up the book and read: "Lloyd's agent reported hereabouts the island of Tanakuvi, longitude 172 49 West and latitude 19 36 South. But HMS Vengeance, searching for the island, reported depth of fifty-seven fathoms."
    Larsen slammed the book shut. "It's enough to make you believe in the devil himself."
    "Then you're learning something at last," chuckled Liam, ducking as Larsen playfully swung a great fist near his nose.
    "There's been islands appearing and disappearing in these parts ever since Magellan found the Tuamotus four hundred years ago." Ulf chuckled drily.
    "The question is," Larsen said, "what is here now? This chart is no bloody help at all. There's a ship lost every week running into uncharted islands hereabout, and I don't intend for Rangaroa to be another one."
    Liam opened the well-thumbed copy of the Pacific Islands Pilot and read: "In this vicinity the Clara Bella reported rocks in