As I shall not have occasion to refer to my friend again, I may as well state here what befell him. There came a time when so many prisoners were at large, and the means of getting them in were so utterly inadequate, that the Governor issued a proclamation inviting them to return before a certain date, with the assurance that all who had not been guilty of murder or highway robbery should receive free pardons. My escapee accepted a free pardon, and going into business not long afterwards, became a highly-prosperous man.
CHAPTER II.
AT SEA.
On a hot summer morning the Molly Asthore, a topsail schooner of 120 tons, tripped her anchor in Watson’s Bay, where she had been snugly moored during the previous night. Her square sails hung from the yards in graceful festoons, waiting to be sheeted home by her not very active crew, and under a light wind she slowly glided through Port Jackson Heads, where the swell of the lonely Southern Ocean was making itself heard in measured cadence.
The rich perfume of the wattle trees was slowly wafted to us by the lagging breeze. The shrill sounds of the garrulous cicadæ animated the thick bush which sheltered them on the shore. The wild flowers drooped under the heat. A lizard ventured forth upon the trunk of a dead tree for a moment, but quickly retired before the universal glare; and an occasional bright-winged parrot or lemon-crested cockatoo flashed through the palpitating atmosphere in search of a more leafy neighbourhood. A glimmering haze overspread the distant little straggling town of Sydney, and we left port under the gaze of but one man—a swarthy aboriginal, who brandished a spear at us from a neighbouring cluster of mia-mias lying in the shadow of a rock.
As we cleared the South Head the wind freshened, the gaff-topsails were run up, and soon the long line of Australian coast faded into dim perspective.
The Molly Asthore was a roughly-built vessel. She had not the sharp, yacht-like bows of the island traders of to-day. Her decks were neither white nor well-kept; rope ends usually trailed about instead of being Flemish-coiled, and she was innocent of brass work or ornamentation of any kind. The cuddy, to which access was obtained by a short perpendicular ladder, was furnished with two rude bunks for the master and mate, and a little square table, round which there was barely room to walk. The schooner had carried cocoanut oil, a commodity whose penetrating scent is never eradicated from ships in which it has once been stored, and the offensive odour of rancid oil and bilge-water was almost overpowering in this little room. The men who slept forward were not so well off, but they counted on a fine weather voyage, which would admit of lying on deck through the nights. The provisions consisted chiefly of weevily biscuits and bad salt meat, and the cockroaches which abounded in all parts of the schooner showed a shocking tameness.
But a sailor bound for the South Seas in those days was not over particular about his personal comfort. He had the romance of adventure before him. Little was known of these seas, and all vessels which sailed on them were more or less ships of discovery. The fate of La Perouse, whose visit to Port Jackson, where he last saw the home of the white man, I had often heard my father speak of, was still shrouded in mystery, and we might even come upon the survivors of his unfortunate expedition, who were believed to be imprisoned in some of the island groups we purposed visiting. With all the interest of a new world opening before me I was disposed to think lightly of the hardships in store.
The ship’s company consisted of the master, Jacob Turner, an old weatherbeaten tar, of mahogany complexion, with short, thick whiskers like tufts of cocoanut fibre, who had many strange experiences of lawless regions to tell; the mate, Silas Cobb, a Yankee who had served in an American whaler and knew much of the adventurous life of the whale fisheries; two English sailors who had run away from their last ship in Hobart Town; an escaped New South Wales convict, a cabin boy, and myself. We were short-handed, but that was no unusual occurrence.
We gave the dreary convict-home of Norfolk Ireland a wide berth for obvious reasons, and entered the tropics when ten days out from Sydney without having sighted land since leaving port.
For a whole fortnight an almost vertical sun blazed upon our crawling ship. Idle days dawned in soft rose colour, swooned through languid airs, and melted away in golden sunsets. Sapphire seas shimmered beneath the sun across limitless fields of azure. One day a gentle regular breeze came down upon us. It was the refreshing trade wind, which rippled the ocean with tiny wavelets, and carried us along without the sense of motion. We were in the Elysian Fields of Neptune’s empire.