Second Mate of the “Postboy.”

That Maori old-timer not mentioned was a perfect type of the South New Zealand seaman. Tohi te Marama had been one of the hard-case crew of the little whaling barque “Chance,” whose raffish-looking hands were described by Frank Bullen in his “Cruise of the Cachalot.” When I met him he was over seventy years old, but he was still sailorising, pilot aboard a Dunedin schooner which went round to Milford Sound with a gang of men to work the tangiwai greenstone reef on the seaward slope of the Mitre Peak range.

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Never have I seen a man with a more richly weathered sea-seasoned face. His complexion was a prime old saddle-brown with a dash of the ruddy glow of three-quarters of a century of hot sunshine and a tough hardness of features that came of the same period of Antarctic-born gales and roaring westerlies. His keen old eyes that had looked out to windward so long were enclosed in a network of wrinkles, and the more he laughed, this jolly-hearted ancient mariner, the more those wrinkles grew.

There wasn't a hair on his face; I don't think he ever needed to shave; the gales of Foveaux Strait would be sufficient barber.

Fossicking around among these brown veterans for folk-lore of coast and island, I happened to ask this Maori sailorman whether he could give me any ancient waiatas or chants concerning Rakiura and the fiordland shores and sounds. Tohi thought for a moment, then he grinned till his shrewd eyes almost disappeared among their wrinkles. “Yes,” he said, “I know some good old songs, and this is the one I like best of all.” And he threw his head back and trolled out in deep-sea fashion:

“Oh, Sally Brown's a bright mulatto;
Away-oh, roll and go!
She drinks rum and chews tobacco;
Spend all my money on Sally Brown!”

The famous old chanty was Tohi's favourite waiata. “Yes, boss,” he said, “I was the chanty-man long ago aboard the ‘Postboy,’ topsail schooner. I was second mate of her, away back in the whaling and sealing times. I know every bit of a bay, every seal-cave along the coast and around the islands. I was at Sydney in her in the Fifties, when everyone was going mad over the gold-diggings in Victoria and America. I was nearly going off in a vessel to the Sacramento diggings in California. But I came back to the old place and went sealing in the Sounds, and then when Paddy Gilroy got the ‘Chance’ I went with him whaling on lays, same as all the rest of the boys. I went to sea when I was twelve or so, and here I am, at it again.”