ROMANCE OF SAILOR

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 4396, 23 May 1933, Page 7

ROMANCE OF SAILOR

AN EPISODE OF TORRES STRAIT.

Sailing through the waters of Torres Strait, which separates Australia from New Guinea, the traveller passes dozens of palm-fringed islands. All of them are coloured with romance, for these waters were the haunt of the beche-de-mer seeker and the collector of mother of pearl in the days when licence was unrestricted and the seas were open to all who wished to wrest wealth from them. From the four corners of the earth me'n came, white men and coloured men, buccaneers and sea rovers, "black-birders" and legitimate traders.

On one of these islands, called Massig by the people, but chartered Yorke, live the Mosby family, mingling with the natives of the place and yet aloof from them. The mother, still alive, is a Massig woman. She is tall and erect, but black as the mother of night. She answers to the language name of Ulood, but is equally responsive to the designation, conferred on her by some white man, of Quinine, which perhaps, was meant to be Queen Anne. Certainly her regal carriage and dignity of bearing would justify that title. But on the paternal side the Mosby family honours the memory of a runaway American sailor. Edward Mosby was his name. He was called Ned Mosby. Ned was heard of first in the late 'sixties in Sydney, where he had an argument with the officers of his ship. He and a friend bound the chief officer with ropes and fled the ship. It was whispered that this was not the first time he had deserted. Rumour said that he was wanted as a deserter from the United States Navy. That probably was the reason why, while he lived in the Strait, the flag of every new ship was carefully scrutinised through the glasses. If the Stars and Stripes shone out Ned made it convenient to hide in the bush until the stranger moved oh. The big-framed, red-whiskered seaman found his way up into Torres Strait. It was a time when one of the Government officials at the port of Somerset, then Australia's most northern port and place of refuge for castaways, could write that the waters were a meeting-place for men "as bad as any who ever sailed out of a'ny port on- God's earth!" With some friends Ned acquired a black crew, and searched the waters for pearl-shell. Fortune favoured him. He was able to establish fishing stations at some of the central islands, and the boats went out regularly and returned with their catch of valuable shell and pearls. Ulood became his wife. Their home was of the native type, grass-thatched. This had its disadvantages, for once when something had displeased the natives of the island of Massig they made an attack on the white man who had settled in their midst. He had firearms; their weapons were bow and arrow and clubs. At night they shot fire-tipped arrows into the dry thatch, and Ned escaped only with difficulty. Those were primitive days, and soon the influence of the white man began to assert itself. Ned seemed to get on fairly well with the people, and suggested that he should provide them with a school teacher who would initiate them into the mysteries of the "white man education." When some of the natives visited a neighbouring island and from there imbibed a little missionary teaching, old Ned showed them how they might distinguish the Sabbath from any other day of the week by giving them a sheet of copper on which mystic symbols denoted the day of worship, if not of rest. To the astonished villagers he introduced that amazing animal the horse and the "devil" in the form of a horned cow. He gave them new plants for their gardens, and bartered knives and tomahawks and calico and other delights of civilisation for beche-de-mer and pearls. Sometimes there were unexpected interludes, as when one day a half-caste Maori "skipper" in his employ sailed in with six of the black crew —mainland natives—trailing behind at the end of a long rope. They had attempted to kill the other members of the crew and get away with the lugger while the men were working on the reef. Their scheme miscarried, a'nd the skipper gave them the choice of drowning or thus being taken back to the summary justice of the temporary king of the island in the person of Ned. They chose the later, and Ned, in true sea style, had them triced up and given the rope's end all round when they were brought ashore. In one of his adventures Ned lost his leg, and the deficiency was supplied with a wooden stump. During visits to Thursday Island and meetings with convivial acquaintances the stump was a hindrance. Often townspeople would be delighted by the spectacle of Ned, intoxicated, being carried on the back of a friend from one hotel to another for drinks, while the wooden leg found a temporary resting-place in the gutter. Ned remained true to his native wife. A more commodious home was built in European style. There were now four boys and a girl to provide for. Ned

had a 'nest egg at the bank and a large one hidden in his own home in the form of beautiful pearls packed in small canvas bags. Night after night the old seaman would take them out and run them through his fingers, gloating over them. "By-and-by," he would tell his family as they reached manhood, "I am going to take you back to America with me—back to Baltimore, where my family live. These pearls are going to pay the fare." But one night as he sat with his store of pearls there was a slight noise outside just the fleetingglimpse of a face at the window, the face of a Japanese diver who had heard of the old man's pearls and who wanted to acquire them. Cautiously me watched and waited. At daw'nhe told his boys, "The pearls are buried where no one can steal them. When I want them myself I can get them easily, but I take no risks." But both Ned and the diver died without revealing the secret of the pearls; and so there they remain, despite diligent search since. The family never reached Baltimore.

The descendants of the mysterious American sailor number almost three score now. Fine, upstanding men, with something of the physique of the father and the bearing of the old island mother, they have their own European-built homes embowered i'n tropical foliage and standing apart from the native village. As owners of several pearling vessels they are a registered company and carry on an important business. The boys have inter-married with women of South Sea or half-caste stock. The latest addition to the Mosby family, a'n almost white infant with blue eyes and red hair, recalls the old grandfather, who, whatever the crime was that first drove him from the haunts of white men to the comparative seclusion of the islands of Torres Strait, played no insignificant part in the civilisation of the isla'nd people.