ON THE OCEAN WAVE 75 



a damper, and in the cunning twists and wriggling by 

 which the fingers freed each other of the sticky dough 

 and other dexterous manipulations I soon came to 

 recognize that with his left hand he was as deft as many 

 men with their right and left. He had sailed the boat 

 laden with wire-netting and heavy goods from Bowen, 

 two hundred miles south, and was on his way to his 

 selection, one hundred miles farther north. A wiry, 

 slight man, though a real ' shell back/ one who had 

 been steeped in and saturated with every sea, was 

 4 giving the sea best,' nerve-shaken, so he said, and yet 

 sailing a cutter with but three or four inches of free- 

 board * single handed.' And he told the why and the 

 wherefore of his fear of the sea. 



With a mate, he had been for many months beche- 

 de-mer fishing, their station or headquarters a lonely 

 islet in Whit-Sunday Passage, which winds about that 

 picturesque group of islands through which Captain 

 Cook passed in the year 1770. The twain had been 

 out on one of the spurs of the Great Barrier Reef, 

 and had been caught in the toils of adverse weather. 

 After beating about for days, they managed to make 

 their station, hungry, thirsty, their souls fainting within 

 them. Shelter and comfort were theirs, and it was no 

 surprise to my visitor when his mate slept the next 

 morning beyond the accustomed time. 



* Let him rest/ he said. ' He is dog-tired/ and 

 went about the work of the way. He had himself 

 known what it was t(o sleep eighteen and twenty hours 

 at a stretch, for he had many times been worn by toil 

 and watching and nerve-tension to the limit of 

 endurance. And so the day passed, and the man in 

 the bunk slept on. Peace and rest were his, and the 



