in the following chapters, wherein i have endeavoured to write down my experiences at sea, in australia and on the south sea islands, i have not gone beyond the first four or five years of my life abroad, but later on i hope to do so, if i get the chance. i have made no attempt to moralise in my book, and if i appear to have been guilty of doing so, be assured it was a spasm of the intellect and quite forgotten all about a few minutes after i had written it down.

all i have attempted in this book is to endeavour to tell exactly my experiences as they occurred in my travels in many lands; also i have wished to reveal a little of the usual experiences, the ups and downs, that youths pass through when they go to sea and are left completely on their own in other lands, seeking to see the world, often ambitious to find a fortune, but generally succeeding in only gathering heaps of grim experiences. unfortunately no one can buy his experience first, and so the general rule of green fortune-seekers overseas is to end in failure, and to be honest, i was no exception to the rule. nevertheless my loss of all that might have been was amply compensated by the rough brave men whom i met, seafarers and otherwise, who revealed to me the best side of humanity and xithe value of good comradeship: devil-may-care fellows with hearts that were blazing hearth-fires of welcome in the coldest days of adversity of long ago, ere i, crammed up with experience and nothing much else, down in the stokehold of a tramp steamer, returned across the ocean to my native land, eventually to get the roving fever and again go seaward.

pom-pe-te, pom-pe-te, pom, pom,

all thro’ the burning night

shovelling coal for the engine’s heart

down in the blinding light.

working my passage, penniless,

over the western main,—

and i know they’ll all be sorry

to see me home again.

pom-pe-te, pom-pe-te, pom, pom,

shiver and shake and bang;

thundering seas lifting us up,

making the screw-shaft clang.

unshaven faces thrust to the flame,

washed by the furnace bright,

and england thousands of miles away

in the middle watch to-night.

oh! what would they say could they see me

mask’d thick with oil and dirt,

shovelling deep down under the sea?

this sweater for a shirt,

with the funnel’s red flame blowing

out in the windy sky,

and the family pride perspiring

to keep the steam-gauge high!

xiii can hear the wild green chargers

pounding the boat’s iron side—

old death, impatient, knocking away

all night to get inside!

where haggard men like shadows move,

toil in the flame-lit gloom.

oh, it’s just the whole world over

sailing the wave of doom.

for the aristocrats are sleeping

snug in their bunks, i know,

all on the upper deck, while we,

are sweating away below!

hard-feeding the white heat’s fury,

piling the wake with foam,

unravelling all the knots that wind

the way that takes them home.

i’ve clung on an old wind-jammer,

i’ve done things—best untold;

hump’d the swag on many a rush,

found everything—but gold!

but oh! for the flashlight homeward!

the anchor’s running chain,

and the sight of their dear old faces—

to see me home again!

be assured that i have given no artificial colouring in my book, neither have i seriously set out to describe what i have seen, though i am confident that i must have succeeded in giving some local atmosphere, since all that i have written is drawn from true experience, but i cannot be certain that all the events followed exactly in the order that i have written them, for with the flight of time the dates of days, months and years fade away. i have xiiileft to silence almost one year of my south sea island life, especially of that period when i, with a kindred spirit of my own age, lived for several months in a hut of our own fashioning on the shore side near pangopango harbour off the isle of tutuela; also i have passed over several months of my australian bush experiences, and i have done this for reasons of my own. later on i hope to record the experiences of my sea life that followed my twentieth birthday.

all i say of the south sea missionaries is said in good-fellowship. some of the best men are missionaries and sacrifice years of their life in a hopeless quest. so bear with the honesty of one who has fought side by side with the best and worst, and face to face with the grim realities of existence. for the present i hope someone will like what i have written in this, my book—one more ambitious plunge of a failure.

a. s.-m.