ters have seen a little fighting.

On board the convict ships of those early days there were often
mutinies, desperate and sometimes bloody, and some of these led
to remarkable results. In one instance the soldiers--not the
prisoners--rose upon the crew and the ship's officers, turned them
adrift in an open boat, and carried off the ship. They were recaptured
afterwards by a man-of-war in the Indian Ocean and brought to justice.
Convict mutinies often were only suppressed after desperate hand-to-hand
fighting; then a day or two later the ringleaders would be hanged from
the yardarm, and a dozen or more convicts flogged at the gratings. And
these things, be it remembered, were going on only an old man's lifetime
ago.

New Zealand is fertile in adventure stories, and the well-known _Boyd_
massacre is paralleled by two or three other tragedies equally as
dreadful, if less often told. The whaling history of that colony would
make a book--not of the kind suitable for young ladies seminaries, 'tis
true, but mighty strong in human interest, and presenting the race as
well as the sex problem for the study of the reader.

Statistics are terribly dry reading, but by way of contrasting the
condition of Australian shipping then and now, it is worth while quoting
a few figures.

In 1835, the heyday of the colonial whaling trade, when the smoky glare
of the whaleships' try-works lit up the darkness of the Pacific ocean
night, there were forty-one vessels, of a total tonnage of 9,257 tons,
registered in New South Wales, employed in the fishery. In the same year
twenty-two vessels arrived in Sydney from the various grounds, their
cargoes of whalebone, sealskins, and sperm and black oil valuing
altogether about L150,000. Now the whaling trade in Southern Seas is
represented by two or three small and poorly equipped ships from Hobart,
though the whales--sperm, right, and humpback--are again as plentiful as
they were in the first years of the fishery. One of the present writers,
less than four years ago, counted over three hundred humpbacks passing
to the northward in two days on the coast of New South Wales, while
there were ten times that number of the swift and dangerous "fin-back"
whales travelling with them.

But, though the whale fishery is extinct, there is something to be shown
instead.

It has been said that twenty-two whalers entered Sydney in 1835, which
means that during that year not twice that number of vessels of all