September 15th, the Warrimoo approaches Sydney harbor. Twain relates the story of the ship, the Dunbar (Twain refers to the ship as the Duncan Dunbar which was actually a different ship), breaking up on the rocks at the harbor entrance in 1857. Twain writes of the beauty of Sydney but Australia's interior brings to mind Nevada's dust storms, the Zephyrs.
Twain become acquainted with an English naturalist who lives in New Zealand and learns of the natural history of Australasia, particularly the platypus, Ornithorhyncus.
William T. Wawn, Master Mariner and captain of the schooner Stanley, was a capitalist and capitalism treats everything as a commodity including people. The dedication in his book, The South Seas Islanders and the Queensland Labour Trade provides an excellent illustration of just what his biases are:
I've been reading, and mapping locations from a book about the Queensland/Kanaka trade, written by the captain of one of the ships used to "recruit" Kanakas to work the sugar cane fields of Queensland, Australia, _The South Sea islanders and the Queensland labour trade_ by William T. Wawn.
Wednesday, September 11, 1895. Made port at Suva, the capital of the Fiji Islands.. After dinner I found in the billiard-room a resident whom I had known somewhere else in the world, and presently made some new friends and drove with them out into the country to visit his Excellency the head of the State. Fiji's last king ceded the islands to Britain, 10 October 1874, in order to prevent an American occupation.
Twain writes about the "recruiting" of islanders as agricultural workers in Queensland, Australia. He references Captain Wawn's book The South Sea Islanders and the Queensland Labour Trade: A Record of Voyages and Experiences in the Western Pacific, from 1875 to 1891 but suggests reading it along a pamphlet written by the missionary William Gray.
Twain opines on Scottish pronunciation and invents a couplet he attributes to Robert Burns. The ship passes through the Horne or Futuna Islands, where many Islanders were "recruited" to work in Queensland. Twain finds William Wawn's book, (My video of a portion of the book)
This is a portion of The Morals Lectures. The lectures delivered during the Following the Equator tour. This is from a transcript published at http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/onstage/morals.html
At sea en route from Honolulu to Fiji: Lunar eclipse viewed on September 3; the ship crosses the equator near the International Date Line September 5 and the Date Line September 8. They skip September 9 and go on immediately to September 10. This has both physical and spiritual repercussions. The passengers and ship's officers play Horse Billiards (Shuffleboard or Shovel Board). The ship's crew has fun at the passengers expense with deck washing and surface painting.
