He spurned them as
too loathsome to be touched. Leading the way, Cook ordered his men to
break the fence down, and proffered three hatchets, thrusting them into
the folds of the priest's garment. Pale and quivering with rage, the
priest bade a slave remove the profaning iron. Down tumbled the fence!
Down the images on poles! Down the skulls of the dead sacred to the
savage as the sepulchre to the white man! It may be said to the credit
of the crew, that the men were thoroughly frightened at what they were
ordered to do; but they were not too frightened to carry away the
images as relics. Cook alone was blind to risk. As if to add the last
straw to the Hawaiians' endurance, when the ships unmoored and sailed
out from the bay, where but two weeks before they had been so royally
welcomed, they carried {202} eloping wives and children from the lower
classes of the two villages.
It was one of the cases where retribution came so swift it was like a
living Nemesis. If the weather had continued fair, doubtless wives and
children would have been dumped off at some near harbor, the incident
considered a joke, and the Englishmen gone merrily on their way; but a
violent gale arose.
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