The weather was still boisterous, but it was essential to take the body to Bowen, to render unto the authorities there conclusive evidence that death had been the result of natural causes.  My visitor’s nerves were then virile.  But the time of stress and strain was at hand.  He found himself alone on a remote Island.  A grim responsibility forced upon him.  Awful as the duty was, it had to be courageously faced, and performed as tenderly as might be.  Instead of the enjoyment of comfort and rest, and days of busy companionship and revivifying hopes, there was the shock that sudden death inflicts, dramatic loneliness, dry-eyed grief, forced exertion, and the abandonment of brightening prospects.

With pain and infinite labour he succeeded in dragging and rolling the corpse to the beach.  Thence he pushed it up a plank on to the deck of the cutter, and leaving his possessions to chance and fate, he, the wearied and bereaved one-armed man, set sail in violent weather across the open sea to the nearest port.  At midnight the “great cry” of a hurricane arose.  Lightning flashed over the stricken yeasty sea.  A lonesome and grim quest this—­full of peril.  Did not Nature in the trumpet tones of a furious and vengeful spirit decree the destruction of the little boat as she bounced and floundered among the crests of those awful waves?  Here was booty belonging to the ocean—­prey escaping from the talons of the fiercest and most remorseless of harpies.  So they shrieked and swarmed about the boat, howling for what was theirs.  The strife was great, but not too great for the lonely man’s seamanship.  All the fiends of the sea might do their worst, but until the actual finale came, he would sail the boat—­lifting her on the swell, eluding the white hissing bulk of the following sea.

When at last the boat ran into port, the sea had gained a moral victory, but the man gave to the authorities the mortal remains of his mate to be buried decently on land.

He told me that he felt cowed—­he could never face the sea again.  Once before he had given up “sailorising,” not then on account of his nerves, but because ambition to possess a sweet-potato patch, pumpkins and a few bananas, melons, mangoes, had got hold of him.  He had taken up a piece of land, but having no money his flimsy fencing was no barrier to the wallabies, and he abandoned the enterprise to them.  Now he had abandoned his beche-de-mer project, had bought wire netting to keep out the wallabies, and would make a second effort to settle down.  A little net fishing would help to keep him going.  “As for the sea,” said he, “I have had enough—­too much.  It is all right while your pluck lasts, but once get a shake, and you had better give it up.  And the little boat!—­I broke that rail as I was getting poor Andrew’s body on board.  She is all right, but for that—­and she’s for sale!”

In an hour, having concocted some stew and baked his damper, the single-handed nerve-shaken, old sailor set sail, and I knew him no more.