Читать книгу My Crowded Solitude - Jack McLaren - Страница 4

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On a mighty blaze on a mighty tree are cut two initials and a date. The initials are mine, the date is when I began an eight years' lonely residence among the most backward race of people in the whole of the tropical South Pacific, which is a place where backward peoples abound.

This experience was mine primarily because in the midst of an adventurous South Seas wandering the urge came upon me to settle awhile. It was not that I was weary of the South Seas, for I loved them. Nor was it that I was weary of adventuring, for youth was mine, and to my particular kind of youth adventuring was Life. It was merely that I was weary of adventuring in many places and desired greatly to adventure in one place for a change.

But for long I saw no means of satisfying this urge. There was always something--usually financial--to hinder me. Indeed, the number and force of circumstances apparently especially designed to prevent a wandering young man giving up his wandering was astonishing. Then one day I came again to Thursday Island, the place of pearls and pearl-shell which sits astride the strait that makes of New Guinea and Australia two separate lands, and encountered a man with a proposal which suited me exactly.

It was that we should establish a coconut plantation at Cape York--that is to say, at Australia's uttermost north, the apex of that tremendous and almost completely unknown peninsula which, after half a thousand miles of paralleling the mighty Barrier Reef, thrusts up amid the islands of Torres Strait and towards New Guinea like a pointing finger.

This great land, it appeared, had a peculiarity all its own. It was a South Sea land without coconut palms--insignia of a South Sea land. You could sail its shore for days, said my friend, for weeks if you liked, and never once see a palm.

In one place only were there a few, planted by a man named Jardine. The beaches were edged instead by jungle and open forest and tall indigenous grasses. He'd seen them often enough--he'd been much up and down that coast--and every time it had somehow seemed strange. As you went along you kept looking ahead for the green of clustered palms, for sight of tall boles all bent with the wind. It didn't seem right that there shouldn't be any, for you were sailing all the while a land washed by the waters of the Coral Sea and fanned by trade-winds and inhabited by natives--a land with all the features of a true part of the tropical Pacific, except the most outstanding.

But, said my friend, there was no reason why the palms should not be made abundantly to grow there. No reason at all. He'd given a deal of thought to the matter, considered all the details, garnered information wherever he could. He was sure that with discretion and judgement it could be done. The great land lay squarely within the latitudes coconuts favoured. It was affluent in the matter of rainfall and, so far as was known, fertility of soil. It was not within any area of cyclonic or other palm-destroying winds. Indeed, had it been tenanted by agriculturists like the Solomon Islanders or Papuans, instead of by Australian aborigines--Palaeolithic nomads who grew nothing whatever, but lived by the chase--its beaches would have had their miles upon miles of palm groves. A fine plantation indeed could be made there! enthused my friend. There would be all manner of advantages. The most suitable site could be had for the choosing. In a land so great suitable sites would be innumerable. The labour of the natives would cost little. They would be eager to work and thus obtain European foods and goods. A man would labour a whole month for a few shillings' worth of 'trade' goods. They were a poverty-stricken lot, who seldom saw strangers, and would jump at a chance like this. What did I think of the idea? I had had experience of coconut planting in New Guinea and elsewhere, and if I would become the working partner, he would provide certain necessary moneys.

But it would be no easy task, he warned when I promptly agreed. I should consider the disadvantages involved. He didn't want me to begin the task only to abandon it unfinished. That would be no good to either of us. I would have to live there eight years. It would be like going into a kind of exile, cutting myself off from the rest of the world, and all that. There would be hardships of various kinds, and perhaps danger from natives. From all accounts, the natives were a pretty wild and savage crowd. And it would be difficult to teach them plantation work. Then there was the loneliness. I would see white men only at long intervals. Loneliness would be hard to stick in such a place...

But this was just the kind of life I craved. Also it came to me that there would be something romantic in being the first systematically to plant coconuts in so great a land and thereby bring it into its own. I felt I could not begin quickly enough. A day or two later all arrangements were made, and I boarded a small sailing-craft and set forth to spy out the land in general and a spot suitable for the venture in particular.

It was not an imposing craft for a voyage of discovery, being a craft dirty, ill-found and worse-kept, even to the matter of sun-cracked decks and straggling rope-ends and blistered paint-work. Also it had been used in the fishing of trepang. Trepang is a sea-slug of repulsive appearance when alive and of great malodorousness when smoke-dried for export as a Chinese edible; and the malodorousness had impregnated itself into the very timbers, so that never for a moment was I free from it.

Further, the captain was a thin-faced yellow-eyed Cingalese who spent much of his time in the cabin dallying in turn with an opium-pipe and a newly acquired native wife with a tendency to obesity; and the smell of the opium mingled with the smell of the trepang and produced a third smell unlike but viler than either of its components.

Again, the crew, of various crossed breedings, with black predominant, had before leaving drunk much of Thursday Island's strange liquors and now drank more on board, to the displaying of the several savage characteristics of their black heredity incongruously mingled with the vices of their white heredity.

But these things mattered little to me. Too often before had I seen their like. As trader, gold-seeker, pearler, recruiter of plantation labourers, as a general South Seas Odysseus, the crudities of life had been commoner to me than the refinements, and I had become accustomed to them. Besides, the real significance of the venture burned within me. I was setting out to discover a new possibility in a new land. It was like setting out to discover a new land itself. I was a pioneer, an explorer, a Columbus--a Columbus in a trepang-craft.

It was the height of the trade-wind season, and all through that first day we lay up to the blustering seas, sailing tack for tack across the breeze, taking four miles sidewise to gain one of forward progress; and at sundown we anchored behind a tall and rocky island which kept from us both wind and sea; and here the drinking of the crewboys was ended, for soon after dark they went into an alcoholic sleep and the thin-faced captain quietly confiscated their store of liquor--to their tremendous discontent when they awoke, and to their accusing one another of having stolen it.

With the first of the sunrise the anchor came clanking up--a sunrise which filled me with the joy of life, so clear and fresh and warm was it--and on rounding the sheltering isand's shoulder we fell in with a score or more luggers working a bed of pearl-shell, all of them bright, brisk craft, tall of mast and wide of sail. Everywhere was colour--small flecks of it, great splashes of it, colours that ranged from the scarlet of a loin-cloth to the broad gold-and-blueness of the sea. In the low rays of the sun the luggers' sails were white as paper, the green of their rails the green of jade, the gleaming of their protecting copper, just above the water or awash, the gleaming of wet gold. On each vessel's either bow, so placed that it was an eye, was a distinguishing disc of blue, or white, or crimson. The red wheel-handles of the divers' air-pumps were as flashes of reflected flame, and the nude backs of the men who turned them bits of bronze. All about the smoothness of the sea were bursting bubbles of silver--betrayers of the divers' positions on the bottom--and from each vessel's rail an air-pipe and life-line overside and down like a thick grey snake and a thin one incredibly long.

I remarked to the captain's wife to the effect that this was a sight worth while; and she agreed with me, and with her fat hand pointed to various small colours I had missed, and showed me a cloud which she said was shaped like a stout woman's breast. But her husband shook his fist at the vessels and spat voluminously.

'Japanee!' he said. 'All bloody Japanee!'

He didn't like Japanese, he told me later. They'd got hold of all the pearling. One time there was hardly any of them in the Strait; but now they were all over the place. They'd got hold of all the luggers, and an outsider hadn't a chance of getting one. He'd tried and tried. He was a good diver; he'd dived for various lugger-owning firms years ago, and done well at it, too, what with the pearls he found and forgot to hand over, and all that. There was a lot of money in pearling, if you had a bit of luck. But he couldn't get a lugger. The Japanese blocked him every time he tried. So he had to take on trepanging. It wasn't much of a game, trepanging. There were too many boats at it. The trepang was getting too hard to find.

'It's harder work than pearlin',' he said. 'Not only is there a lot of divin' to get the trepang, but afterwards their guts have to be taken out, and the trepang boiled and smoked; and we've got to go ashore every now and then and cut heaps of wood for the smoking and boiling; and the fire's got to be looked after; and what with the smokehouse and the boiler there ain't any room on deck, and everything's stinking like hell and--and--oh! b--them Japanese!'

At noon we sighted low down against the sky a long grey smear which the captain said was the Peninsula's western shore; and that afternoon we lay along it but did not stop, for the land, so far as could be seen from the sea, was mainly steep-sided hills covered with tall, coarse grasses which I knew from experience to betoken agriculturally unfit soil. So on we went, that day and the next, winding between sandbanks and reefs and islands, on past a hill where stood a telegraph station which by linking a submarine cable to a land-line of exceeding length joined Thursday Island and its pearlers to the rest of the world--a single, lonely-looking building it was, on tall piles, with a wide verandah which had at its corners loop-holed shooting-shelters of spear-proof galvanized iron. Then we came to the Peninsula's utmost extremity, and after a stout battle with an adverse tide rounded it and made through an island-bordered pass where jungle-dad cliffs stood steeply to the water's edge and made of the sea a place of purple shadows with light in them.

It was the pass through which Captain Cook sailed his tiny inadequate Endeavour and thereby established definitely that Australia was not joined to New Guinea; and I thrilled absurdly to the knowledge that a century and a half later I, also on a voyage of discovery, should be sailing in a tiny inadequate craft through this self-same pass, should be looking at scenes unaltered as when that prince of navigators looked at them.

I remarked on this to the captain. But he wasn't at all impressed. He didn't think Captain Cook had any particular virtues as a navigator. There were many better, he thought, and to prove it gave me the names of some of them; whereupon I discovered he thought I had referred to a remarkably dissolute trepanger of his acquaintance, he never having heard of the Endeavour and having no conception whatever of what the term a century and a half conveyed.

Nor when I explained was he very greatly impressed. In coming safely through this maze of then uncharted shoals, he said in effect, the >Endeavour no doubt performed a worthy feat, but only a week or two ago these same waters had seen one absolutely remarkable. Whereupon he related the adventure of a pearling-cutter--an adventure which recalled, even in the matter of nomenclature, the adventure of the Marie Celeste, the sailing-ship which was found adrift in the Atlantic, abandoned intact and with all sail set and nothing to indicate what had happened.

The cutter was called the Marie Esebia, and one day in a calm at the farther limit of the strait her native crew of three went overside for a swim. Suddenly a breeze sprang up and and filled the sails, and the vessel was off towards the skyline before the men in the water realized what had happened. The men were picked up later none the worse, but by then the cutter was well over the curve and out of sight, and it was only after an extended search that the runaway was found on the eastern side of Cape York. She was quite unharmed, for manless and all as she was, she had travelled more than a hundred miles to windward, through a most tremendous tangle of reefs and sandbanks and islands, where there were scarcely two consecutive half-miles of open water--and missed them all!

This region had a very definite interest for my captain. As we sat on the rail, with the vessel swimming so smoothly to the last of the day-wind as to make scarcely a ripple, he told me of it. It concerned the wreck of the Quetta, a British-India passenger-steamer of a full ten thousand tons which hereabouts one calm and moonlight night so ripped out her bottom on an uncharted rock that within five minutes she plunged completely under, to the losing of some hundreds of lives. My captain was then a pearl-diver, and soon after the disaster went down to the vessel in the dress.

He told me he would not care to see again what he saw down there. He didn't think he could stand it, what with the opium and all. The passengers had just started a dance, and there was an awning along the deck, all hung with red electric globes and blue ones and flags and things, and the ship was sitting straight up on the bottom, like she was sailing along. Some of the people was caught up under the awning. The tide was making them bump it. You'd have thought they was alive, the way they moved. There was a lot of women. Beautiful, some of them, and young, too. There was a man with a cigar in his hand. He had a round face and his eyes was open, staring-like, and the cigar was all in loose bits, like bits of paper. All sorts of people, and they was all bumping the awning as if they was trying to get up; and some of their faces was like they was asleep and happy, and some was frowning, and some looked frightened. There was a girl with her dress washed up over her head like she'd put it there so's she couldn't see them others...

My captain gave a little shiver, glanced at the land for a bearing and gave an order to the steersman. Then when the vessel had swung downwind a little he extended a long brown finger over the side and said, in a tone which had in it more than a little of awe, that we were now directly over the spot where the Quetta still lay, and that if I cared to look down steadily awhile maybe I would see something of the grey uncertain shadow which was her hull. But somehow I did not care to look; and my captain with a nervous laugh rose and went down into the cabin, whence came presently the acrid scent of burning opium.

The finding of a site suitable for the establishment of a pioneer coconut plantation was not the simple matter my partner and I had thought. Despite the fact that for many weary days I sailed up and down the Peninsula's eastern shore, making inspection of every likely spot, never once did I come across the combination I sought--arable land and shelter for shipping--though these qualities existed separately in exasperating numbers. Indeed, never before had I seen so many fine harbours edged by soil of absolute barrenness, and so many unsheltered beaches edged by land which would grow anything at all. To me the outstanding feature of the country was a remarkable dearth of suitable plantation sites. It was extremely discouraging.

And to add to the discouragement there was the opinion of the crew that the land wouldn't grow coconuts anyway. If it would, why were none there now? they asked, thereby revealing the conservative native belief that what never was never could be. There must be something wrong with the land, they said decisively--to all of which the captain's wife nodded agreement, and one evening, greatly daring, warned me privately that my venture was a foolish one, and then, fearing my displeasure and as something in the way of conciliation, took from behind her ear a cigarette of crude tobacco rolled in dried bana-leaf and placed it between my lips and lit it, striking the match on the hardened sole of her foot.

And to add further to the discouragement, there was the opinion of a white man I met on the shore of one of the exasperatingly unfertile harbours. He was a sandalwood-cutter who had brought to the coast, for shipment to China for use as joss-sticks and as fuel for the everlasting temple-fires, a quantity of the scented wood on the backs of a string of horses. It was a dam-fool idea--growing coconuts, he said. They took too flaming long to come into bearing. Seven years was a hell of a big slice out of a man's life. And the damn things mightn't fruit in this country at all. I might have all my labour for nothing. I was taking a big risk. Sounded a mug's game, if you asked him. He'd rather have sandalwood-cuttin'. Of course, sandalwood-cuttin' had its drawbacks. It wasn't all beer and skittles, sandalwood-cuttin'. The wood took a lot of finding, and the bloody Chinks had a way of rigging the market and making prices come down. Still, a man had some sort of an idea where he stood most times. If he was me he'd get this coconut growing nonsense out of his head and go in for something that gave a more certain return. And a quicker one.

And to add to the discouragement still further I had in this region a taste of what it was to be absolutely alone. It was on an uninhabited island, called Turtlehead Island, which lay close to the coast, and I determined to explore while my captain took his vessel to a place where a trepang cargo awaited him. As the sails went up and the vessel fanned out from the anchorage, there came the voice of my captain calling that within three days he would most faithfully return. I think I scarcely heard him. My first experience of being utterly alone had aroused in me a sensation I had never felt before or have ever felt since.

It was a sensation of smallness and frailty. It was as though everything but me was big and strong. The sea was a thing of immensity and power. The hills of the two-miles-distant mainland were mighty and rugged. Never had I seen hills so mighty and rugged. The trees about the beach were thick of bole and tall. They had resisted the vicissitudes of maybe a hundred years. While I--I was a thing of but a few score pounds of bone and muscle and flesh which even the most trifling mishap could for ever destroy. As I stood there on the beach beside the little heap which was my sufficiency of arms and rations, I felt more incompetent than ever I had felt in my life.

Then on rounding a corner of the beach I discovered a native hut--a preposterously tiny hut built of bark and amazingly crooked saplings, with two sides only and a most inadequate roof--and at once the sensation of smallness and frailty left me and the hills and the trees and the sea lost their seeming superiority. My interest centred on this thing of human association. Here was a link with the world of men, something I appreciated and understood; and with a curious ecstatic pleasure I fell to wondering who was its owner and why he had chosen to live in a solitude such as this, natives being gregarious in the extreme. Then I put the matter from me for the time and gave myself to examining the island.

It was an island large for those waters, being some twelve miles round, and at first I thought I had discovered the place I sought, for on the shore of the well-sheltered harbour was an area of arable land. Then I found it was as unsuitable as any of the other places I had inspected--the area of arable land was far too small. It was another disappointment; but by now I was becoming accustomed to disappointments, and complacently enough I sat in my tent beside the empty hut and awaited the end of the three days and the trepang-vessel's return.

But at the end of the three days the vessel did not come, nor did she come at the end of a week, nor of two weeks. At first I did not greatly care. The Tropics were the land of lots of time and I was a child of the Tropics. There was always tomorrow. Anything might happen tomorrow, and it didn't much matter if it didn't.

Besides, I was now enjoying this my first taste of solitude. There being nothing else to give it to, my attention was given wholly to Nature and natural things. Hitherto I had carelessly generalized with regard to Nature. Now I particularized. I noted individuals and individual characters. A bird, from being merely a member of a certain species, became a thing of peculiarities which made it interestingly different from other birds. I found that no animal was exactly the same as its fellows, any more than any man is exactly the same as his fellows. Even a tree, I discovered, was not just one of a thousand trees, but an individual with a history of its own. These things engaged me so greatly that the days passed quickly.

But at length my interest in things human revived. I became anxious at the trepang-vessel's failure to return. I put myself on short rations, for I had brought food sufficient only for a week, and abandoned the discovering of individual characteristics in birds and things for watching from the seaward beach for the returning vessel's sail.

In the course of adventuring in many places I had more than once been made aware of the fact that in the face of a pressing human need beauty lost much of its charm. But as I watched from that seaward beach it seemed to me that never had I been aware of it so acutely as now. I knew that the great blue spread of the sea was a great blue spread of loveliness, that the infrequent cloud-shadows upon it and the white flecking of the waves were things of swift beauty. But I knew it only as something by the way. The thing that impressed me most about that sea was its emptiness. Never, I thought, had I seen a sea so thoroughly empty of ships. Not only was there no sign of the sail I sought, but there was no sign of any kind of sail. The dissociation of that sea from things human was astoundingly complete. Sometimes at the end of a long day's watching I thought of it as a sea that had never been sailed at all, and never would be sailed, a despairingly virgin sea. Its beauty meant to me nothing at all. I was a hungry man. I was a starveling in a palace of loveliness.

My anxiety developed to serious alarm. I put myself on shorter rations still, having one meal daily and only half a meal at that. On the seaward beach I built a great stack of dry, dead wood and all day stood by ready to ignite it as a signal of distress should a sail perchance appear. But the sea retained its dreadful emptiness. Its beauty began to mock me.

Then, on the twelfth evening, I returned to the tent to see approaching across the harbour an object of indeterminate shape which for a time puzzled me, and at length I saw was a canoe. Eagerly as a castaway of fiction, I ran to the water's edge and awaited its coming.

There were three natives in it--two women and a man--each with skin of a dull dead blackness and short curly hair lying exceedingly close to the head. Of clothing the man wore nothing at all, and one of the women was clad in a garment that left her naked from the waist upwards, and the other in a garment that left her naked from the waist down.

I was prepared for astonishment at sight of me; but as though it were the commonest thing imaginable to find white men on lonely and otherwise uninhabited islands, they calmly went about making fast the canoe to a stake driven upright in the sand, and then came up to me, the man in front, and in turn held out their hands in greeting, one of the women in a mistaken effort at cleanliness first rubbing her palm on her naked thigh.

The hut was his property, the man informed me in an English in which the words 'feller' and 'belong' were considerably overworked, and he had come from the camp of his tribe, a day and a half's journey down the coast. He had come here to fish, he went on. There was very good fishing here. Very good indeed, he repeated, and with a nod and quick movement of his arm indicated where the gold of the harbour was creased by series of flowing ripples. After which he ordered the women to go out after the fish; and when they had obediently launched the canoe and gone he said that the younger was his wife and the elder his daughter, which reversal of the usual order was due to the fact that he had had another wife but she had abandoned him recently for a Japanese pearlfisher, whereupon he had neither grieved nor worried, but promptly annexed another woman of the tribe and considered himself none the loser by the affair, as the second wife was younger and more handsome than the one he had lost.

Then he asked what were the circumstances pertaining to my presence on the island; and when I told him, emphasizing my poverty, he looked disappointed and said he had hoped to beg from me, and immediately afterwards betrayed deep concern for my well-being. On the return of the women he bade them cook for me some of the fish, which they did by burying them in the hot ashes of a fire, viscera and scales and all; and he told me that in the morning, when the tide would be favourable for making the passage, he would take me in his canoe to the mainland and personally escort me across the Peninsula to a harbour where there would be opportunity of hailing a passing boat.

I liked that Stone Age man. He seemed so considerate and kind, such a real good fellow. I felt I could have trusted him anywhere. Yet, as I authoritatively learned later, he was one of the worst characters in a land where bad characters abounded. The water-police had wanted him for long. Charged against him was a list of offences ranging from murder to petty theft, and it was only his exercise of an astonishing bushcraft that saved him from capture. Also he was outcast from his tribe for being a persistent stealer of other men's wives and for making disturbances generally. Still, he was willing, quite without hope of reward, and merely in order to relieve my distress, to make a long and dangerous journey. I consider him the most kindly intentioned murderer I have ever met.

But I had no need to make the journey across the Peninsula, for early next morning the trepang-vessel's white wing showed round the corner of the island; and presently she was through the shallows of the channel and anchored close inshore, and the thin-faced captain was standing with me on the beach and apologizing profusely for the delay, which, he explained, was due to the crewboys recovering their store of confiscated liquor and drinking to such an extent that they ran the vessel on a reef from which she could not be freed for twelve full days.

A little later I had bidden farewell to my friend of the young wife and not-so-young-daughter, made them a present from the trepang-vessel's stores, and was heading back towards the pass through which the Endeavour had sailed and where the Quetta made a dull uncertain shadow on the bottom.

For by this time, I knew there was on the Peninsula's eastern shore no place suited to my purpose, and I was setting out to inspect more closely the western shore--the shore which formed one of the boundaries of the Gulf of Carpentaria, one of the most extensive waterways in the world. Wherefore on rounding Cape York once more the vessel headed on past the telegraph station, and on past rounded rocky points that projected seaward with aimless menace, past islands edged by broad and sloping beaches, past coral reefs whose branching arms showed brown to the falling of the tide, past river-mouths which sent a yellow swirling to the blueness of the sea, with all the while among the Peninsula's runts of hills and inconsequential valleys, and sometimes on its beach, the smoke of native fires.

Sometimes opposite one of these beach-fires we anchored and I went ashore--to see what manner of folk these natives were, and to ask them if they knew of a place such as I sought. But always when I reached the huts they were deserted, and there was only the smouldering of the fire to show they had been lately occupied; and I was uneasily conscious that from the adjoining jungle numerous eyes watched my every movement, and I was glad I had brought with me a rifle.

'They think we water-police boat,' one of the crewboys who rowed the dinghy for me said once. They wild fellers. They always doin' some bad thing, and the police-boat chase them plenty times. Wild fellers too much! They not like you and me!' And he went on to illustrate the wildness of those wild fellers with tales of tribal raidings, of stealthy death and sudden death, and of dreadful nocturnes, turning now and then to his companions for corroboration or elaboration, and at the end remarking that he wouldn't care to live there among them, as I intended to do. But as he told all this in the tone of one whose own civilized state was so advanced that he could regard such backward people only as subjects for contemptuous scorn, I didn't take him very seriously. He was one of a class of coloured men who took every opportunity to convey the impression that they were most civilized indeed. I had met men like that who were less than ten years removed from cannibalism.

The Peninsula's western shore seemed as unsuited to my purpose as the eastern shore. I landed on many beaches, examined many hundreds of acres; I entered river-mouths and narrow winding creeks; and always it was the same old story of arable land and shelter for shipping being never in conjunction. It began to be borne in on me that it was not to be my lot to bring this great land into its own.

And then one morning we sailed into a harbour created by the vicinity of two large islands and several small ones, so placed as to give shelter from every direction--and all along the shore was a jungle, a thick, tall jungle, purple in the early light, and subtly tingeing the breeze with the scent of flowers. I looked at it delightedly. Jungle-land was agriculturally the best land. Ground which would grow a jungle so tall and thick as this would grow anything. I could not have wished for a better place. Nevertheless as I went ashore I was prepared for disillusionment. I had been disappointed so often before. This place seemed just a little too satisfactory to be true. I suspected a catch in it somewhere. But there was no catch. The jungle-land was even better than it looked from the sea; and the amount of it was more than enough for my purpose, and the soil had a richness such as nowhere I had seen in this land, and there was abundance of fresh water--a long the beach were several springs of it, and traversing the jungle was a tiny gurgling creek. I examined the place thoroughly, taking two days over it, becoming familiar with all its details, taking rough measurements of the area of the arable land, and sounding the anchoring depths of the harbour. There was no doubt whatever that I had come at last to the place I sought. The only thing wrong with it was its name--which, according to the more or less inadequate chart of the region, was Simpson's Bay. Simpson's Bay seemed so utterly commonplace and inappropriate. After that long search of mine it should have been called something with a note of triumph in it. Even Eureka would have been better than Simpson's Bay, though I don't like Eureka as a name. As the vessel raced back before the wind to Thursday Island, I determined to discover the native name of the place and let it be known henceforth by that.

At Thursday Island I made the necessary negotiations with the Land authorities and became possessed of a large document importantly sealed and stamped and a plan inscribed to the effect that I was part-owner of the section shaded in red; then a supply of stores and tools was obtained; and in a few days I boarded an outward-bound vessel which in due course landed me at the ill-named Simpson's Bay and then went on her way. My task was begun.

I was entirely alone. I had not even a dog. From the presence of numerous bark huts along the beach I knew the place as an habitual native camping-spot. But the ashes of the cooking-fires were cold and there were no fresh foot-tracks. I knew, however, the natives would sometime return. Meanwhile I made myself as comfortable as I could, and between two of the great trees about the high-water mark slung a hammock, placed beneath it most of my stores and tools and personal belongings, and soon after dark, with rifle and revolver beside me, turned in and began a night in which the outstanding features were the wailing of curlews along the beach, the guttural barking of crocodiles in an adjacent creek, the howling of distant wild-dogs, and the imagined voices of stealthily approaching natives. I have been in many strange and dangerous situations; but I don't think I was ever so fearful for my personal safety as I was that night.

But with the coming of daylight my fears all vanished. I looked at my domain with the eye of a conqueror-to-be; and in so looking I saw the black-and-purple tangle of the jungle replaced by symmetrical lines of waving, fruiting palms, and myself on the verandah of a magnificent bungalow, saying proudly to myself: 'I did it! I--who was once a wanderer of neither means nor purpose! I am a creator! From a black man's jungle have I made a white man's garden!'

Indeed, so strong upon me was this envisioning that it was with the eager delight of a child that I selected a site for my residence. And it was exultingly that on a mighty blaze on a mighty tree I cut the initials and the date:

J.M.

7/10/11.