AustLit

A lost race adventure novel in which Captain Fisk searches for, and eventually discovers the island of Isk, the South Pacific home of the Awazils - a race of people descended from the ancient Greeks and who continue their traditions and culture. A review published in the Western Mail (Perth) in 1896 further records:

The Captain Flick of Mr Fergus Hume's romance is a modern edition of the adventurous, free-booting sea dog for which the Western counties of England were so famous in years gone by. The object of the expedition upon which he sets out, in a well-equipped and well found vessel from Plymouth, is as he naively puts it, to restore the civilization the statue of Aphrodite, carved by Praxiteles for the Temple of Cythera. It is hardly necessary to say, however, that the motive impelling him to this strange quest is not as pure and ardent desire to discharge a signal service to art, but the essentially sordid ambition to obtain possession of the statue in order that he may dispose of it for a huge sum of money. He and his companions experience some strange and thrilling adventures in their search for and on the island of Isk, located by the author off the coast of Australia, in the Indian Ocean. Whatever his defects, Mr Fergus Hume has no lack of imagination; and in The Expedition of Captain Flick, many are likely to find entertainment in turning to its pages for recreation (10 April 1896, p.5).