Well, I could see no reason why Captain Cook, if he made up his mind
to repair his ship inland, couldn't have dredged out a channel to the
place where the monument now stood, if he had a dredging-machine with
him, and afterward fill it up again; for Captain Cook could do 'most
anything, and nobody ever said that he hadn't a dredger along. The
young lady seemed to lean to my way of thinking, and following up the
story of the historical voyage, asked if I had visited the point
farther down the harbor where the great circumnavigator was murdered.
This took my breath, but a bright school-boy coming along relieved my
embarrassment, for, like all boys, seeing that information was wanted,
he volunteered to supply it. Said he: "Captain Cook wasn't murdered
'ere at all, ma'am; 'e was killed in Hafrica: a lion et 'im."
Here I was reminded of distressful days gone by. I think it was in
1866 that the old steamship _Soushay_, from Batavia for Sydney, put in
at Cooktown for scurvy-grass, as I always thought, and "incidentally"
to land mails. On her sick-list was my fevered self; and so I didn't
see the place till I came back on the _Spray_ thirty-one years later.
And now I saw coming into port the physical wrecks of miners from New
Guinea, destitute and dying. Many had died on the way and had been
buried at sea. He would have been a hardened wretch who could look on
and not try to do something for them.
The sympathy of all went out to these sufferers, but the little town
was already straitened from a long run on its benevolence.
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