She
had come in on the flow, but now stood high and dry with the sandcrabs
playing hide and seek around her keel. To me she looked like the
Woolworth Building balanced on the edge of a plate. As I stood gazing
at her, her master hailed me. I went aboard and we wetted the Koombana's head, for this was her first scheduled trip up the nor'-west coast since he had brought her out from the Clyde.
"Captain,"
I said, "her lines are fine, but for all that she don't look safe to
me. Top-heavy I should say, if you were to ask me."
"And what does a landlubber like you know about ships?" he laughed. "Stow that talk and have another. Say when—"
Almost
a year to the day I heard that she had been lost with all hands in a
"willie-willie" on an upcoast trip some two days out of Broome. No one
saw what happened, not a soul on board was saved, no wreckage was ever
found. She just disappeared. Remembering her build, I am still sure in
my mind that she had turned turtle.
That
fearful hurricane tore a great hole in the Broome pearling fleet. It
cost Pearltown four score of her best luggers and their crews. But by
that time I had left Broome and the "Never Never Land" for good. For
some time I had been fed up with the hopeless struggle against unfair
odds, the stench of rotting oysters, mosquitoes, sand flies, sun, white
ants, spinifex, with the poor tucker, the dearth of greens and the lack
of chums, and at last decided to quit in search of a better hole.
Do
you wonder that Singapore, where my wandering star next took me, looked
good after Broome? But here again misfortune overtook me. Soon after my
arrival the dengue fever laid hold of me. For a full week I thought I
was going to peg out. When I got over it, homesickness had its turn,
and instead of going to Ternate in the Dutch East Indies as I had
planned, I took the first boat home.
That was luck, if you like! If I had not been longing for the sight of home, I should have sailed in the steamer La Seine on her next trip to Ternate. And La Seine on that next
