AustLit

Dedication: To my wife

Epigraph: 'Fancy', said Halbert, 'one of those old Dutch voyagers driving on this unknown coast on a dark night. What a sudden end to their voyage! Yet that must have happened to many ships which have never come home. Perhaps when they come to explore this coast a little more they may find some of the old ship's ribs jammed on a reef; the ribs of some ship whose name and memory has perished.'

'The very thing you mention is the case,' said the Doctor. 'Down the coast here, under a hopeless, black basaltic cliff, is to be seen the wreck of a very, very old ship, now covered with coral and seaweed. I waited down there for a spring tide, to examine her, but could determine nothing, save that she was very old; whether Dutch or Spanish I know not. You English should never sneer at those two nations; they were before you everywhere.'

Henry Kinglsey in The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn.

The Mahogany Ship, 1920, anticipated publication in book form of a serial on a similar theme by Donald McLean, who had used the same title. Maclean renamed his book as The Luck of the Gold Moidore. Vernon William's theme was suggested by a passage in Henry Kingsley's The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, 1859, in which Dr. Mulhouse referred to the remains of an old shipwreck on the Victorian coast. He wove a romantic story of the discovery of an old pirate ship, named The Good Shepherd, alleged to have been built of mahogany wood and lost in the seventies of the seventeenth century. It was uncovered amid the sand dunes of a wild, desolate spot called Point Hare, some seventy odd miles distant from Warragul, South Gippsland. The plot is built round the intrigues and conflicts of rival claimants for the ship's treasure. These disputants presumed to be descendants or connections of the original pirates; one of them was a Jesuit seeking the treasure for the service of his order. The opening chapters are the best of the book; in them are recorded the reminiscences of an Irish recluse, a man of entertainment and culture. The work has many interesting references to the technique of sea-faring, including the variations of compasses over the centuries. (E. Morris Miller Australian Literature From Its Beginnings to 1935 (1940): 747).