Mervyn Jones was a particularly smart seaman and navigator; educated at Eton for other things, the sea had, however, exercised an irresistible fascination for him; being too old for the Navy, he had worked up into the Naval Reserve through the Merchant Service, and thus had come out to command the Merrie England. The charts of the Coral Sea owe much to his labour, and to that also of his two officers, Rothwell and Taylor. All these officers were destined later to share a more or less common fate: Jones died of a combination of lungs and malaria, Taylor of malaria at sea, whilst Rothwell was invalided out of the service. Meredith was taking a gang of native convicts down to Sudest Island; they had been lent by the New Guinea Government to assist in making a road to a gold reef discovered there which was now being opened by an Australian company. It was here that he and many of his charges left their bones.
Not far from Sudest lies Rossel Island, a wooded hilly land, inhabited by a small dark-skinned people differing in language and customs from all other Papuans. Personally I do not believe they have any affinity with Papuans, either by descent or in other ways, whatever views ethnologists may hold. The Rossel Islanders have among their songs several Chinese chants, the origin of which is explained in this way. In September, 1858, the ship St. Paul, bound from China to the Australian gold-fields, and carrying some three hundred Chinese coolies, was wrecked on an outlying sand-bank of Rossel. The European officers and crew took to the boats and made their way to Queensland, the Chinamen being left to shift for themselves. Thus abandoned to their fate, the Chinamen were discovered by the islanders, and were by them liberally supplied with food and water; when well fattened they were removed in canoes to the main island, in lots of five and ten, and there killed and eaten. The Chinamen, when removed, were under the impression that they were merely taken in small numbers as the native canoes could only carry a few passengers at a time, being ignorant of the distance of the sea journey. As they left their awful sand-bank in the canoes, they sang pæans and chants of joy, which the quick-eared natives picked up and incorporated in their songs. In 1859 but one solitary Chinaman remained of the three hundred, and he, fortunate man, was taken off Rossel by a passing French steamer and landed in Australia, where history or scandal says he later pursued the occupation of sly grog seller at a Victorian gold rush, and being convicted thereof, was later pardoned in consideration of his sufferings and being the sole survivor of three hundred.
From Sudest the Merrie England went on to Woodlark Island, from whence the discovery of gold had been reported by a couple of traders, Lobb and Ede. These two men were a very good example of the old gold-field’s practice of “dividing mates.” Lobb was professional gold or other mineral prospector, who had sought for gold in any land where it was likely to occur; when successful, his gains, however great, soon slipped away; when unsuccessful, he depended on a “mate” to finance and feed him, in diggers’ language, “grub stake” him, until such time as his unerring instinct should again locate a fresh find. Ede was a New Guinea trader owning a cocoanut plantation on the Laughlan Isles, together with a small vessel. Ede landed Lobb on Woodlark with a number of reliable natives, and, keeping him going with tools, provisions, etc., at last had his reward by word from Lobb of the discovery of payable gold. Thereupon they had reported their discovery and applied for a reward claim to the Administration, together with the request that the island should be proclaimed a gold-field; and at the same time had informed their trader friends, some twenty in all, of what was to be gained at the island.
Lobb and Ede, with their twenty friends, formed the European population of the island when the Merrie England arrived there; with the exception of Lobb, there was not an experienced miner in the lot. The twenty were a curious collection of men: an ex-Captain in Les Chasseurs D’Afrique, whom later on I got to know very well, but who, poor chap, was always most unjustly suspected by the diggers of being an escapee from the French convict establishment at New Caledonia, merely because he was a Frenchman; an unfrocked priest, who by the way was a most plausible and finished scoundrel; and the son of the Premier of one of the Australian colonies; these now, with Ede and myself, constitute the sole survivors of the men who heard Sir William declare the island a gold-field. Here it was that an ex-British resident, and the son of a famous Irish Churchman, jostled shoulders with men whose real names were only known to the police in the various countries from which they hailed. “Jimmy from Heaven,” an angelic person, who was once sentenced to be hanged for murder and, the rope breaking, gained a reprieve and pardon, hence his sobriquet; “Greasy Bill”; “Bill the Boozer”; “French Pete”; and “The Dove,” a most truculent scoundrel; the names they answered to sufficiently explain the men.
All nationalities and all shades of character, from good to damned bad, they however all held two virtues in common: a dauntless courage and a large charity to the unfortunate; traits which will perhaps stand them in better stead in the bourne to which they have gone than they did in New Guinea.
CHAPTER III
Some six months I put in at Woodlark Island, acquiring during that time a fine strong brand of malaria, a crop of boils, which had spread like wildfire among the mining camps, catching Europeans and natives alike, a little gold, and a large amount of experience; all of which were most painfully acquired.
Sylvester, after having suffered some particularly malignant bouts of malaria and having developed some corroding and fast-spreading mangrove ulcers, parted company with me and went to New Zealand. The mangrove ulcer, commonly called New Guinea sore, is, I think, quite the most beastly thing one has to contend with on those islands; it is mainly caused, in the first instance, by leech or mosquito bites setting up an irritation which causes the victim to scratch; then the poisonous mud of either mangrove or pandanus swamps gets into the abrasion, and an indolent ulcer is set up, which slowly but perceptibly spreads, as well as eating inward to the bone, for which I know no remedy other than a change to a temperate climate. Painful when touched during the day, it is agony itself when the legs stiffen at night.
The method of obtaining gold, at the time I was at Woodlark Island, was primitive and simple in the extreme, and was performed in this way. Having located a stream, gully or ravine, in which a “prospect” could be found to the “dish,” the “prospect” consisting of one or more grains of gold, the “dish” holding approximately thirty pounds weight of wash dirt, i.e. gold-bearing gravel, the miner—or digger, as he is more generally called—pegged out a claim of some fifty feet square. When he had done this he put in a small dam, to the overflow of which he attached a wooden box some six feet long by twelve inches wide, having a fall of one inch to the foot, and paved with either flat stones or plaited vines. Into the head of this box was then thrown the wash dirt, from which the action of the water washed away the stones, sand, etc., leaving the gold precipitated at the bottom. The larger the flow of water, the more dirt could be put through, and the more dirt the more gold.