Louis Becke:Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories
- new book ISBN: 9780217460200
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustra… More...
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1904 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I chinkie''s Flat HINKIE''S FLAT, in its decadence, was gene rally spoken of, by the passing traveller, as a God-forsaken hole, and it certainly did present a repellent appearance when seen for the first time, gasping under the torrid rays of a North Queensland sun, which had dried up every green thing except the silver-leaved ironbarks, and the long, sinuous line of she-oaks which denoted the course of Connolly''s Creek on which it stood. The township was one of the usual Queensland mining type, a dozen or so of bark-roofed humpies, a public-house with the title of The Digger''s Rest, a blacksmith''s forge, and a quartz-crushing battery. The battery at Chinkie''s Flat stood apart from the township on a little rise overlooking the yellow sands of Connolly''s Creek, from whence it derived its water supply--when there happened to be any water in that part of the creek. The building which covered the antiquated five-stamper battery, boiler, engine, and tanks, was merely a huge roof of bark supported on untrimmed poets of brigalow and swamp gum, but rude as was the structure, the miners at Chinkie''s Flat, and other camps in the vicinity, had once been distinctly proud of their battery, which possessed the highsounding title of The Ever Victorious, and had achieved fame by having in the good times of the Flat yielded a certain Peter Finnerty two thousand ounces of gold from a hundred tons of alluvial. The then owner of the battery was an intelligent, but bibulous ex-marine engineer, who had served with Gordon in China, and when he erected the structure he formally christened it The Ever Victorious, in memory of Gordon''s army, which stamped out the Taeping rebellion. The first crushing put through was Finnerty''s, and when the clean-up was ov... Louis Becke, Books, Fiction and Literature, Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories Books>Fiction and Literature Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A MEMORY OF THE SOUTHERN SEAS TN other works by the present writer frequent allusion has been made, either by the author or by other persons, to Captain Hayes. Perhaps the continuous appearance of his name may have been irritating to many of my readers; if so I can only plead that it is almost impossible when writing of wild life in the Southern Seas to avoid mentioning him. Every one who sailed the Austral seas between the " fifties " and " seventies," and thousands who had not, knew of him and had heard tales of him. In some cases these tales were to his credit; mostly they were not. However, the writer makes no further apology for reproducing the following sketch of the great " Bully" which he contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette, and which, by the courtesy of the editor of that journal, he is able to include in this volume. In a most interesting, though all too brief, sketch of the life of the late Rev. James Chalmers, the famous New Guinea missionary, which appeared in the January number of a popular religious magazine, the author, the Rev. Richard Lovett, gives us a brief glance of thenotorious Captain " Bully " Hayes. Mr. Chalmers, in 1866, sailed for the South Seas with his wife in the missionary ship John Williams?the second vessel of that name, the present beautiful steamer being the fourth John Williams. The second John Williams had but a brief existence, for on her first voyage she was wrecked on Niue Island (the "Savage" Island of Captain Cook). Hayes happened to be there with his vessel, and agreed to convey the shipwrecked missionaries to Samoa. No doubt he charged them a pretty stiff price, for he always said that missionaries "were teaching Kanakas the degrading doctrine that even if a man killed his enemy and cut out and ate his heart in public, and o...<
