Here I was reminded of distressful days gone by. I think it was in 1866 that the old steamship Soushay , from Batavia for Sydney, put in at Cooktown for scurvy-grass, as I always thought, and “incidentally” to land mails. On her sick-list was my fevered self; and so I didn’t see the place till I came back on the Spray thirty-one years later. And now I saw coming into port the physical wrecks of miners from New Guinea, destitute and dying. Many had died on the way and had been buried at sea. He would have been a hardened wretch who could look on and not try to do something for them.
The sympathy of all went out to these sufferers, but the little town was already straitened from a long run on its benevolence. I thought of the matter, of the lady’s gift to me at Tasmania, which I had promised myself I would keep only as a loan, but found now, to my embarrassment, that I had invested the money. However, the good Cooktown people wished to hear a story of the sea, and how the crew of the Spray fared when illness got aboard of her. Accordingly the little Presbyterian church on the hill was opened for a conversation; everybody talked, and they made a roaring success of it. Judge Chester, the magistrate, was at the head of the gam, and so it was bound to succeed. He it was who annexed the island of New Guinea to Great Britain. “While I was about it,” said he, “I annexed the blooming lot of it.” There was a ring in the statement pleasant to the ear of an old voyager. However, the Germans made such a row over the judge’s mainsail haul that they got a share in the venture.
Well, I was now indebted to the miners of Cooktown for the great privilege of adding a mite to a worthy cause, and to Judge Chester all the town was indebted for a general good time. The matter standing so, I sailed on June 6, 1897 , heading away for the north as before.
Arrived at a very inviting anchorage about sundown, the 7th, I came to, for the night, abreast the Claremont lightship. This was the only time throughout the passage of the Barrier Reef Channel that the Spray