We were enabled to save a considerable amount of stores from the wreck, as well as some arms and ammunition. There were also a bull and two cows, which formed the remainder of a herd of cattle that Hayes had running on the island of Ponapé; the rest--some forty head or so--had been stolen from there by his one-time bosom friend and colleague, the notorious Captain Ben Peese.
The natives of Strong's Island were but few in number--about four hundred all told--and although a very handsome race and possessed of the very greatest intelligence, were dying out rapidly. In 1825, when Duperrey, the French navigator, visited the island he estimated the population at eleven thousand, and Don Felipe Tompson, an Englishman in the Spanish Navy, who was there long before Duperrey, relates that the house
