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Updated: May 5, 2025
"I won't tell you why it would anger you perhaps. But it was not all my fault. However, I have decided what to do. I am going back to my old vocation of pearler in Torres Straits. I can make more money there than I could here." The following morning, as he was leaving Belle Grace, he heard that Mrs.
She was a cutter-rigged vessel, painted a greyish-white, and of about fifty tons burden. She was probably a Government vessel possibly the Claud Hamilton, a South Australian revenue boat stationed at Port Darwin as she flew the British ensign at the mast-head; whereas a pearler would have flown it at the peak. The moment we caught sight of that ship I am afraid we lost our heads.
He was a man with an immense girth of chest, a rugged, clean-shaved face of mahogany colour, and two blunt tufts of iron-grey, thick, wiry hairs on his upper lip. He had been pearler, wrecker, trader, whaler too, I believe; in his own words anything and everything a man may be at sea, but a pirate.
"And this is where I come in with the missing details," he said. "Johnny Black did tell. He told my father. Wrote him from Levuka, before he came on to die at Peenoo-Peenee. My father had saved his life one rough-house night in Valparaiso. A Chink pearler, out of Thursday Island, prospecting for new grounds to the north of New Guinea, traded for the three spikes with a nigger.
She was stranded in Saigon with precious little money and in great trouble about a kid she had, a boy of five or six. "A fellow I just remember, whom they called Pearler Harry, brought her out first into these parts from Australia, I believe. He brought her out and then dropped her, and she remained knocking about here and there, known to most of us by sight, at any rate.
"Can't you?" drawled the New England voice. "You law-abiding, get-a-summons, act-of parliament lot of sons of Belial can't you? Now, look a-here, these Colt pistols I am selling " He took the pearler aside and could be heard talking earnestly in the corner. "See you load and see?" There were rapid clicks. "Simple, isn't it?
Coincidence is a strange thing. I can point to a dozen in my short life, every one as remarkable, if not as startling, as this. Here, I'll spin you a yarn: "It happened four years ago. I had no moustache then, was fat like a whale, and first mate on the 'Dancing Kate', a pearler in the Indian Ocean, between Java and Australia.
"Young MacTavish, who is in a crack English regiment, asked the captain of a pearling lugger whether he didn't know Talbot de Cholmondeley in the Blues. "The pearler said very likely he had met 'em, and no doubt he'd remember their faces if he saw them, but he never could remember names.
The black fellow who called himself "Captain Jack Davies," of whom I shall have more to say hereafter, was amongst the crew at the time. I obtained this information in Sydney from Captain Tucker, a well- known Torres Straits pearler. Bruno, Jensen's dog, was something of a greyhound in build, only that his hind-quarters were heavier.
This dog, which played so important nay, so vitally important a part in my strange afterlife, was given to Jensen at Batavia by a Captain Cadell, a well-known Australian seaman, who had gained some notoriety by navigating the Murray River for the first time. Cadell, who was a great friend of Jensen, was himself a pearler. But he met with a sad end.
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