Explore "The Call of the South" by Louis Becke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Between the southern end of the great island of New Guinea and the Solomon Group there is a cluster of islands marked on the chart as "Woodlark Islands," but the native name is Mayu. Practically they were not discovered until 1836, when the master of the Sydney sandal-wooding barque _Woodlark_ made a survey of the group. The southern part of the cluster consists of a number of small well-wooded islands, all inhabited by a race of Papuans, who, said Captain Grimes of the _Woodlark_, had certainly never before seen a white man, although they had long years before seen ships in the far distance.
It was on these islands that I met with the most profitable bit of trading that ever befel me during more than a quarter of a century's experience in the South Seas.