pposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to
start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a very
enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise
Dare-devil Harry--Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day.
No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms,
who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who
had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new
trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas,
and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea, and
forty out in the East ("a pretty thorough apprenticeship," he used
to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of
shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to
where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas.
His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the
Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a
Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the
celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and
crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as
it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time
neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the
officers of her Majesty's steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a
survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the
enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone
who cares may see, the "General Directory," vol. ii. p. 410, begins the
description of the "Malotu or Whalley Passage" with the words: "This
advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the
ship Condor," &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels
leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to
April inclusive.

This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing could rob him
of this kind of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the
breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new
men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas
and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant
nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.

In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his
employe