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Title: Yorke The Adventurer
1901

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: January 28, 2008 [EBook #23821]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YORKE THE ADVENTURER ***

Produced by David Widger

YORKE THE ADVENTURER

By Louis Becke

T. Fisher Unwin, 1901

Chapter I

In that delightful and exciting book, written by Captain Joshua Slocum,
and entitled, "Sailing Alone Round the World," there is a part wherein
the adventurous American seaman relates how he protected himself from
night attacks by the savages by a simple, but efficient precaution. It
was his custom, when he anchored for the night off the snow-clad and
inhospitable shores of Tierra del Fuego, to profusely sprinkle his
cutter's deck with sharp tacks, and then calmly turn in and sleep the
sleep of the just; for even the horny soles of the Fuegian foot is
susceptible to the business end of a tack; and, as I read Slocum's
story, I smiled, and thought of dear old Yorke and the _Francesco_.

*****

I first met Yorke early in the "seventies." Our vessel had run in under
the lee of the South Cape of New Britain to wood and water, and effect
some repairs, for in working northward through the Solomon Group, on a
special mission to a certain island off the coast of New Guinea, we
had met with heavy weather, and had lost our foretopmast. In those days
there was not a single white man living on the whole of the south coast
of New Britain, from St. George's Channel on the east, to Dampier's
Straits on the west--a stretch of more than three hundred miles,
and little was known of the natives beyond the fact of their being
treacherous cannibals. In Blanche Bay only, on the northern shore, was
there a settlement of a few adventurous English traders--the employees
of a rich German company--and these were only acquainted with the
natives in their own vicinity. Even the masters of trading vessels
avoided the south coast of the great island, not only on account of the
dangerous character of its inhabitants, but also because there was not,
they thought, anything to tempt