ption, and occupation, as they
say in the _Police Gazette_. Richard Hatteras, at your service, commonly
called Dick, of Thursday Island, North Queensland, pearler, copra
merchant, _beche-de-mer_ and tortoiseshell dealer, and South Sea trader
generally. Eight-and-twenty years of age, neither particularly
good-looking nor, if some people are to be believed, particularly
amiable, six feet two in my stockings, and forty-six inches round the
chest; strong as a Hakodate wrestler, and perfectly willing at any
moment to pay ten pounds sterling to the man who can put me on my back.

And big shame to me if I were not so strong, considering the free,
open-air, devil-may-care life I've led. Why, I was doing man's work at
an age when most boys are wondering when they're going to be taken out
of knickerbockers. I'd been half round the world before I was fifteen,
and had been wrecked twice and marooned once before my beard showed
signs of sprouting. My father was an Englishman, not very much profit to
himself, so he used to say, but of a kindly disposition, and the best
husband to my mother, during their short married life, that any woman
could possibly have desired. She, poor soul, died of fever in the
Philippines the year I was born, and he went to the bottom in the
schooner _Helen of Troy_, a degree west of the Line Islands, within six
months of her decease; struck the tail end of a cyclone, it was thought,
and went down, lock, stock, and barrel, leaving only one man to tell the
tale. So I lost father and mother in the same twelve months, and that
being so, when I put my cabbage-tree on my head it covered, as far as I
knew, all my family in the world.

Any way you look at it, it's calculated to give you a turn; at fifteen
years of age, to know that there's not a living soul on the face of
God's globe that you can take by the hand and call relation. That old
saying about "blood being thicker than water" is a pretty true one, I
reckon: friends may be kind--they were so to me--but after all they're
not the same thing, nor can they be, as your own kith and kin.

However, I had to look my trouble in the face, and stand up to it as a
man should, and I suppose this kept me from brooding over my loss as
much as I should otherwise have done. At any rate, ten days after the
news reached me, I had shipped aboard the _Little Emily_, trading
schooner, for Papeete, booked for five years among the islands, where I
was to learn to water copra, t