Some Experiences of a New Guinea Resident Magistrate

by C. A. W. Monckton

At last with a tearing bang the mainsail went, and I thought we were gone too; it was too dark to see, one could only hear. The vessel gave a horrid deadly sort of sideways lurch, and then instinctively I met it with the helm and found, to my amazement, that she still kept steerage way, and was running on as though under sail; and so she ran for an hour, when dawn broke, and I saw that our blown-out mainsail was jambed across her mast and rigging, and was acting as a square-sail. Cox then steered, while Burton and I securely lashed the sail in the position it then was; that done, we turned our attention to the pumps, for the Guinevere was half full of water. The first pump, her original one, we abandoned as hopeless after the first half-hour; the other, the rotary one, we carefully took to pieces, as the whole water-raising part of the mechanism of the pump was on deck. We found in it some small chips of wood jambing the valves—chips left below decks by the carpenters working at her on the slip; cleaning these we soon had the pump working, and two hours’ toil gave us a dry ship again. Then, in spite of an enormous sea and a howling gale still blowing, we felt fairly hopeful, and settled down to a three days’ fight, to bring our vessel again to a port to refit. At last we made Port Macquarie, telling a steamer that approached and wanted to tow us, to go to the devil, for we had awful visions before our eyes of claims for salvage.

At Port Macquarie we signalled for a tug, and were soon safely at anchor in the river; we here heard that a number of vessels had been wrecked at Newcastle during the gale, and found that we also had been reported as lost. The pilot and his boat’s crew very kindly gave us a lot of help in refitting our rigging and sails, for which service they would take no payment. Here Cox—after getting into a row with the police for shooting at a flock of pelicans with a rifle, these birds being strictly protected—decided to return to New Zealand; we soothed the police by explaining that anything Cox shot at was perfectly safe, the only thing likely to be hurt was something at which he was not shooting. Having completed our refitting, and Cox having departed in a sailing vessel for Sydney, Burton and I again went to sea.

For a day or two we worked the Guinevere north in bad weather, and then, as Burton and myself were utterly worn out from want of sleep, we decided to run in and anchor near the Solitary Isles; this we accordingly did, but unfortunately amongst a lot of rocks and shoals and in a very exposed position. The sailing directions described these waters as highly dangerous. About an hour before daylight the sea and wind got up, with the result that our anchor parted, whereupon we let go another, our only remaining one, and prayed that it would hold until dawn. Daylight and our remaining anchor broke together, and we did a sort of steeplechase out to sea amongst cruel-looking rocks; how we got the Guinevere through safely I don’t know, for it was a job I should not like to tackle again with a full crew and steam under me; certainly no vessel less nimble than a racing yacht could have managed it. We were now, however, without an anchor, and therefore it was necessary for us to make a port in order to get one. We did not like ports either, for fear of being prevented from going to sea again. An anchor, however, we must have, and accordingly we stood away for the Clarence River.

We fell in on the way with the Spray and Captain Slocum, who hung on to us one night while he slept. The Spray was nearly as broad as she was long, immensely strong and almost unsinkable. Slocum’s usual method of navigation was to sail his boat all day, run off shore, heave-to, and sleep all night while his vessel bobbed about like a cork. A very strong southerly current on this coast had prevented him from doing this, as his ship lost nearly as much in the night as he had gained in the day. He had left Sydney some time after us and missed the storm, but he had not been delayed by calling at ports on the way. In the morning we parted from the Spray and Slocum, he to continue his voyage round the world—which, in passing, I may mention he successfully accomplished—and we to make the Clarence River. Heaving-to off that river we signalled for an anchor, but the signalman chose to believe we had made a mistake and sent a tug out instead; so accordingly we went into port, where we decided to remain for a day or two.

Here we received a telegram from William Whitten, telling us a cutter he was taking to New Guinea had been wrecked on the coast, and asking us to wait for his arrival in a coastal steamer, after which he would come on with us. We therefore waited, being only too glad to have additional hands. Whitten had seen the report of our arrival at the Clarence River in a telegram in the daily papers; we did not at all approve of the interest our movements now seemed to be exciting, and decided that, once we were clear of this port, we should touch nowhere again until we made Cooktown. Whitten appeared, accompanied by a seaman named Otto, whose surname I never knew; we then unostentatiously slipped out to sea again, making rapid progress north, with Whitten and his man taking one watch and Burton and I the other.

We made Cooktown without any further misadventure, but for one little incident, breaking the monotony of the trip; that was a narrow escape we had of being piled up by Whitten on the coast one dark night, in consequence of his crediting the Guinevere with only doing eight knots an hour instead of nearly twelve. I happened to go on deck before dawn, and found Otto trying to persuade Whitten that a dark mass right ahead of us was land, while the latter maintained that it was impossible and must be a cloud. I thought it was land, too, and insisted upon standing out to sea again until dawn; when daylight came there, sure enough, was a high cape not more than a couple of miles off. Whitten had already piled up four vessels in the course of his career, through a mixture of recklessness and cocksureness, he never believing in danger until too late.

At Cooktown we found the whole community preparing for wild junketings in celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee, and the Warden invited Burton and myself to participate; the festivities were to culminate in a banquet at night. Cooktown is like all isolated hot towns in one respect, and that is, the inhabitants take very little interest in anything outside their own little parochial affairs, and, as most of them possess “livers,” they accordingly quarrel furiously: even when a man is of a peaceful nature, his wife is not, and the rows of the woman involve the man. One had hardly been introduced to a man for half an hour before he was explaining what awful people so-and-so, and so-and-so were—his pet bêtes noirs; and, later on, one had a repetition of the same thing from so-and-so. The Warden told me, though, that at the great banquet all personal differences were to be buried for good: Subcollector of Customs, Inspector of Police, bankers, merchants, parsons, doctors, lawyers, post and telegraph officials, schoolmasters and ship captains, in fact, all the rank and fashion of Cooktown were to foregather and coo like doves.

The Warden was a very fine old fellow; he had at one time been British Consul in Persia, and he was also the first man to hoist the British flag in New Guinea prior to the Proclamation of the Protectorate; he was now over sixty, but his back was as straight and his step as firm as a man of half his years; he was also full of quaint stories of the experiences of his youth in Persia and Arabia; he possessed, however, a peppery temper and had a long-standing quarrel with one of the local celebrities. The hour of the banquet arrived and the guests assembled; speeches were made, and toasts were drunk—many toasts and many speeches—and as the champagne mounted to excited brains a few quarrels began, but were always promptly suppressed by the Warden in his capacity of President, and each time we sang “God save the Queen.” Burton leant over to me and whispered, “There is going to be a damned fine fight before this chivoo is over, there is too much bad blood among them for a tea-party,” and I acquiesced. After the feasting was over and we had dispersed about the room, something seemed to occur which caused all the old feeling in the room to burst out; the parsons fled through the door, the Warden seized his ancient foe by the neck and, throwing him on the floor, sat across his chest and bumped the man’s head up and down, whilst every other man sought out his own particular enemy and thumped him. Burton and I got quietly to one side and looked on; the police arrived and peeped in, but, upon seeing their Chief and the Police Magistrate involved in the turmoil, discreetly withdrew. At last peace was restored, and the guests at Cooktown’s historical banquet departed to their several homes, while Burton and I went off to the Guinevere, wondering what stories the élite of Cooktown would manage to invent by way of explanation to their wives. A sorry looking lot of men we met next day, and they all showed a marked disposition to avoid the subject of Jubilee banquets.

Within the course of a day or two Burton left in a steamer bound for Sydney en route for England, and upon his departure I sailed for Samarai, still accompanied by Whitten and Otto. No sooner had we left behind us Cook’s Passage in the Great Barrier Reef than we fell into a howling south-easter, a wind almost dead in our teeth; Whitten, after one night’s experience of it and the Guinevere’s behaviour in a big head sea, refused to go on, and consequently I had to put back to Cooktown to land him and Otto. The Guinevere had, to a man not acquainted with her peculiarities, an alarming habit of going through, instead of over, a head sea; as a matter of fact, she was just as safe with her decks a foot under water as she was with the sea like a duck pond; but Whitten would not believe it.

At Cooktown I shipped three Queensland natives as crew and sailed again; when well out to sea, however, I discovered that only one was a sailor and therefore able to steer, the other two had been stockmen on a cattle run. I accordingly abandoned my intention of making Samarai direct, and, instead, made for Port Moresby, where I hoped to pick up a crew of New Guinea boys, and beat down the coast to Samarai. After a few days we sighted Port Moresby just as the sun was setting, and I obtained capital cross bearings on an island to the east of the entrance of the harbour and upon Fisherman Island; the night was dark, but I accepted the chart as accurate, and, being confident of the correctness of my compass bearings, I decided to risk running through the passage in the outlying reef by compass. Suddenly crash we went upon the reef; we launched the dingey, a new one purchased in Cooktown, and I told the boys to place a kedge anchor in her and drop it away in deep water, in order that we might kedge the cutter off; they promptly dropped it into the dingey and stove in her planks, rendering her useless. The wind then began to get up, bumping us further and further over the reef, until, to my surprise, I found that the vessel was bumping less and rising upon an even keel again. After two or three hours of this, we suddenly slipped off into deep water upon the Port Moresby side; and again making sail, stood into the harbour, though the Guinevere was leaking badly from the bumping she had received.