5] 
“YACHTING” IN MELANESIA. 215 
one of the bunks was occupied by some boy who was being taken home 
ill. But the crown of it all was making up the teachers’ pay in the 
store-room, commonly known as “the sweat-box,” the temperature 
between 95° and 100°, no air, a rolling ship, and the smell of the bilge 
water over all. 
The old Southern Cross had no bath and we hailed with delight a 
chance .f standing under the rush of water that came off the deck- 
house in a shower. ‘Tradition says that Bishop John Selwyn used to 
get them to turn the salt-water hose on him when they were washing 
down the decks. 
Captain Tilly resigned in 1870 and Captain Jacob succeeded him 
and was in charge of the ship at the time of the Bishop’s murder. ‘The 
third Southern Cross was built in 1874 and Bongard was her captain 
from 1875 till she was sold. Bongard was the mate who took in the 
boat at Nukapu and picked up the Bishop’s body. He had previously 
been mate on Henry Kingsley’s yacht. The new ship was built in 
Auckland, a noted place for building good schooners. She was a three- 
masted topsail schooner of 180 tons, with a 24 horse-power auxiliary 
engine; her cost was about £5,000, of which £2,000 came from the Pat- 
teson Memorial Fund of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. 
After she was sold she was renamed Ysabel and was noted for her fast 
sailing. 
The fourth Southern Cross served from 1891 to 1903. She was 
built at Wyvenhoe in Essex by a noted yacht-builder, a friend of 
Bishop Selwyn’s. Her cost was £9,000 and Bishop Selwyn and his 
friends contributed the money. In rig she was a three-masted fore- 
and-aft schooner with yards on the foremast, and still bearing her old 
name she is in the timber trade from Hobart to Melbourne and may 
often be seen in the Yarra just below Queen’s Bridge. Her present 
owner speaks well of her sailing powers, but oh, when on her how one 
longed to be elsewhere! Her sail area was much reduced after she 
reached New Zealand, owing to a fear that the hull would not stand 
the strain, and this reduction in driving force, together with the drag 
of the propeller, made it very difficult to keep her well up when tacking. 
In 1901 the Bishop asked me to go to Tikopia in the ship from Mota, a 
distance of about 100 miles. On a previous voyage we had done the 
Same journey in 17 hours; this second time we left on Monday about 
noon in a heavy swell; when Tuesday dawned we sighted the island 
a long way to windward and at noon we were 20 miles to leeward of it, 
and it was IO a. m. the next day before we landed. It was always a 
struggle to get from the Solomons to Santa Cruz, and sometimes it 
took the better part of a week, but the last stretch of 600 miles from 
Vila to Norfolk Island was a veritable sea of growls. It was generally 
a case of making less than 100 miles a day tacking against the south- 
