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.
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