the cabin boy stood shivering on deck.  He, too, had thrown away his clothes, all but the wrist-bands of his shirt, which in his flurry he could not unbutton.  He could not make up his mind to jump overboard.  He heard the men in the water shouting to one another, “Make for the light.”  That course led them away from the nearest land, which they could not see.  At length a great sea swept the boy among the breakers, but his good angel pushed a piece of timber within reach, and he held on to it until he could feel the ground with his feet; he then let the timber go, and scrambled out of reach of the angry surge; but when he came to the dry sand he fainted and fell down.  When he recovered his senses he began to look for shelter; there was a signal station not far off, but he could not see it.  He went away from the pitiless sea through an opening between low conical hills, covered with dark scrub, over a pathway composed of drift sand and broken shells.  He found an old hut without a door.  There was no one in it; he went inside, and lay down shivering.

At daybreak a boy, the son of Ratcliff, the signal man, started out to look for his goats, and as they sometimes passed the night in the old fowlhouse, he looked in for them.  But instead of the goats, he saw the naked cabin boy.  “Who are you?” he said, “and what are you doing here, and where did you come from?”

“I have been shipwrecked,” replied the cabin boy; and then he sat up and began to cry.

Young Ratcliff ran off to tell his father what he had found; and the boy was brought to the cottage, put to bed, and supplied with food and drink.  The signal for a wreck was hoisted at the flagstaff, but when the signallman went to look for a wreck he could not find one.  He searched along the shore and found the dead body of the captain, and a piece of splintered spar seven or eight feet long, on which the cabin boy had come ashore.  The ‘Ecliptic’, with her cargo and crew, had completely disappeared, while the signalman, near at hand, slept peacefully, undisturbed by her crashing timbers, or the shouts of the drowning seamen.  Ratcliff was not a seer, and had no mystical lore.  He was a runaway sailor, who had, in the forties, travelled daily over the Egerton run, unconscious of the tons of gold beneath his feet.

There was a fair wind and a smooth sea when the ‘Clonmel’ went ashore at three o’clock in the morning of the second day of January, 1841.  Eighteen hours before she had taken a fresh departure from Ram’s Head to Wilson’s Promontory.  The anchors were let go, she swung to wind, and at the fall of the tide she bedded herself securely in the sand, her hull, machinery, and cargo uninjured.  The seventy-five passengers and crew were safely landed; sails, lumber, and provisions were taken ashore in the whaleboats and quarter-boats; tents were erected; the food supplies were stowed away under a capsized boat, and a guard set over them by Captain Tollervey.