Many years ago—­in 1878, to speak precisely—­a ship laden with fragrant cedar logs from the valley of the Daintree River—­140 miles to the north—­ touched on Kennedy Shoal, 20 miles to the south-east of Dunk Island.  Crippled though she was she managed to make Cardwell, where she was temporarily patched up, and whence she set sail for Melbourne.  It was the critical month of March, and the Merchant—­clumsy and cumbersome, but a good and safe ship given ample sea-room—­before sailing many miles on her course, was caught in the coils of a cyclone, the violence of which is well remembered by old residents on the coast to this day, and was lost with all hands.  She is supposed to have struck on a reef to the southward of the Palm Islands, as the bulk of her cargo was cast ashore in Ramsay Bay, Hinchinbrook Island.  Portions of the wreckage were found on the Brook Islands; her figurehead—­the spread eagle of the United States—­and a seaman’s chest were picked up on the beach here.  Her windlass, with a child’s pinafore entangled with it—­for the skipper had taken his wife and two children to bear him company—­drifted on the South Franklands, 40 miles to the north, and a large portion of the shattered hulk on a reef eastward of Fitzroy Island, 25 miles still farther up the coast.  Fate did her worst for the poor Merchant, and not yet content, relentlessly pursued two (if not more) of the vessels which sought to recover her cedar, strewn on the treacherous sands of Ramsay Bay.  Some of the logs, however, drifted to our quiet coves, and portions remain sound to this day.  One more promising and accessible we beachcombed.  It provided planks for a punt, besides various articles of furniture, and gave me some most practical homilies on contentment.  Having found and duly salvaged that log, it was necessary to cut it up; and then I began to be thankful that pit-sawing was not forced upon me as a profession in the days of inexperienced youth.  Pit-sawing is deceptive.  It has the appearance of being easy, though not genteel, when others are the toilers, and in the red dust, torn by the polished steel teeth from out the heart of the dull log, do you not “inhale the balmy smells of nard and cassia which the musky wings of the zephyrs scatter through the cedared groves of the Hesperides?” Is not that fragrance sufficient compensation for your toil, with the clean red planks profit over and above legitimate earnings?  Yet that long saw tugs at our very heart-strings, and you know that to get a real, not merely sentimental, liking for the craft of the sawyer, you must take to it very young, before the possibilities of other occupations and pastimes have distorted your genius.  This worthy lesson comes from the gentle art of Beachcombing.