A Modern Buccaneer

A Modern Buccaneer is a Fiction Short Story Book. The book tells that Born near Sydney harbour, nursery of the seamen of the South, I could swim almost as soon as I could walk, and sail a boat at an age when most children are forbidden to go near the water. We came of a salt water stock. My father had been a sea captain for the greater part of his life, after a youth spent in every kind of craft, from a cutter to a man of war. No part of the habitable globe was unfamiliar to him: from India to the Pole, from Russia to the Brazils, from the China Sea to the Bight of Benin every harbour was a home. He had nursed one crew frost bitten in Archangel, when the blankets had to be cut up for mittens; had watched by the beds of another, decimated by yellow fever in Jamaica; had marked up the "death's head and cross bones" in the margin of the log book, to denote the loss by tetanus of the wounded by poisoned arrows on Bougainville Island; and had fought hand to hand with the stubborn Maories of Taranaki. Wounds and death, privation and pestilence, wrecks and tempests were with him household words, close comrades. What were they but symbols, nature pictures, the cards dealt by fate? You lost the stake or rose a winner. Men who had played the game of life all round knew this. He accepted fortune, fair or foul, as he did the weather a favour or a force of nature to be enjoyed or defied. But to be commented upon, much less complained of? Hardly. And as fate had willed it, the worn though unwearied sea king had seen fit to heave anchor, so to speak, and moor his vessels for he owned more than one in this the fairest haven of the southern main. Once before in youth had he seen and never forgotten the frowning headlands, beyond which lay so peerless a harbour, such wealth of anchorage, so mild a clime, so boundless an extent of virgin soil; from which he, "a picked man of countries", even then prophesied wealth, population, and empire in the future.