In Bad Company and other stories

From boyhood the proprietor of studs more or less extensive, I was quick to discern excellence in other people's favourites. My mind was stored, my imagination fired, besides, with tales of equestrian feats, performed chiefly by Arab chiefs and other heroes of old-world romance. In a chronic state of expectancy, I was always ready to do honour to the legendary steed, so rarely encountered, alas! save in the bounteous realm of fiction.

When, therefore, I did fall across 'the courser of the poets,' or his simulacrum, I was prepared to secure him at a fancy price; holding that if I could recoup the outlay by selling a pair of average horses of my own breeding, the luxury of possessing a paragon would be cheaply purchased.

And would it not be? Albeit there are multitudes of people to whom one horse, save the mark, is much like another. For them, the highest joy, the transcendent sensation of being carried by 'the sweetest hack in the world,' exists not. But to him who recognises and appreciates the speed, the spirit, the smoothness, and the safety of the 'wonderful' hackney, there are few outdoor pleasures possessing similar flavour.

It is more than half a century, sad to relate, since I first took bridle in hand. During that time I have ridden races on 'the flat,' over 'the sticks,' and have backed for the first time a score or more of wholly-untried colts. I have tested hundreds of saddle-horses, over every variety of road, at all sorts of distances, in all ranges of climate, and after this extended experience I unhesitatingly pronounce Dermot, son of Cornborough, to be in nearly all respects the finest example of the blood hackney which I ever mounted. The 'sweetest,' etc., he certainly was. Almost too good for this wicked world.

The birth of this unrivalled steed was mainly due to one of the magnates of the earlier Victorian era, himself an example of the strangeness of that destiny which shapes our ends in life. A member of a family of financial aristocrats, domiciled in London and Paris, with which capitals our friend was equally familiar, Mr. Adolphus Goldsmith scarcely dreamed in youth of 'colonial experience.'

But something went wrong with the finance arrangements of his near relatives. A crisis culminated, and the necessity arose for Goldsmith (fils) applying himself to the stern realities of life. He had previously performed the strictly ornamental duties of a young man about town. But with a cool perception of the situation, characteristic of the man, and a steadfast determination to conquer adverse fate, the whilom élégant of the Bois de Boulogne and the Row looked over the map of the world, picked his colony, giving the pas to Victoria, the then fashionable El Dorado for younger sons and vauriens, converted the remnant of his fortune into letters of credit, and sailed for Port Phillip.

As an Englishman by birth and rearing as well as adoption, Mr. Goldsmith had sported park hacks and ridden to hounds in his day. He possessed the Englishman's love for horses. Visions, therefore, arose of improving the breed in the new country which he was about to patronise, and incidentally devoting himself to agricultural pursuits.

Distrusting, however, his suitability for the necessary purchases and arrangements, he sensibly cast about for a coadjutor, fully instructed in bucolic lore, to whom he might confide details.

He was successful beyond expectation, inasmuch as he induced Mr. Hatsell Garrard, a gentleman farmer from the midland counties (whose love of all genuine sport had, combined with a run of bad seasons, probably rendered rent-paying temporarily arduous), to accompany him as General Manager to Australia. And whoso recalls his fresh-coloured countenance, his pleasant smile, his shrewd blue eye, his neat rig and bridle-hand, reproduces out of memory's storehouse the ideal yeoman from 'Merrie England.'

Mr. Garrard promptly demonstrated a knowledge of his business by purchasing Cornborough, son of Tramp, a grandson of the immortal Whalebone. For this sole achievement he deserves a statue, and in that Pantheon which future Victorians may rear for the founders of their prosperity and glory, the square-built, genuinely English figure of Mr. Garrard should find a place. What a responsibility was cast upon him when you come to think of it! How easily might he have chosen an equally blue-blooded, but leggy, rickety, pernicious weed, such as has so often been foisted upon unwary breeders.

Instead of which, he enriched us with the noble, whole-coloured, brown horse, choke-full of the best blood in England, of medium height, but perfect in symmetry, soundness, faultless in wind and limb, temper and courage, fated to be the long-remembered sire of racers, hacks, and harness horses of the highest class – to be honoured in life, regretted, ay, sincerely mourned, in death. For on his unexpected demise, his disconsolate owner was discovered in such a state of prostration and grief that every one thought his wife must be dead, or, at any rate, some relative near and dear.

Truly, the squatter of the 'forties' was from one reason or another a man sui generis, with whom the present pastoral era furnishes few parallels. Mr. Goldsmith, in addition to other accomplishments (did he not challenge Charles Macknight to a bout at single-stick, duly fought out within the precincts of the Melbourne Club?) was a musical connoisseur and no mean performer. When the comfortable cottage at Trawalla was completed, albeit stone-paved and bark-roofed, the drawing-room contained a handsome piano, to which, after dinner, the proprietor mostly betook himself. There, in operatic reminiscences and compositions of impromptu merit, he was wont to wander from the realms of reality to a dreamworld of sweet sounds and brighter souvenirs. How one envied him the delicious distraction!

So the Trawalla estate had birth and beginning. It was a first-class 'run' in those simpler times; well watered, with picturesque alternations of hill and dale, plain and forest. The 'shepherded' sheep had unfailing pasture and ample range. There were no fences in those days, excepting around the horse-paddock.

Temptations to over-stocking were fewer, and chiefly – in default of boundary – took the form of an invasion of some neighbour's territory, a trespass which his shepherds were prompt to resent. Thus, the natural grasses were but moderately fed down, and, with the autumn rains unfailing in that district, assumed a richly verdurous garb, scarcely so frequent in the wire-fenced decades. I do not recall the name of the deserving but less fortunate pioneer, the first or second occupant of this desirable holding, from whom Mr. Goldsmith purchased the 'right-of-run,' with probably a mere handful of stock. With cash in hand, he was doubtless enabled to make an advantageous purchase, and thus enter upon his predecessor's labours; once more, as it turned out, to place his foot on fortune's ladder.

Far from London and Paris, Ascot and Goodwood, as he found himself, the erstwhile man about town was not wholly debarred from congenial society. William Gottreaux, another musical enthusiast, was at Lilaree; Hastings Cunningham at Mount Emu; Donald and Hamilton, Philip Russell, and other gentleman pioneers within an easy ride. He became a member of the Melbourne Club, then in Collins Street, upon the site of the Bank of Victoria. The late Sir Redmond Barry was his early and intimate friend. (I took charge of a small package of tobacco, on my homeward voyage, from the Judge, as it seems that particular brand was not procurable in Paris.) When things were settled at Trawalla and the stock manifestly improving, with Cornborough in a snug loose-box, and the sheep increasing fast, the owner of Trawalla found a reasonable amount of recreation, as comprised in frequent sojourns at the Melbourne Club, and the enjoyment of the metropolitan society of the day, quite compatible with the effective supervision of the station.

Thus, on the advancing tide of Victorian prosperity, then steadily sweeping onward, unknown to us all, Trawalla and its owner were floated on to fortune – a gently gliding, agreeable, and satisfactory process. The sheep multiplied, the fleece acquired name and repute – one couldn't grow bad wool in that country, however hard you might try. Cornborough became a peer of the Godolphin Arabian in all men's eyes, and the A.G. brand, on beeve-or horse-hide, an accredited symbol of excellence. A purchase of waste land at St. Kilda, made solely, as he informed me, in order to qualify as a legislator, turned out a most profitable investment.

Swiftly the golden period arrived when, after the first years of doubt and uncertainty, it became apparent to holders of station property that nothing prevented them from clearing out at a highly satisfactory price, and leaving the conflicting elements of dear labour, high prices, and a heterogeneous population, to settle themselves as best they might. Mr. Goldsmith, now free to return to Europe, seriously considered the claims of the Rue de Bellechasse, Faubourg St. Germain, as contrasted with Collins Street and the Melbourne Club.

It may be that the owner of Trawalla would have decided upon continuous occupation, with a view to founding an estate, if his sons, who visited Victoria in 1851, had exhibited any aptitude for the life of Australian country gentlemen. But Messrs. Edward and Alfred Goldsmith, who had been educated chiefly in Paris, when they visited their father in 1851, did not take kindly to his adopted country. Cultured, polished young men, yet decidedly more French than English, Parisians to their finger-nails in all their tastes and habitudes, they grieved and irritated their Australianised parent.

Chiefly they lacked the adventurous spirit which would have enabled them to behold, mentally, the grand possibilities of a colonial possession. All their sympathies were with their lost Eden, the Paris which they had quitted. In Victoria they beheld nothing but the distasteful privations of a new country, hardly redeemed from primeval sauvagerie. The roads were rough, the beds hard, the cookery – 'Ah, mon Dieu! – lamentable, indescribable.'

It was a good time to sell, and though the Trawalla estate of to-day represents a considerably larger sum than Mr. Simson gave for the run and stock, perhaps our old friend was not so far out when he decided to let well alone and retire upon a fair competency.

To that end the stud was sentenced to sale and dispersion; many a descendant of the lamented Cornborough went to enrich the paddocks of friends and well-wishers. I think Mr. Hastings Cunningham bought the greater number of the brood mares and young stock, at an average rate per head.

Now, Dermot was the old gentleman's hack. (Was he old, or, perhaps, only about forty-five? We were decided then as to the time of life when decay of all the faculties was presumed to set in.) I many a time and oft admired the swell, dark bay, striding along the South Yarra tracks with aristocratic elegance, or, more becomingly arrayed, carrying a lady in the front of a joyous riding-party. His owner was un galant uomo, and the gentle yet spirited steed was always at the service of his lady friends.

So when, one day at the club, he suggested to me to buy Dermot – more than one lady's horse being required in our family at that time, and only fifty pounds named as the price – I promptly closed.

Dead and buried is he years agone; but I still recall, with memory's aid, the dark bay horse, blood-like, symmetrical, beauteous in form as aristocratic in bearing. 'Hasn't he the terrifyin' head on him?' queried an Irish sympathiser, somewhat incongruously, as he gazed with rapt air and admiring eyes at the tapering muzzle, large, soft eyes, and Arab frontal.

Delicate, deer-like, strictly Eastern was the head referred to, beautifully set on a perfectly-arched neck, which again joined oblique, truly perfect shoulders. Their mechanism must have been such, inasmuch as never did I know any living horse with such liberty of forehand action.

Walking or cantering down an incline, shut but your eyes, and you were unable to tell by bodily sensation whether you were on level ground or otherwise. He 'pulled up' in a way different from any other horse. Apparently, he put out his legs, and, lo! you were again at a walk. No prop, shake, or jar was perceptible. It was a magical transformation. An invalid recovering from a fever could have ridden him a day's journey. No one could fall off him in fact.

He who had no peer was born

amid the green forest parks of Trawalla, at no great distance from Buninyong, or the historic goldfield of Ballarat.

His sire, Cornborough, than whom no better horse ever left England, was a brown horse, like The Premier and Rory O'More; like them, middle-sized, symmetrical rather than powerful. Among the early cracks that owed their speed and courage to him were Cornet, Bessie Bedlam, Beeswing, Ballarat, The Margravine (dam of Lord Clyde), with many others, now half forgotten. Cornet was, I think, the first of his progeny trained. He ran away with most of the two-year-old stakes of the day, to be ever after known as a fast horse and a good stayer. I remember his beating Macknight's St. George at Port Fairy, in a match for £100, and winning various other stakes and prizes. His half-sister, Mr. Austin's Bessie Bedlam, was one of the most beautiful race-horses ever saddled. I well remember her running in old days, and can see her now, stepping along daintily with her head up, like an antelope. She won many a race, and was successful as a stud matron after turf triumphs were over. Beeswing was also good, but not equal to her. Ballarat was a great raking, handsome chestnut mare, bred by Dick Scott, a stock-rider of Mr. Goldsmith's. She must have had a good turn of speed, inasmuch as she won the All-aged Stakes in Melbourne, as a three-year old. The Cornboroughs, like the Premiers, were remarkable for their temperate dispositions. They had abundance of courage, but no tendency to vice of any kind.

On his dam's side Dermot boasted Peter Fin (Imp) as grandsire, and other good running blood. His pedigree was incomplete, thus leaving him open to a suspicion of being not quite thoroughbred. But the stain – the 'blot on the scutcheon,' if such there was – showed neither by outward sign nor inward quality.

Then, as to paces. He walked magnificently, holding up his head in a lofty and dignified manner; his mouth of the lightest – velvet to any touch of bit – but withal firm. He had always been ridden with a double bridle, and showed no provincial distaste to bit and bridoon. If required to quicken his pace from a fast but true walk, he could adopt a rapid amble, so causing any ordinary stepper to trot briskly. And then his canter – how shall I describe it? Springy, long-striding, yet floating, improving his speed at will to a hand-gallop if you merely shook the reins, and as readily, smoothly subsiding at the lightest sustained pull.

With such a horse under you it seemed as if one could go on for ever. Mile after mile fled away, and still there was no abatement in the wonderful living mechanism of which the spring and elasticity seemed exhaustless. The sensation was so exquisite that you dreaded to terminate it. When at length you drew rein, it was, so to speak, with the tears in your eyes.

Then the safety of this miraculous performance. You were on a horse that never was known to shy or bolt, and that could not fall down. Nature had otherwise provided. With such a balance of forehand, he may have at rare intervals struck his hoof against root or stone, clod or other obstacle, but trip, blunder, fall – these were words and deeds wholly outside of his being. With legs of iron, and hoofs that matched them well, never once did I know Dermot to be lame during all the years of our acquaintance.

Fortunately for me, and for society generally, he was not quite fast enough for promotion to a racing stable. He was thus enabled to elude the turf dangers and so pass his life in a sphere where he was loved and respected as he deserved.

With regard to his stamina. I rode him a distance of seventy miles one day, being anxious to get home, during the last ten miles of which he waltzed along with precisely the same air and manner as in the morning – with thirteen stone up, too. In addition to other qualities, he was an uncommonly good feeder: would clear his rack conscientiously, and eat all the oats you would give him. I never knew him to be tired, or met any one that had heard of his being seen in that condition.

His graceful, high-bred air, his large, mild eye and intelligent expression, warranted one in crediting him with the perfect temper which indeed he possessed. So temperate was he, that the lady whose palfrey he habitually was (as such, beyond all earthly competition) was in the habit of sending him along occasionally at top speed in company, confident in her ability to stop him whenever she had the inclination.

He was utterly free from vice, either in the stable or out of it. But, if uniformly gentle, he was always gay and free – that most difficult combination to secure in a lady's horse. An angel enclosed in horse-hide, such was 'Dear Dermot.' The doctrine of metempsychosis alone can account for such a consensus of virtues – an equine prodigy, a wonder and a miracle. Generations may roll by before such another hackney treads Australian turf. We are not of the school which decries the horses, the men also, of the present day. There are, there must be now, as good horses, as gallant youths, as ever new or old lands produced. But Dermot – may he rest in peace! – was a very exceptional composition. And I must be pardoned for doubting whether, as a high-caste saddle-horse, I shall ever again see his equal.

THE STORY OF AN OLD LOG-BOOK

Notwithstanding our share in New Guinea and the debateable land of the New Hebrides, besides the proposed cession of Santa Cruz, the Sydney of 'the thirties' wore the look of being more in touch with the South Sea Islands and the Oceanic realm generally, than at present. The wharves were redolent of the wild life of The Islands and the mysterious land of the Maori. Weather-beaten sailing-vessels showed a sprinkling of swarthy recruits, whose dark faces, half strange, half fierce, were mingled with those of their British crews. Hull and rigging bore silent testimony to the wrath of wind and wave. There were whale-ships returning in twelve months with a full cargo of sperm oil, or half empty after a three years' cruise, as the adventure turned out.

Schoolboys were fond of loitering about among them, wondering at the harpoons, lances, and keen-edged 'whale spades,' at the masses of whalebone and spermaceti, or the carved and ornamental whales' teeth, of which Jack always had a store.

In the forecastle of one ship might be seen the tattooed lineaments and grim visage of a Maori; from another would peer forth the mild, wondering gaze of a Fijian. Bows and arrows (the latter presumably poisoned), spears, clubs, and wondrous carved idols were the principal curios, nearly always procurable.

The whale fishery was at that time a leading industry. Sperm oil figured noticeably among the first items of our export trade. Merchants made advances for the outfit and all necessaries of the adventure, trusting in many instances for repayment to the skill, courage, and good faith of the commander. No doubt losses were incurred, but the lottery was tempting. The profits must have been considerable. Sperm oil, before the discovery of gas or petroleum, was worth eighty or ninety pounds per ton. A large 'right whale' was good for eighty barrels, eight barrels going to the tun. He was a fish worth landing. To get back to the ship, even after hours of hard pulling and the chance of a stove boat, towing a monster worth nearly £1000, was exciting enough.

The crew, like shearers of the present day, were proverbially hard to manage. They did not receive wages, but a share in the net profits – a 'lay,' as it was called. The ship was, in fact, a floating co-operative society. This did not prevent them – for human nature is weak – from committing acts distinctly opposed to the spirit as well as the letter of the agreement. They got drunk when they had the chance. They occasionally mutinied. They resisted the mate and defied the captain. They proposed to take savage maidens for their dusky brides, and to live lives devoid of care in The Islands. It strikes landsmen as a curiously dangerous and anxious position for a captain, who had to confront a score or two of reckless seamen with the aid only of the officers of the ship. Yet it was done. The peril dared, the ship saved, and order restored time after time, by the resolute exercise of one strong will and the half-instinctive yielding of the seamen to the mysterious power of legal authority.

Before me as I write are the well-kept and regularly-entered pages of a whale-ship's log-book, the record of a voyage from Sydney harbour over the Southern main, which bears date as far back as April 1833. In that year again sailed the stout barque, which had done so well her part in bringing us safely to this far new land. Her course lay through the coral reefs and Eden-seeming islands of the Great South Sea; along the storm-swept coast of New Zealand; among the cannibals of New Ireland and New Britain; among the as yet half-unknown region of the Solomon Islands and Bougainville Group. As to the dangers of such a voyage, one incident of the strange races that people these isles of Eden is sufficiently dramatic. A boat's crew had pulled over to an inviting looking beach within the coral ring for the purpose of watering. As the boat touched the beach, stem on, one of the crew sprang ashore with the painter in his hand. A cry escaped him and the crew simultaneously, as he sank to his neck in a concealed pit, a veritable trou-de-loup. He hung on to the rope fortunately, and so pulled himself up and into the boat again.

Not a native was in sight. But the treacherous pitfalls being probed and laid bare, the intention was manifest. A line of holes was discovered in the sands, nine or ten feet in depth, cone-shaped and sloping to a narrow point, where were placed sharp-pointed, hard-wood stakes, the ends having been charred and scraped. Sharp as lance-heads, they would have disabled any seaman luckless enough to fall in, especially in latitudes where Jack prefers to go barefooted. Forewarned, walking warily, and 'prospecting' any dangerous-looking spot, they succeeded in unmasking all or nearly all of these man-traps, into which the ambushed natives expected them to fall. They were ingeniously constructed: the top covered with a light frame of twigs and grass, sand being sprinkled over all. Any ordinary crew would have been deceived.

When they reached the village they found the property of a boat's crew, who had been surprised or betrayed. One piece of evidence after another came to light. Last of all, the oars, on the blades of which were marks of blood-stained fingers closed in the last grasp which the ill-fated mariner was to give.

Righteous indignation succeeded this gruesome discovery. A wholesale burning of the town and canoes was ordered. A shower of arrows was sent after the departing boat, as the murder isle was quitted with a distinct sense of relief. It is not improbable that similar experiences have been repeated during the last few years. In those days the 'labour trade' did not exist, and to 'black-birding' was no scale of profit attached.

There is a pathetic simplicity about this unvarnished record of perilous adventure, after the close of half a century. One looks reverently upon the yellow pages which photograph so minutely the daily life of the floating microcosm. The course, the winds, the storms, the calms, the days of failure and good fortune! The huge sea-beast harpooned and half slain, yet cunning to 'sound' deeply enough to pay out all the line, or, the iron 'drawing,' finally to elude capture altogether. Then again what a day of triumph when the hieroglyph show six whales killed and 'got safely alongside.' Midnight saw the boilers still bubbling and hissing; the tired crew with four-and-twenty hours' severe work before them, after, perhaps, half a day's hard pulling in the exciting chase.

Then out of the endless waste of waters rises the lovely shape of the fairy isle. 'Mountain, and valley, and woodland' – a paradisal climate; a friendly, graceful, simple race, reverencing the stranger whites, with their big canoe and loud reverberating fire-weapons; or, on the other hand, sullen and ferocious cannibals, sending flights of poisoned arrows from their thickets, or surrounding the ship with a swarm of canoes, full of hostile savages, eager to climb her deck to slay and plunder unchecked.