6o CONFESSIONS OF A BEACHCOMBER 



been bundled over the Barrier, a wooden spoon such as 

 Kanakas use, or the dusky globe of an incandescent lamp 

 that has glowed out its life in the state-room of some ocean 

 liner, or a broom of Japanese make, a coal-basket, a 

 " fender," a tiger nautilus shell, an oar or a rudder, a tiller, 

 a bottle cast away far out from land to determine the 

 strength and direction of ocean currents, the spinnaker 

 boom of a yacht, the jib-boom of a staunch cutter. Once 

 there was a goodly hammer cemented by the head fast 

 upright on a flat rock, and again the stand of a grindstone, 

 and a trestle, high and elaborately stayed. Cases, invari- 

 ably and disappointingly empty, come and go, planks of 

 strange timber, blocks from some tall ship. A huge black 

 beacon waddled along, dragging a reluctant mass of iron at 

 the end of its chain cable, followed by a roughly-built 

 " flatty " and a huge log of silkwood. A jolly red buoy, 

 weary of the formality of bowing to the swell, broke loose 

 from a sandbank's apron-strings, bounced off" in the ecstasies 

 of liberty, romped in the surf, rolled on the beach, worked 

 a cosy bed in the soft warm sand, and has slumbered ever 

 since to the soothing hum of the wind, indifferent to the 

 perplexities of mariners and the fate of ships. The gilded 

 mast-head truck of a smart yacht, with one of her cabin 

 racks, bespoke of recent disaster, unknown and unaccounted, 

 and a brand new oar, finished and fitted with the nattiness 

 of a man-o'-war's man, told of some wave-swept deck. 



That which at the time was the most eloquent message 

 from the sea came close to our door, cast up on the snowy- 

 white coral drift of a little cove, where it immediately 

 attracted notice. Nothing but an untrimmed bamboo staff" 

 nearly 30 feet long, carrying an oblong strip of soiled 

 white calico between two such strips of red turkey twill. 

 Tattered and frayed, the flags seemed to tell of the desperate 

 appeal for help of some forlorn castaway ; of a human being, 

 marooned on a lonely sandbank on the Barrier, without 

 shelter, food or water, but not altogether bereft of hope. 

 Biche-de-mer fishers have in times past been marooned on 

 the Reef by mutinous blacks, and left to die by slow degrees, 



