"BULLY" HAYES! Oh, halcyon days of the sixties and seventies, when the Pacific was not, as now, patrolled by men-of-war from lonely Pylstaart, in the Friendlies, to the low-lying far-away Marshalls and the coral lagoons of the north-west; when the Queensland schooners ran full "nigger" cargoes to Bundaberg, Maryborough, and Port Mackay; when the Government agents, drunk nine days out of... more...

In the sea story of Australia, from the days of Captain Phillip in 1788, to the end of the "fifties" in the present century, American ships and seamen have no little part. First they came into the harbour of Sydney Cove as traders carrying provisions for sale to the half-starved settlers, then as whalers, and before another thirty years had passed, the starry banner might be met with anywhere... more...

CHAPTER I ~ "CHINKIE'S FLAT" "Chinkie's Flat," In its decadence, was generally spoken of, by the passing traveller, as a "God-forsaken hole," and it certainly did present a repellent appearance when seen for the first time, gasping under the torrid rays of a North Queensland sun, which had dried up every green thing except the silver-leaved ironbarks, and the long,... more...

CHAPTER I Brabant's wife was sitting on the shady verandah of her house on the hills overlooking Levuka harbour, and watching a large fore and aft schooner being towed in by two boats, for the wind had died away early in the morning and left the smooth sea to swelter and steam under a sky of brass. The schooner was named the Maritana, and was owned and commanded by Mrs. Brabant's husband,... more...

CHAPTER I A small, squat and dirty-looking trading steamer, with the name Motutapu painted in yellow letters on her bows and stern, lay at anchor off the native village of Utiroa on Drummond's Island in the Equatorial Pacific. She was about 800 tons burden, and her stained and rusty sides made her appear as if she had been out of port for two years instead of scarcely four months. At this present... more...

CHAPTER I. A wild, blustering day in Sydney, the Queen City of the Southern Seas. Since early morn a keen, cutting, sleet-laden westerly gale had been blowing, rattling and shaking the windows of the houses in the higher and more exposed portions of the town, and churning the blue waters of the harbour into a white seethe of angry foam as it swept outwards to the wide Pacific. In one of the little... more...

"LULIBAN OF THE POOL" A boy and a girl sat by the rocky margin of a deep mountain pool in Ponape in the North Pacific. The girl was weaving a basket from the leaves of a cocoa-nut. As she wove she sang the "Song of Luliban," and the boy listened intently. "'Tis a fine song that thou singest, Niya," said the boy, who came from Metalanien and was a stranger; "and who was... more...

CHAPTER I ~ PAUL, THE DIVER "Feeling any better to-day, Paul?" "Guess I'm getting round," and the big, bronzed-faced man raised his eyes to mine as he lay under the awning on the after deck of his pearling lugger. I sat down beside him and began to talk. A mile away the white beach of a little, land-locked bay shimmered under the morning sun, and the drooping fronds of the cocos... more...

CHAPTER I On a certain island in the Paumotu Group, known on the charts as Chain Island, but called Anaa by the people themselves, lived a white man named Martin Flemming, one of those restless wanderers who range the Pacific in search of the fortune they always mean to gain, but which never comes to them, except in some few instances—so few that they might be counted on one's fingers. Two years... more...

On the 22nd of July, 1828, the Sydney South Seaman, Indefatigable, eleven days out from the Port of Conception in Chili, was in lat 17? S. and about 127? E. long., six hundred miles distant from the nearest land—the then almost unknown Paumotu Group, which Cook had well named the Dangerous Archipelago. Five years before, the brig was named the Calder, and was then commanded by Captain Peter Dillon, a... more...