Notwithstanding our share in New Guinea and the debateable land of the New Hebrides, besides the proposed cession of Santa Cruz, the Sydney of \'the thirties\' wore the look of being more in touch with the South Sea Islands and the Oceanic realm generally, than at present. The wharves were redolent of the wild life of The Islands and the mysterious land of the Maori. Weather-beaten sailing-vessels showed a sprinkling of swarthy recruits, whose dark faces, half strange, half fierce, were mingled with those of their British crews. Hull and rigging bore silent testimony to the wrath of wind and wave. There were whale-ships returning in twelve months with a full cargo of sperm oil, or half empty after a three years\' cruise, as the adventure turned out.
Schoolboys were fond of loitering about among them, wondering at the harpoons, lances, and keen-edged \'whale spades,\' at the masses of whalebone and spermaceti, or the carved and ornamental whales\' teeth, of which Jack always had a store.
In the forecastle of one ship might be seen the tattooed lineaments and grim visage of a Maori; from another would peer forth the mild, wondering gaze of a Fijian. Bows and arrows (the latter presumably poisoned), spears, clubs, and wondrous carved idols were the principal curios, nearly always procurable.
The whale fishery was at that time a leading industry. Sperm oil figured noticeably among the first items of our export trade. Merchants made advances for the outfit and all necessaries of the adventure, trusting in many instances for repayment to the skill, courage, and good faith of the commander. 200No doubt losses were incurred, but the lottery was tempting. The profits must have been considerable. Sperm oil, before the discovery of gas or petroleum, was worth eighty or ninety pounds per ton. A large \'right whale\' was good for eighty barrels, eight barrels going to the tun. He was a fish worth landing. To get back to the ship, even after hours of hard pulling and the chance of a stove boat, towing a monster worth nearly ￡1000, was exciting enough.
The crew, like shearers of the present day, were proverbially hard to manage. They did not receive wages, but a share in the net profits—a \'lay,\' as it was called. The ship was, in fact, a floating co-operative society. This did not prevent them—for human nature is weak—from committing acts distinctly opposed to the spirit as well as the letter of the agreement. They got drunk when they had the chance. They occasionally mutinied. They resisted the mate and defied the captain. They proposed to take savage maidens for their dusky brides, and to live lives devoid of care in The Islands. It strikes landsmen as a curiously dangerous and anxious position for a captain, who had to confront a score or two of reckless seamen with the aid only of the officers of the ship. Yet it was done. The peril dared, the ship saved, and order restored time after time, by the resolute exercise of one strong will and the half-instinctive yielding of the seamen to the mysterious power of legal authority.
Before me as I write are the well-kept and regularly-entered pages of a whale-ship\'s log-book, the record of a voyage from Sydney harbour over the Southern main, which bears date as far back as April 1833. In that year again sailed the stout barque, which had done so well her part in bringing us safely to this far new land. Her course lay through the coral reefs and Eden-seeming islands of the Great South Sea; along the storm-swept coast of New Zealand; among the cannibals of New Ireland and New Britain; among the as yet half-unknown region of the Solomon Islands and Bougainville Group. As to the dangers of such a voyage, one incident of the strange races that people these isles of Eden is sufficiently dramatic. A boat\'s crew had pulled over to an inviting looking beach within the coral ring for the purpose of watering. As the boat touched the beach, stem on, one of the crew sprang ashore with the painter in his hand. A cry 201escaped him and the crew simultaneously, as he sank to his neck in a concealed pit, a veritable trou-de-loup. He hung on to the rope fortunately, and so pulled himself up and into the boat again.
Not a native was in sight. But the treacherous pitfalls being probed and laid bare, the intention was manifest. A line of holes was discovered in the sands, nine or ten feet in depth, cone-shaped and sloping to a narrow point, where were placed sharp-pointed, hard-wood stakes, the ends having been charred and scraped. Sharp as lance-heads, they would have disabled any seaman luckless enough to fall in, especially in latitudes where Jack prefers to go barefooted. Forewarned, walking warily, and \'prospecting\' any dangerous-looking spot, they succeeded in unmasking all or nearly all of these man-traps, into which the ambushed natives expected them to fall. They were ingeniously constructed: the top covered with a light frame of twigs and grass, sand being sprinkled over all. Any ordinary crew would have been deceived.
When they reached the village they found the property of a boat\'s crew, who had been surprised or betrayed. One piece of evidence after another came to light. Last of all, the oars, on the blades of which were marks of blood-stained fingers closed in the last grasp which the ill-fated mariner was to give.
Righteous indignation succeeded this gruesome discovery. A wholesale burning of the town and canoes was ordered. A shower of arrows was sent after the departing boat, as the murder isle was quitted with a distinct sense of relief. It is not improbable that similar experiences have been repeated during the last few years. In those days the \'labour trade\' did not exist, and to \'black-birding\' was no scale of profit attached.
There is a pathetic simplicity about this unvarnished record of perilous adventure, after the close of half a century. One looks reverently upon the yellow pages which photograph so minutely the daily life of the floating microcosm. The course, the winds, the storms, the calms, the days of failure and good fortune! The huge sea-beast harpooned and half slain, yet cunning to \'sound\' deeply enough to pay out all the line, or, the iron \'drawing,\' finally to elude capture altogether. Then again what a day of triumph when the hieroglyph show 202six whales killed and \'got safely alongside.\' Midnight saw the boilers still bubbling and hissing; the tired crew with four-and-twenty hours\' severe work before them, after, perhaps, half a day\'s hard pulling in the exciting chase.
Then out of the endless waste of waters rises the lovely shape of the fairy isle. \'Mountain, and valley, and woodland\'—a paradisal climate; a friendly, graceful, simple race, reverencing the stranger whites, with their big canoe and loud reverberating fire-weapons; or, on the other hand, sullen and ferocious cannibals, sending flights of poisoned arrows from their thickets, or surrounding the ship with a swarm of canoes, full of hostile savages, eager to climb her deck to slay and plunder unchecked.
It is characteristic, perhaps, of the greater simplicity of manners, and steadfast inculcation of the religious observances of that era, that on board the ship referred to, Divine service was regularly performed on each recurring Sunday. If whales were sighted, however, the boats were lowered; and on one Sunday afternoon two whales were killed. It was obviously a part of the unwritten code of salt-water law that whales were not to be allowed to escape under any circumstances, upon whatever days they were sighted by the look-out man. As it was tolerably certain that the ship would be more than once in jeopardy from hostile attacks, a few guns and carronades were mounted; boarding-nettings were not, I presume, overlooked. The old Ironsides\' maxim, \'Trust in Providence and keep your powder dry,\' was in effect a strictly observed precaution.
How strange it seems to think of the altered conditions made by the passing away of a generation or two! Cold is now the hand which traced the lines I view; stilled the hot blood and eager soul of him who commanded the ship—a born leader of men if such there ever was.
Of the crew that toiled early and late at sea, through sun and storm,—that drank and caroused and fought and gambled on shore when occasion served,—how small the chance that any one now survives!
With reference to the Solomon Group, which has been visited by many a vessel since the barque safely steered her course through shoal and reef, insidious currents and treacherous calm, matters seem to have been much about the 203same as at present. At some islands the natives were simple and friendly; at others, sullen and treacherous, ready at all times for an attack if feasible; merciless and unsparing when the hour came.
To refer to the Log-book.
\'Monday, July 22, 1833.—At Bougainville; several canoes came off, trading for cocoa-nuts and tortoise-shell.
\'Monday, July 29.—Beating along the coast of New Georgia. Canoes came off; traded for cocoa-nuts and tortoise-shell. Shipped Henry Spratt, who left the Cadmus last season. [A bad bargain, as future events showed.]
\'August 8.—Sent the boats ashore at Sir Charles Hardy\'s islan............