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essentially English as that of whaling, should not he pursued in waters so convenient to Queensland ports. From the Khaan Group we went to Gerrit Denys, another much larger group of much larger Islands. The natives speak the same language, but with a pronunciation so different, as to make it seem, on first hearing, to be a different idiom; they are of the same mixed breeds; carry on the same commerce and cultivation; have among them no lawyers or tailors, or shoemakers, or doctors or priests; and the only ambition they have, is to possess a long string of glass beads and a gun.
Here I went through the terrible experience of knowing how more vessels are lost in calms than in storms. Our ship was lying close to San Antonio, with nothing but light airs playing with the sails. All day a heavy sea swell had rolled in from the north-east About half-past ten at night there came a dead calm, the swell heaving us stealthily on to the reef which ran out from San Antonio. The night up to eleven o'clock was clear, when there came down not showers, but waves of rain hiding stars and sky from sight. The thunder was simply maddening, but there was a candour about the lightning which robbed it of any malignant partiality; by its occasional flashes we were kept advised of the silver waves which shivered on the coral reef immediately under our port bow. The captain behaved with promptness and skill, helped by a crew who manned the boats and pulled the nose of the ship into a safe position; a breeze sprang up which favoured us, and after a night of grave anxiety we got under sail for the Solomons, glad to get out of the way of skulking reefs into the free and open sea.
Man has made nothing so beautiful as a ship, but it is also the most helpless of things; a ship without wind is a body without a soul, and the time will come when, if these visits to the islands of the Coral Sea are to be continued, they will be made not in three-masted barquentines, but in vessels, to whom a breeze is no favour and a dead calm a great boon.
The time occupied in the voyage was, as I have said, one hundred and thirty-three days; had the ship been provided with an auxiliary screw, the voyage, including the clays occupied in recruiting, could have been done in less than twenty-five days.
The method of recruiting is exactly like the old method of the recruiting sergeant in country towns at home. All the lies that can be conveyed to an Islander's fancy are palmed off on him, and no mortal mixture of earth's mould, is so easily deceived as he; he is an adapt in deceiving himself, and he indulges in it as some lower natures indulge in ardent spirits; but when he is helpt in his self deception by one who is an artist in lying, then the Islander falls easily into the snare which is laid before his open eyes. Nothing has astonished me so much as the little that is known of the natural history of these people, and apparently no one cares to know anything about them.
Let me remind you, that these Islanders have never been conquered by a superior race. They have never come under the discipline of miiltary rule; have never known what it is to obey orders,
