All His Arguments Would Have Availed Him Little, If Tee And Oedidee Had Not At This Time Come On Board,

And given a new turn to the affair, by declaring that the man who stole the musket was from Tiarabou,

And had gone with it to that kingdom, so that it was not in the power of Otoo to recover it. I very much doubted their veracity, till they asked me to send a boat to Waheatoua, the king of Tiarabou, and offered to go themselves in her, and get it. I asked why this could not be done without my sending a boat? They said, it would not otherwise be given to them.

This story of theirs, although it did not quite satisfy me, nevertheless carried with it a probability of truth; for which reason I thought it better to drop the affair altogether, rather than to punish a nation for a crime I was not sure any of its members had committed. I therefore suffered my new ambassador to depart with his two canoes without executing his commission. The other three canoes belonged to Maritata, a Tiarabou chief, who had been some days about the tents; and there was good reason to believe it was one of his people that carried off the musket. I intended to have detained them; but as Tee and Oedidee both assured me that Maritata and his people were quite innocent, I suffered them to be taken away also, and desired Tee to tell Otoo, that I should give myself no farther concern about the musket, since I was satisfied none of his people had stolen it. Indeed, I thought it was irrecoverably lost; but, in the dusk of the evening it was brought to the tents, together with some other things we had lost, which we knew nothing of, by three men who had pursued the thief, and taken them from him. I know not if they took this trouble of their own accord, or by the order of Otoo. I rewarded them, and made no other enquiry about it. These men, as well as some others present, assured me that it was one of Maritata's people who had committed this theft; which vexed me that I had let his canoes so easily slip through my fingers. Here, I believe, both Tee and Oedidee designedly deceived me.

When the musket and other things were brought in, every one then present, or who came after, pretended to have had some hand in recovering them, and claimed a reward accordingly. But there was no one who acted this farce so well as Nuno, a man of some note, and well known to us when I was here in 1769. This man came, with all the savage fury imaginable in his countenance, and a large club in his hand, with which he beat about him, in order to shew us how he alone had killed the thief; when, at the same time, we all knew that he had not been out of his house the whole time.

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