CHAPTER XV
A STRANGE EPISODE
Nothing stranger ever happened on land or sea than the circumstance whereby Captain Anthony came into possession of the charts used on the convict ship Hougoumont, which were subsequently employed to frustrate the plans of the government which first provided them.
A large English bark was signalized on the 16th of February in lat. 39° 46' S., long. 31° 54' E. It was a beautiful morning, and Captain Anthony concluded to board her and see if he could procure a detailed chart of the Australian coast, which he was now rapidly approaching.
The vessel proved to be the Ocean Beauty, seventy days from Liverpool and bound for New Zealand. The captain was a big, convivial Englishman, full of jolly stories which he loved to tell. Captain Anthony spent a pleasant hour in his cabin and finally asked him if he had made many voyages in this direction.
"Been making them out here all my life," he said. "Why, I was master of a convict ship, the Hougoumont, and carried a shipful of prisoners to Australia in 1868,"
