A Bid for Fortune | Page 6

they're going to be taken
out of knickerbockers. I'd been half round the world before I was
fifteen, and had been wrecked twice and marooned once before my
beard showed signs of sprouting. My father was an Englishman, not
very much profit to himself, so he used to say, but of a kindly
disposition, and the best husband to my mother, during their short
married life, that any woman could possibly have desired. She, poor
soul, died of fever in the Philippines the year I was born, and he went
to the bottom in the schooner Helen of Troy, a degree west of the Line
Islands, within six months of her decease; struck the tail end of a
cyclone, it was thought, and went down, lock, stock, and barrel, leaving
only one man to tell the tale. So I lost father and mother in the same
twelve months, and that being so, when I put my cabbage-tree on my
head it covered, as far as I knew, all my family in the world.
Any way you look at it, it's calculated to give you a turn; at fifteen
years of age, to know that there's not a living soul on the face of God's
globe that you can take by the hand and call relation. That old saying
about "blood being thicker than water" is a pretty true one, I reckon:
friends may be kind--they were so to me--but after all they're not the
same thing, nor can they be, as your own kith and kin.
However, I had to look my trouble in the face, and stand up to it as a
man should, and I suppose this kept me from brooding over my loss as
much as I should otherwise have done. At any rate, ten days after the
news reached me, I had shipped aboard the Little Emily, trading
schooner, for Papeete, booked for five years among the islands, where I
was to learn to water copra, to cook my balances, and to lay the
foundation of the strange adventures that I am going to tell you about.
After my time expired and I had served my Trading Company on half
the mudbanks of the Pacific, I returned to Australia and went up inside
the Great Barrier Reef to Somerset--the pearling station that had just

come into existence on Cape York. They were good days there then,
before all the new-fangled laws that now regulate the pearling trade had
come into force; days when a man could do almost as he liked among
the islands in those seas. I don't know how other folk liked it, but the
life just suited me--so much so that when Somerset proved
inconvenient and the settlement shifted across to Thursday, I went with
it, and, what was more to the point, with money enough at my back to
fit myself out with a brand-new lugger and full crew, so that I could go
pearling on my own account.
For many years I went at it head down, and this brings me up to four
years ago, when I was a grown man, the owner of a house, two luggers,
and as good a diving plant as any man could wish to possess. What was
more, just before this I had put some money into a mining concern on
the mainland, which had, contrary to most ventures of the sort, turned
up trumps, giving me as my share the nice round sum of £5,000. With
all this wealth at my back, and having been in harness for a greater
number of years on end than I cared to count, I made up my mind to
take a holiday and go home to England to see the place where my
father was born, and had lived his early life (I found the name of it
written in the fly-leaf of an old Latin book he left me), and to have a
look at a country I'd heard so much about, but never thought to set my
foot upon.
Accordingly I packed my traps, let my house, sold my luggers and gear,
intending to buy new ones when I returned, said good-bye to my
friends and shipmates, and set off to join an Orient liner in Sydney.
You will see from this that I intended doing the thing in style! And why
not? I'd got more money to my hand to play with than most of the
swells who patronize the first saloon; I had earned it honestly, and was
resolved to enjoy myself with it to the top of my bent.
I reached Sydney a week before the boat was advertised to sail, but I
didn't fret much about that. There's plenty to see and do in such a big
place, and when a