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Title: The South Seaman
An Incident In The Sea Story Of Australia - 1901

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: April 19, 2008 [EBook #25108]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUTH SEAMAN ***

Produced by David Widger

THE SOUTH SEAMAN:

AN INCIDENT IN THE SEA STORY OF AUSTRALIA

From "The Tapu Of Banderah and Other Stories"

By Louis Becke

C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.

1901

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 famous officer in the East
India Company's service; his name is interwoven with the sea story of
Australia as the commander of the Company's ship _Research_, and the
discoverer of the relics of the gallant and ill-fated La Perouse, whose
ships were wrecked on Vanikoro Island, in the New Hebrides group, in
1788.

When the _Colder_ was under the command of Captain Dillon she was a
crack Indian trader to Port Jackson, but newer and smarter vessels drove
her out of the trade; and in 1828 she was owned by Mr. John Duncan, an
English merchant of Valparaiso, who for this present voyage had loaded
her with wheat for Sydney, and sent her to sea under the command of Mr.
Joseph Hunter, after changing her name to _Indefatigable_.

The first and second mates of the brig were Europeans, as also were
two or three of the crew--the rest were Chilenos, picked up at the
last moment of sailing. The steward was a Bengali, a man devoted to his
captain, with whom he had long sailed in other seas. The Chilenos were
not alone lazy and incompetent seamen, not fit to keep a look-out,
nor take the wheel in rough weather, but what was worse, they were
treacherous scoundrels, as ready for murder with their long, ugly
sheath-knives, as British merchant sailors are w