The line from the wharf runs among the houses to the station, where the school children were just arriving from up country settlements. After passing some tea gardens, which looked oddly sophisticated in the bush, we found ourselves among banana fields and pineapples, but everything was more or less obscured by fine driving rain. There was still a fair number of scattered houses, built of wood and iron, with a deplorably drenched air, and handfuls of draggled English flowers in their little gardens among tropical fruits, paw-paws, and lemons. When the ascent begins the line soon enters the wonderful tropical forest—indescribable, unimaginable in the abounding luxuriance and the variety of its tangled, matted growth. The stately soaring eucalyptus is always the staple factor in Australian scenery, but here they are linked together and festooned with heavy ropes of giant creeper, “vines” they call them in the tropics.
In the thick undergrowth are ferns, paw-paw trees, bananas, mango trees, with dark glossy leaves and feathery flowers, and the poisonous “nettle tree,” or “stinging tree” (Laportea gigas). The leaves are very large, of delicate pale green in colour, and covered with soft hairs. The stinging hairs, though not large, are so virulent that cattle have been known to die from the poison. An Australian botanist, Mr. A. G. Hamilton, “once saw a cow which had rushed through a lot of small plants. She had lost all her hair and looked like an india-rubber cow.”[23]
BARRON, RIVER CAIRNS.
The construction of the line must have involved a considerable feat of engineering, for it winds up the hills like an Alpine railway. Presently we began to have glimpses of deep dark gorges with a broad green river flowing beneath us, then we crossed a waterfall slipping down an almost perpendicular rock, and in flood covering the railroad. The rain had ceased, and now the rolling clouds, soft loose masses resting gently on the tops of the tallest gums, suddenly drifted away and revealed a vast landscape of rare loveliness. Looking down the opening gorge, we saw the valley of the Barron River, for almost its whole course, winding to the sea, a pale streak below the dark slopes of the mountains. The train stopped within sound of the thunder of the Barron Falls. The swirling water takes its magnificent plunge in tumultuous clouds of white froth to the gorge below, where rare butterflies hover, and white cockatoos flutter among the tops of the gum trees. Above all the tumult two swallows were darting to and fro, they carried one’s thoughts home. Higher up the river there were silent green backwaters, and soft sandy foreshores, where little pink bivalve shells were lying. A big hotel dominated the neighbourhood of the little station, and a young man and woman, faultlessly attired in bathing costumes that would have done credit to a French watering-place, were picking their way daintily down the steep slopes to the river, giving the oddest note of incongruity to the wildness of the place. We weighed anchor as soon as the tourist train brought us back to the wharf.
We now entered on what proved to be the most interesting part of our journey, for we kept farther inshore, and the coast became continually more enchantingly beautiful and more full of interest. It was a time of halcyon days and balmy nights. The ship’s company were very young and gay and musical. In the starlit darkness of the tropical evenings they sang and played charmingly. The Marconi-man was a violinist, the supercargo had a fine baritone,—the very name of supercargo suggests the atmosphere of Captain Marryat’s novels, an atmosphere of adventure. The night we left Cairns the captain had some of the deck lights turned out, because they made steering more difficult. He said that on a rainy night he was obliged to anchor, for the coral sea is here often only six or seven fathoms deep; but that on a clear night, even when there was no moon, the officer on the watch could still “pick up the islands with glasses.” The small coral islands are innumerable, and often quite flat, so that only a practised eye could discern their neighbourhood at night, even with glasses.
A great charm of travelling by sea is that it brings one into intimate relationship with all sorts and conditions of men. People who stay at home have a tendency to get into sets, to associate too exclusively with people of their own kind, whose points of view, standards of life and habits are all more or less the same as their own, and so they settle into grooves and get dull, and their minds become inelastic. On a ship, at sea, especially a small ship, the society may be as varied as the world. One of the most interesting people we met on our travels was a passenger on the “Montoro.” His business was shipping. He knew all the islands that are scattered in enticing little groups from the Torres Straits to beyond New Guinea. He could distinguish at a glance the different types of natives—Kanaka boys from the Torres Straits islands, pale-skinned, shock-headed Papuans, yellow Melanesians, or sooty Cingalese. He knew every inch of the route we were travelling, having often made the journey. Formerly boats of this line had gone across to Port Moresby, in New Guinea; and our original intention had been to visit the island and gain at least a passing glimpse of the curious native life there. But the boats had been taken off, because, as our fellow-passenger explained, the route was too dangerous and expensive in ships and lives. Outside the Barrier Reef there is always a swell, in which the small boats rolled heavily, and the passengers grumbled proportionately. On the return journey the prevailing strong winds heap up heavy seas, and are apt to drive a ship past the narrow opening in the Reef. Small boats of about 800 tons now run directly from Thursday Island to Port Moresby. But though we had all the inclination, we had no time to make this most interesting journey.
Our fellow-passenger had an interest in the Pearl-fishing Industry carried on in the neighbourhood of Thursday Island, by the “Island boys.” These natives of the Torres Straits Islands, for that is what the term means, have a Government inspector to look after them, and see that they get a fair proportion of the profits of the trade. Whatever those profits may be, they are sometimes hardly earned, for there are many sharks. On one occasion a boy was diving and a shark seized his head in its mouth. The boy dug his knees and nails into its throat, forcing it to let go, and was rescued by his friends, his whole chest horribly lacerated. He was taken ashore as quickly as possible, and eventually recovered; but the doctor, who was summoned to his aid, was so impressed with his marvellous escape from death, that in the interests of science rather than of his patient, he sent for a photographer and had the boy photographed as he was, before applying his medical ministrations. One photographer had the photographs made into picture post-cards. We could buy them, our informant said, when we reached Thursday Island. The proofs of this story are, unfortunately, incomplete. We hurried to the post-card shop, when we landed a few days later, but the photographer, who also sold stamps and string, sword-fish’s fins, coral, and newspapers, said the post-cards were sold out. We asked to see the negative, but being busy with other customers, he excused himself from finding it. We were unable to inform the narrator of this missing link in his story, for he had left us to embark for New Guinea on a little boat, in which he would sleep on deck, and have his meals in the one cabin by the light of a swinging lamp. We were sorry to lose his amusing company.
It was during the passage between Cairns and Thursday Island, that Captain Cook, after having so far successfully navigated these dangerous seas in his small sailing ship, “became,” by running on to the Barrier Reef, “acquainted with misfortune.” The name Cape Tribulation marks the headland to the north of the scene of his disaster. His boat had passed safely over a shoal, while the ship’s company was at dinner, though the sudden shallowing of the water to eight fathoms had caused some temporary alarm. Nevertheless, all seeming once more safe, “the gentlemen left the deck in great tranquillity, and went to bed.” A few minutes before eleven, however, they had struck upon the Barrier Reef, and remained immovable, except by the heaving of the surge that beat her against the edges of the rock upon which she lay. In a few minutes everyone was upon the deck, “with countenances which sufficiently expressed the horrors of the situation,” for “we had too much reason to conclude that we were upon a rock of coral, which is more fatal than any other, because the points of it are sharp, and every part of the surface so rough as to grind away whatever is rubbed against it, even with the gentlest motion.” It was not till a week after this disaster, a week of continual labour and acute anxiety, that they succeeded in getting the ship ashore at Endeavour Harbour. The place of Captain Cook’s landing is marked by a low brownish green mound jutting out from the coast, which along here has a most inhospitable air, the coastal ranges coming down to the water’s edge. The days passed into weeks before the damage could be sufficiently repaired to set sail again. As we passed near inshore these same coastal ranges were deeply purple, with clouds rolling down their sides. There was no sign of life, not even the smoke of a native fire, the scene had great breadth and solemnity.
