Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor

Tom Castro is what I call him, for this was the name he was known by, around 1850, in the streets and houses of Talcahuano, Santiago, and Valparaiso, and it is only fitting now that he comes back to these shores even if only as a ghost and as mere light reading that he go by this name again. The registry of births in Wapping lists him as Arthur Orton, and enters the name under the date 7 June 1834. It is known that he was a butcher's son, that his childhood suffered the drabness and squalor of London slums, and that he felt the call of the sea. This last fact is not uncommon. Running away to sea is, for the English, the traditional break from parental authority the road to adventure; Geography fosters it, and so does the Bible (Psalms, 107): ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.'

Orton ran away from his familiar, dirty, brick-red streets, went down to the sea in a ship, gazed at the Southern Cross with the usual disappointment, and deserted in the Chilean port of Valparaiso. As an individual, he was at once quiet and dull. Logically, he might (and should) have starved to death, but his dim-witted good humour, his fixed smile, and his unrelieved meekness brought him under the wing of a family called Castro, whose name he came to adopt. Of this South American episode no other traces are left, but his gratefulness does not seem to have flagged, since, in 1861, he reappears in Australia still using that name Tom Castro. There, in Sydney, he made the acquaintance of a certain Ebenezer Bogle, a Negro servant. Bogle, without being especially handsome, had about him that air of authority and assurance, that architectural solidity typical of certain Negroes well along in years, in flesh, and in dignity. He had another quality, which most anthropology textbooks have denied his race a capacity for sudden inspiration. In due time, we shall see proof of this. He was a well-mannered, upright person, whose primeval African lusts had been carefully channelled by the uses and misuses of Calvinism. Apart from receiving divine visitations (which will presently be described), Bogle was no different from other men, with nothing more distinctive about him than a longstanding, shamefaced fear that made him linger at street crossings glancing east, west, south, and north in utter dread of the vehicle that might one day take his life.