Author's note: Mary Watson, suspecting attack from mainland Aborigines who had landed on Lizard Island in 1881, took to the sea, along with her four month old baby, Ferrier, and a wounded Chinese workman. They floated in the cut-down water tank her absent husband had used for boiling sea-slugs at his beche-de-mere station. After several days, with no luck finding water after beaching at two islands, all three died of thirst.

An epic poem in four numbered parts