he thought I should be able to rough it in the bush.
In another point of view my father considered me just the kind of person to become a colonist. I was well grounded in religion and much attached to the Church, of which he himself was a devoted member and priest. I was a sworn admirer of the institutions of my country, and there was no fear but that I would heartily co-operate with those colonists who were endeavouring to reproduce, in their adopted country, the manners, customs and forms of government of the country of their birth.
My father sincerely believed, and I shared his belief, that it should be the endeavour of all English colonists to dot the world over with little facsimiles of England, as far as the circumstances of the case would permit. But since they could not carry their beloved Sovereign along with them, yet they could show their loyalty to the throne by their devotion to its representative abroad; and they would resist, with all their might, the efforts of demagogues and free-thinkers to introduce new-fangled forms of government, under pretence of securing the greatest liberty and happiness to the greatest number. Under the careful tuition of my revered parent, I came to hate a radical almost as heartily as I abhorred an infidel.
A cousin of my own, by my mother's side, had been some years successfully settled in Australia, and he was anxious that I should join him, as his farming operations were on so large a scale that he required an energetic and well-principled young man to share his labours and his profits. This was an opening my father highly approved of and which I was eager to embrace.
It was necessary, however, that I should spend a couple of years in England, in order to learn practically the business of farming. An extensive farmer in a neighbouring county, an old schoolfellow of my father, consented to take me as a pupil and teach me his business, for a very moderate premium.
When I had completed my two years' agricultural education, my outfit was provided, and my passage taken in a sailing vessel, belonging to a firm of shipowners, one of the partners in which was an old friend of my father. Brisbane, in Queensland, was the port to which the ship was bound, that being the nearest accessible point to the scene of my future operations.
My father, mother, and brother came up with me to London to see me off, and we had a melancholy parting at Gravesend. My mother wept long and bitterly at this separation from her first-born, and, I believe, her favourite child. My brother, also, was much affected, and a pang shot through my breast on giving him a fond embrace at the thought that he was still to remain in the land I so dearly loved, and to form one of the ministers of that Church which I believed to be the purest and most scriptural of Christian communities, whilst I was doomed to exile from home and country, in order to labour hard among the unpeopled wilds of a colony situated at the other side of the globe, utterly removed from those congenial influences of an old civilisation that surrounded me in England.
My father, though outwardly calm, was, I felt assured, only able to repress his emotion by a great effort. When the ship began to weigh anchor, and it was necessary for all visitors to go ashore, he strained me to his breast, and said:—
"Farewell, my son, I know I can trust you to act up to those high principles I have always set before you. Religion and loyalty are the best foundation for a successful career in any condition, and I know my boy has both."
With these words, and with many a tender pressure of my hand, he quitted me, having first given me a volume on which he had been engaged for some time back, and the first copy of which he had that morning received from his publisher. It was entitled "Constitutional Sermons," and contained a collection of his own discourses, in which he endeavoured to show, with complete success I believe, the perfect agreement of the British Constitution with the doctrines of Christianity.
I watched the boat that conveyed my loved relations to shore with eyes dimmed with tears, and a heart almost bursting with emotion. However, the passage down the river soon gave me something else to occupy my thoughts, and I gradually became highly interested in the novelties surrounding me.
Our ship was a perfectly new vessel, built according to the design of a very ingenious gentleman, who, though not a professional shipbuilder, had, by his very original writings and researches, inspired a belief in many quarters that the ordinary modes of constructing ships were all wrong, that the system of shipbuilding he advocated was the only one based on sound principles, and that ships constructed on his plan would excel vessels of the ordinary build both in speed and in safety. The owners of the line of Australian packets my father knew, struck with the originality and plausibility of the new system, had entrusted the inventor with the building of a ship on his plan, and the vessel I was now in, appropriately named the Precursor, was the result, and this was her first voyage.
Before we started, she was an object of much curiosity, and though certain old and experienced shipbuilders shook their heads, they did not venture to speak out their objections amid the general clamour of applause that proceeded from the self-constituted critics who understood all about shipbuilding by intuition and without the drudgery of learning. The passengers shared the enthusiasm of the inventor, and were confident we should make the swiftest and pleasantest voyage on record. I was surprised to find that the passengers were so few in number, considering the general chorus of admiration the construction of the vessel had elicited. While some vessels of the old construction, which started about the same time as ourselves for the same destination, were crammed full, we had ample room for three times as many as we had on board.
I noticed, also, that the crew consisted chiefly of young and inexperienced-looking hands, mingled with some old sailors of dissipated and disreputable appearance, who did not inspire me with much confidence in their nautical knowledge, their moral character or their physical powers.
I was informed by one of my fellow-passengers that the underwriters at Lloyd's had insisted on an unusually heavy premium of insurance, but he ascribed this to the intrigues of the shipbuilders, who set afloat reports derogatory to the safety of the vessel. In fact, he said, a great deal of prejudice had been excited against her by the underhand proceedings of those interested in her failure, whereby passengers and crew had been deterred from taking passage in her. Had it not been for the noble and generous way in which the editors of influential papers had taken up the new principle of shipbuilding, of the merits of which, in their editorial omniscience, they were fully qualified to judge, it is doubtful whether the inventor would ever have had an opportunity of constructing a ship on his principles in this country. In that case, he would, no doubt, have taken his invention to some other country, and the supremacy of the sea would have passed out of the hands of England, perhaps for ever. At least so thought my informant, who was an enthusiast for the new system of shipbuilding, but who, I regret to say, accompanied us no farther than Plymouth, off which port he quitted us in a pilot-smack.
Our captain was a young man, a relative of the inventor, and an implicit believer in the new principle, which he felt convinced was to revolutionise the whole shipbuilding trade, and render voyages by sailing vessels matters of as much certainty as by steamers.
Any doubts that the lack of passengers, the scratch appearance of the crew, the high rate of insurance, and the youth of the captain, might have inspired, were rapidly dispelled when our ship bore away down the Channel with a favourable wind, under a full spread of snowy canvas.
I soon got over the strangeness of shipboard, and in a few days felt as much at home on the sea as though I had been a sailor all my life. We were favoured with the finest weather imaginable all the way to Cape Horn, which we doubled in gallant style, and then bore up in an almost northerly course, running parallel to the west coast of South America, at about one hundred miles distant from land.
Our captain, whose aim it was to make a voyage of unexampled rapidity to Queensland, thought that if he crossed to the north of the line and got into the region of the prevalent north-east trade-winds, which are so much stronger and more certain than the south-eastern trades, he might
