THE SOUTH SEAMAN:
AN INCIDENT IN THE SEA STORY OF AUSTRALIA
From "The Tapu Of Banderah and Other Stories"
By Louis Becke
C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.
1901
On the 22nd of July, 1828, the Sydney South Seaman, Indefatigable, eleven days out from the Port of Conception in Chili, was in lat 17? S. and about 127? E. long., six hundred miles distant from the nearest land—the then almost unknown Paumotu Group, which Cook had well named the Dangerous Archipelago.
Five years before, the brig was named the Calder, and was then commanded by Captain Peter Dillon, a famous officer in the East India Company's service; his name is interwoven with the sea story of Australia as the commander of the Company's ship Research, and the discoverer of the relics of the gallant and ill-fated La Perouse, whose ships were wrecked on Vanikoro Island, in the New Hebrides group, in 1788.