Ben Boyd's Career

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 99, 29 April 1939, Page 10 (Supplement)

Ben Boyd's Career

jyfß. WILL LAWSON ha. made a name for himself in Australia with his romantic novels founded on historical incidents and the adventures of unusual men of the out-of-doors. His latest book ("New Century Press," Sydney), is "In Ben Boyd's Day," the often stirring and eventually tragic story of a very remarkable colonist of New South Wales. Benjamin Boyd wnn a man of (tome note in Knglish society before he came out to found a plantation of his own and seek high fortune in n land where his ambitious projects could hnve fr£e play. He founded the celebrated Boyd Town settlement in Twofold Bay. He made great plans. He was to become a power in Australia and the South Seas. Tho story of his efforts, his unfortunate

A Man Of Ambition Who Came To Grief schemes for bringing in Melanesian labour from the western Pacific Islands, liis passionate and unsatisfactory love affair, and his final mysterious disappearance in the Holomon Islands are woven by Mr. Lawson into a quite fascinating novel. The story of Ben Boyd's last and fatal cruise in the schooner yacht Wanderer has often been told, and has a special New Zealand interest, for John Webwter, of Hokianga, was Boyd's great comrade, and he took charge of the Wanderer when the Solomon Island

SHvagea attacked her, and after beating them off gearched unsuccessfully for his friend. The author describes that episode briefly; it hag been narrated more fully in the "Star" from Webster's lips in his old age, and in his "Last Cruise of the Wanderer." Mr. Lawson knows his Australian scenes and epochs well; he is not so accurate in his references to New Zealand. Describing Boyd's visit to Hokianga in the beautiful Wanderer and his first meeting with John Webster, in 1849-50, the author pictures Webster as living at Opononi, "the garden filled with quiet beauty, set above the sea wall with the old ship's guns in the embrasures, with the wash of the blue waters making sea

music against the stones." That would have been all right a quarter of a century later, but Webster was not at Opononi in Boyd's day. He lived in Te Wairere with his brother William, and then at Kohukohu, engaged in the timber business. It wag not until long after his visit to California in the great •goldrush and then the cruise to Honolulu and the South Seas in the Wanderer, and his later visit to London, that he settled at Opononi which he made so interesting and beautiful a home. The author's settlement chronology goes astray also in his references to other -places in New Zealand in 1850. "Albert Town" (Port Albert) was not established until some twelve years later; the Thames as a European town did not exist, neither did the settlement of Waipu (misspelled "Waiapu", indicating confusion with the East Coast Maori district). But in the Australian story Mr. Lawson's knowledge is copious and his touch sure.