Sea of Glory

outstretched. Henry Eld ordered the men not to shoot in the child’s direction. Pushing his way through one of the gates, he attempted to reach her, but the scorching heat forced him back.
    Soon the entire village was engulfed in flames. Ringgold and his men retreated to a nearby coconut grove where they waited “until the conflagration should have exhausted its fury.” After about an hour, some of the men attempted to enter the village. The heat was still so intense that Sinclair feared his cartridge box might explode. They found calabashes of water, hampers of yams, and many pigs, all burned to death; the villagers had clearly anticipated a long siege. They found spears, clubs, and muskets that had been abandoned by the natives in the ditch. In one of the houses they found Underwood’s cloth cap—“all mashed by the blows which had felled him.” Most of the dead had been burned to cinders in the fire, with only four or five bodies, including that of the young girl, found lying amid the ashes. One of the victims was identified as the chief whom Sinclair had dispatched with his pistol. “[T]o satiate their revenge,” several of the sailors threw the body onto one of the smoldering houses “and roasted him.”
    The trees surrounding the village were stuck full of arrows, most of them fired by the women of the village. Everyone agreed that the natives had put up a stiff resistance, and yet the sailors had sustained only a single significant injury—one man had received a bad gash in the leg from an arrow. As smoke billowed into the clear blue sky and the inescapable smell of burning flesh filled their nostrils, the sailors attempted to slake their thirst with coconuts. Soon it was time to march to Arro. “We continued as we had commenced,” Sinclair wrote, “to destroy every house and plantation that we came across, and as we marched in three lines, I do not think that one escaped us.” The villagers who were still alive had fled to the hills, and Ringgold and his men encountered only one native (who was quickly stabbed by several bayonets) during their march to Arro.
    They reached the village around sunset. “It must have been a most beautiful place,” Sinclair wrote, “situated as it was beneath the shade of a grove of lofty trees.” It was now a wasteland. The village had been abandoned by the time Alden had begun the work of burning it. “Thank God we have taught these villains a lesson,” Sinclair wrote that night. “[A] load has been taken off my conscience; I hope, however, we have not yet done with them.”
    Even as Sinclair was writing these words, George Emmons was finishing up the last engagement of the day. He had spent much of the afternoon in pursuit of a group of five canoes sighted leaving Malolo that morning. He figured they must have escaped to Malololailai, and around four P.M., he sailed his cutter in among the mangrove swamps of the island in search of the missing canoes. Sure enough, there they were—five canoes making their way along the outer reef of the island. The canoes each contained eight warriors; the vessels’ sides had been built up to shield the natives from attack. Emmons had half his normal crew—just seven men. “I thought the odds were too great to allow [the Fijians] any more advantages than they already possessed,” he wrote. Emmons raised the cutter’s sails, which enabled the men who had been pulling oars to take up their muskets, and sailed for the nearest canoe. Once they were within range, Emmons opened fire with his blunderbuss. “Many were killed at the first discharge,” he wrote, “and others were thrown in so much confusion that but little resistance was made.” One native, however, was able to throw three spears at Emmons. After successfully dodging all of them, Emmons could see that the native was reaching for yet another spear. “[ H ]aving discharged my last pistol,” he wrote, “I jumped into the canoe and jerked [the] spear out of his hands while Oahu Jack dispatched him with a hatchet.”
    One of the canoes managed to escape as the rest of the natives jumped into the water and swam in various directions. After shooting at a group of four natives who had reached the shallows (killing one and wounding two), Emmons and his men set to work butchering those still in the water. He later told Sinclair that the Fijians’ “heads were so hard that they turned the edges of the cutlasses and our men had in some cases to finish them off