CRUSOES OF THE SOUTH SEA

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIV, Issue 1075, 23 July 1924, Page 10

CRUSOES OF THE SOUTH SEA

ISLANDS OF ROMANCE. MEN IN LONELY EXILE. To-day the island of Juan Fernandez, on which Alexander Selkirk, the prototype ot Robinson Crusoe, lived alone for lour years, has a wireless station, and Ones a brisk business in exporting crayfish to the markets of Valparaiso. But (writes Thomas Dunbalin in the Sydney Sun) there are still Crusoes of desolate isles scattered around the coasts of Australia, north, south, east, und west. Most of them have a Man Friday or two or some kind of human companionship. But occasionally a man retires to an island to live tiie true Crusoe life. J bus an old "halter,” now dead, lived alone for many •years on Deliverance Island, in the western part of Torres Straits. There were all sorts of legends, probably quite wrong, about his reasons for living this solitary life. It. was alleged that he was the Archduke Johann of Austria and various other eminent persons. But he did not look like it Deliverance Island is a lonely spot in those times, though in the early days ot pearling in the Straits the luggers used to work tiie banks near the island a good deal. On one occasion during Crusoo’s term there no vessel visited the island for seven years Usually at least one vessel a year called * ''There was no Friday on Deliverance Island. but another Crusoe had a whole tribe of them, lie was a man of good education, who was alleged to have been an officer—some said a major—m the British \riny. For some unknown reason lie went ‘‘bus'll,” and settled down on an island in the Buccaneer Archipelago, off the even now little known north-west coast of Western Australia. . There he became a land of chief of the local tribe of aborigines. Perhaps Ins habit of command gained him the supremacy amongst the simple inhabitants of those parts, who still swim from island to island in droves, men, women and chiluren, as they did over two centuries ago, when their amphibious dexterity aroused the wonder of Dampier. . . , , Fe wwhite men ever visit this wild coast and the very existence of this white chiei of an aboriginal tribe is known only to a stray adventurer or two who have ponetrated into tho labyrinth of islands and reefs separated bv narrow channels, through which the tide rushes with great force, which make up the Buccaneer Archipelago. A few years ago he was sitll living there with his dusky followers. Perhaps ho is still alive. . , Recent explorers have brought back void of another Crusoe in the far north-west. Tie is a Frenchman who has established himself on one of the islands which abound on that coast. He, too, has Ins men Fridays in the shape of aborgines. lie is however, more in touch with such rudiments of civilisation as exist in those parts than tho recluse of the Huccaneei Archipelago, who has cut himself oh entirely from the men of his own colour, ihe Frenchman, though he lives very much in the same way as the natives, has not altogether given up the ways of his kind, and he trades to some extent in trepang and other commodities, which furnish him with tho means of supplying his very modest requirements in the way of the necessities and luxuries of civilisation. Gno of the weirdest stories of a wild white man, a story without an ending is told in a book written by the wife of a former Governor of Western Australia. She says that, the magistrate in charge, about I'EBO, of a district in the north-west was fond of shooting, and often made excursions along the coast for that purpose. Returning one evening to his camp on an uninhabited stretch of coast which was seldom visited by any other white man except himself, he saw in tlie dusk wJiut he took to be a large sea-bird sitting on a rock by tlie shore. He fired, but the thing gave an awful groan such as no bird ever altered. When the horror-stricken magistrate reached it he found that lie had killed a white man. ONE MORE MYSTERY. The man was practically naked, and had apparently been living a Crusoe life for a long time. There was nothing which could give any clue to his identity, and inquiries completely failed to throw any light on the mystery. There had been up wreck, as. far as’ could be learned, from which lie might have been a survivor. All that the magistrate could do was to have the body buried and try to forget. • Assuming that the story is true—and in spite of its weirdness it. does not seem the sort of story that would lie invented, it adds one moro to those mysteries of the bush which occur in all parts of Australia. Usually they are mysterious disappearances. Mon go out some fine day and vanish oft the face of the earth as completely and inexplicably a 3 if the ground had opened and swallowed them up. In this ease a man appears from nowhere, and no one is able to account, for him. Awav up near tho head of the Great Australian Bight are the islands of sl. Peter and St. Francis, which mark the farthest point reached in 1627 by the first vessel to sail along the southern coast of Australia —the “Golden Seahorse,” which carried Peter Nuyts, whoso name was long given to the shores along which he had sailed. TWO OXFORD MEN. Lying off an almost uninhabited coast, and with their shores washed by the huge seas of the Bight, the islands are nearly as remote from civilisation now as they were when Nuyts set eyes on them three centuries ago. Yet they have not one Crusoe, hut two—two Oxford men who have settled down in this remotest corner of the antipodes, in a place even further removed from tho rush and fret of modern life than, the quietest cloisters of the most aloot Oxford college. All the world knew the late E. J. Banfield, who lived with only his wife and ft dog on Dunk Island, off tho Queensland coast. But far away to the north, off that lonely stretch of coast, that runs for 300 miles from Cooktown to Somerset, there lives —if indeed he still lives —a true Crusoe. He is a returned soldier, who settled with a mate on one of the islandthat dot these seas. The mate became ill. and died, and after ho had taken the body to Cooktown ho returned to his lonely island, doubly lonely through the loss ol the mate who had shared the life there.