, and
after disembarking their human freight, departing for the "Fisheries."

Some of these ships often remained in the Pacific for years, making
cruises of twelve or eighteen months' duration, returning to Sydney when
full ships to discharge and refresh, their cargoes being sent to England
in some returning "favourite fast clipper," while the whalers went back
to their greasy and dangerous vocation, until they were lost, or cut off
by the savages, or worn out and converted into hulks.

What numbers of them _were_ lost! and what wonderful and blood-curdling
experiences their crews underwent when they were castaways, or deserted,
or were marooned on "the islands"! Here is a story of a vessel lost in
Torres Straits in 1836--not a whaler, but an East Indiaman. Some of her
crew and passengers managed to land on the mainland of North Australia
and were there captured by blacks. Six months later a few survivors were
rescued and landed in Sydney; and this is what had happened to the only
woman of the party, Mrs. Fraser, wife of the captain: She had seen her
child die, her husband speared to death before her face, the chief mate
roasted alive, the second mate burned over a slow fire until he was too
crippled to walk, and otherwise horribly and indescribably tortured, and
she herself was made to climb trees for honey for her captors by having
lighted gum branches applied to her body.

In another instance a vessel was wrecked on the North Australian coast
in 1846, and nearly twenty years later the sole survivor turned up at a
cattle station near Port Denison, in North Queensland. He had been all
this time living among the blacks, unable to escape, and civilisation
had found its way, in the years that had elapsed, far enough into the
back country to reach him. The stockman who first saw the man took him
for a black and levelled his rifle at him, when he was stopped from
shooting the poor fellow by the words, "Don't fire, I am an Englishman."

Here, told in a few words, is the story of the first landing in
Victoria, and the first discovery of coal in New South Wales: On the map
of Tasmania, in the north-east corner, is marked the Furneaux Group of
islands in Bass's Straits. Dotted about the cluster are such names as
Preservation Island, Clarke Island, and Armstrong Channel. These names
all commemorate the wreck of the _Sydney Cove_, Captain Hamilton, bound
from Calcutta to Sydney, and lost in February, 1797. She sprang a leak
on