The Wandering Master and the Warlord at Rest ( )

Log entry, the catch Scarlet Queen Philip Conny master. Position four degrees five minutes south, 150 degrees 26 minutes east. Wind fresh sky fair. Remarks departed Rabel New Britain island that dawned with one crewman in sixth bay due to trouble on ship.

Reason for trouble? The wandering master and the warlord at rest. The burnished hot morning when we slipped through St. George's channel, Blanche Bay. It had been a long leg and a slow one, down into Simpson Harbor from French Indochina.

But now things speed it up. In a day we had our cargo unloaded into the China traitors warehouses, and on the next day another cargo was swinging aboard, bound for a plantation on Hull Island in the Phoenix Grove.

At no net day, Gallagher and I leaned on the rail, watching the whole town of Robell gather at our pier. to welcome the tubby little steamer up from Canberra by way of Fort Morsers. The crowd didn't mean that anyone of importance was arriving.

The ship itself, the link with the outside world, was enough to bring out the natives with their green, blue, even yellow dyed hair. The oriental from Rabaul's Chinatown. The portly German planters. Enough even to bring Rabaul's never small crowd of ne'er-dewell stumbling out of the bars and into the hot sunlight.

The excitement was contagious. Red and I moved forward to watch the steam a warper rusty stern into the dock, squeezing in just off our bowsprit, shaking the queen in her backwash, drawing the crowd to a point as their gangway went out and her passengers started to listen by. That old hunk of barnacle and rust really