scope for cattle. Led by a castaway Frenchman, who had lived among them for years, the blacks were troublesome. In those days, that meant shooting. The blacks of the tip of the Peninsula were practically wiped out by Frank Jardine. My boy Willie, and an old man named Billy, are the only survivors of the tribe. One day, when I was getting abo plant names from Willie, I asked about his people. "Old Jardine bin shootem, long wildench time,"n," was all he said. According to Holland, it is stated in Debrett's that Frank, scion of the baronets of Lockerbie, Scotland, married Sana, a Samoan princess. The royal blood is somewhat in doubt; even the marriage. Frank stole Sana. Carried her off from a mission in the Torres Strait, where, a girl of 16 or 17, she had come with others of her people to teach the ep gospel to the islanders. With his fleet of luggers, based at Somerset, Frank probably did well at pearling. But his big strike was gold. Gold from a Spanish galeon he found on an outlying reef. So the story goes. Every child in Australia knows of that romantic treasure trove. Many a reef and coast has been searched for similar treasure. But when it is mentioned go to old hands of the Strait, they recall the wreck of the "Quetta" not far from Somerset about 1890. The Quetta carried gold bullion. Frank had good divers. Until his last days Frank was a terror to the blacks. (He always had several families as retainers at Somerset). When a feeble old man, capable of walking only with the help of a long staff, he would call up a black who displeased him, stand him to attention, and strike him down with his stick. Jardine died a leper in 1919, after fighting off death until the return of his favorite son from World War I. Cholmondeley ("Chum") had been home only a few weeks when the old man passed on. He was buried behind the beach of the sheltered cove in which his luggers used to anchor, below the old house. We saw his grave, over caved in, and Sana's beside it, hidden from the beach by bushes and long grass. Son Bertie, the ne'er-do-well, had enclosed them in a fence of heavy anchor chains set in concrete pillars. The chains must have been very old and deeply ationed when they were put there. Bertie's concrete was a mere shell moulded over wooden frames. In the top of each pillar he had let in the broken-off neck of a bottle, as if to let in rain to rot the wood. The wood had rotted, and several of the pillars had collapsed. Most sordid, and curiously native, was the tombstone Bertie made. An oddly heathen- ish thing in its oriental intricacy of design, and childish in its mini- lature proportions. A slender-towered or minaretted idea in concrete, not three feet high, vaguely like the Taj Mahal or something Hindu or Burmese. While George and Van swatted bats - 39 of them - I collected speci- mens from a wongai treearmed by Sana, then prowled around making photos while Willie gathered drinking nuts from a coconut plantation behind the house. Driving west along the old Lockerbie road, we stopped to boil the nilly at rain forest fringed Polo Creek, about a mile west of Somerset. Heavy showers began as we ate lunch, and continued for the rest of the ey day. Gave up thoughts of visiting Paira, a type locality of interest to George, and returned to camp via Lake Boronto and Lake Wincheura.