lightest movement of the line. But you must be quick and strong of
hand then, or you will never drag him forth, for slippery as he is he
can coil his length around a projecting bit of rock and defy you for
perhaps five or ten minutes; and then when you do succeed in tearing him
away and pull him out with the hook buried deep in his loose, pendulous,
wrinkled and corduroyed throat, he instantly resolves himself into a
quivering Gordian knot, winding the line in and about his coils and
knotting it into such knots that can never be unravelled.

Here and there you will see lying buried deep in the growing coral, or
covered with black masses of _congewoi_ such things as iron and copper
bolts, or heavy pieces of squared timber, the relics of the many wrecks
that have occurred on the bar--some recent, some in years long gone by.
Out there, lying wedged in between the weed and kelp-covered boulders,
only visible at low water, are two of the guns of the ill-fated
_Wanderer_, a ship, like her owner, famous in the history of the
colony. She was the property of a Mr. Benjamin Boyd, a man of flocks and
herds and wealth, who founded a town and a great whaling station on the
shores of Twofold Bay, where he employed some hundreds of men, bond and
free. He was of an adventurous and restless disposition, and after
making several voyages to the South Seas, was cruelly cut off and
murdered by the cannibal natives of Guadalcanar in the Solomon Islands,
in the "fifties." The captain, after beating off the savages, who,
having killed poor Boyd on shore, made a determined attempt to capture
the ship, set sail for Australia, and in endeavouring to cross in over
the bar went ashore and became a total wreck. Here is a description
written by Judge McFarland of the _Wanderer_ as she was in those days
when Boyd dreamed a dream of founding a Republic in the South Sea
Islands with his wild crew of Polynesians and a few white fellow
adventurers:--

"She was of 240 tons burthen; very fleet, and had a flush deck; and her
cabins were fitted up with every possible attention to convenience, and
with great elegance; and had she been intended as a war craft, she could
scarcely have been more powerfully armed, for she carried four brass
deck-guns--two six-pounders and two four-pounders--mounted on carriages
resembling dolphins, four two-pounder rail guns--two on each side--and
one brass twelve-pounder traversing gun (which had seen service at
Waterloo)--in al