nces, the lure of an adventurous life,
were drowned by the bugle notes of the Australian "call to arms."

These were young men who had left the shores of their native country,
venturing farther out a-sea, ever seeking pearls of great price. They
had once been engaged in pearl-fishing from the northernmost point of
Australia--Thursday Island--that eastern and cosmopolitan village
squatting on the soil of a continent sacred to the white races.

When the handful of white people holding this newest continent first
flaunted their banner of "No Trespassers" in the face of the
multicolored millions of Asia, they declared their willingness to sweat
and toil even under tropic skies, and develop their country without the
aid of the cheap labor of the rice-eating, mat-sleeping, fast-breeding
spawn of the man-burdened East. But this policy came well-nigh to
being the death-blow to one little industry of the north, so far from
the ken of the legislators in Sydney and Melbourne as to have almost
escaped their recognizance.

The largest pearling-ground in the world is just to the north of this
lovely Southland. It would seem as though the aesthetic oyster that
lines its home with the tinting of heaven and has caught the "tears of
angels," petrifying them as permanent souvenirs, loves to make its home
as near to this earthly paradise as the ocean will permit.

When the law decreed that only white labor must be employed on the
fleets a number of the pearlers went north and became Dutch citizens,
for from ports in the Dutch Indies they could work Australian waters up
to the three-mile limit. But as soon as it was known that Australia
needed _men_, that _we_ were at war, then politics and profits could go
hang: at heart they were all Australians and would not be behind any in
offering their lives. It took but a few days to pay off the crews,
send the Jap divers where they belonged, beach the schooners, and take
the fastest steamer back HOME--then enlist, and away, with front seats
for the biggest show on earth.

CHAPTER II

AN ALL-BRITISH SHIP

We flew the Dutch flag, we were registered in a Dutch port, but every
timber in that British-built ship creaked out a protest, and there
paced the quarter-deck five registered Dutchmen who could not croak
"Gott-verdammter!" if their lives depended on it, and who guzzled "rice
taffle" in a very un-Dutch manner. Generally they forgot that they had
sold their birthright. Ever thei