[Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas by Herman Melville]@TWC D-Link book
Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas

CHAPTER XXV
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Judge, then, his feelings when Viner, the lost third mate, the instant he touched the deck, rushed up and wrung him by the hand.
During the gale his line had parted; so that the boat, drifting fast to leeward, was out of sight by morning.

Reduced, after this, to great extremities, the boat touched, for fruit, at an island of which they knew nothing.

The natives, at first, received them kindly; but one of the men getting into a quarrel on account of a woman, and the rest taking his part, they were all massacred but Viner, who, at the time, was in an adjoining village.

After staying on the island more than two years, he finally escaped in the boat of an American whaler, which landed him at Valparaiso.

From this period he had continued to follow the seas, as a man before the mast, until about eighteen months previous, when he went ashore at Tahiti, where he now owned the schooner we saw, in which he traded among the neighbouring islands.
The breeze springing up again just after nightfall, Viner left us, promising his old shipmate to see him again, three days hence, in Papeetee harbour..


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