Grandfather’s Yarns
(All Bights Reserved). THE WEST COAST CAVES. A HARROW ESCAPE. GEORGE PAULEY AHD THE CZAR’S DAUGHTER.
Ho. •Any more yarns about the West Coast caves, Grandfather?’ asked Jack. ‘ Oh, there are numbers of caves there that I never saw, my boy,’ said Grandfather, 1 but there a good many on Crayfish Island' that we used to go into. They run in a long way, too, and there are any amount of human bones in them. There’s one at the back of the old fishery that we could never reach the end of. ‘ One year a lot of Maories and white people were mutton-birding on Kundy’s Island. The Maories slept in wharves up the hill, but the white people slept in a cave on the beach. It came on very bad weather and the cave was leaking and dripping, making everything uncomfortable. One man named George Pauley built himself a hut and then sold it to another man for four pieces of tobacco and built himself another. ‘ Then they all built little huts for themselves ; and the very day after the last man moved out of the cave it fell in. There was a landslip caused by the constant rain. ‘ Brown had a new boat of which he was very proud, and all the boats were hauled up r to the mouth of the cave. The very morning the cave fell in Brown asked old Bob Watson to go and see if the boats were all right. ‘ They’re all light,’ said Watson, ‘every nail is an anchor now.’ 1 Everybody rushed down to the shore to see what he meant, and there they saw the slip. The falling earth had filled and sunk several of the boats, and a great stone, weighing several tons had rolled into Brown s boat and then bounded into the next boat, the Moko, belonging to George Pauley. ‘Brown’s boat was not damaged nearly so much as -the Moko, but he followed the Maori fashion and smashed it to pieces, refusing the ■offers of £lO to £2O which were made. ‘ The Maories had a great dislike to mending things and there was no very good carpenter there at the time; it was a ridictilous and extravagant fashion, though, they had of destroying property. The Moko was patched up pretty well and they took her to Preservation to paint her. She was painted and left in a large cave there which bears its name, but she wouldn’t dry in the cave and had to be broug-ht outside
again. ' ‘ Of all the comical men that I 6ver met I think Geo. Pauley, the owner of the Moko, was the most comical. He used to keep us amused hy the kour. He went round Australia and through Torres Strait with Captain King, in a revenue cutter, the first time that voyage was ever made. When they entered the Sydney harbour on their return they were firing a salute, and Pauley' somehow lost some fingers off his right hand in touching one of the guns. ‘ Pauley was very well read and had a splendid memory. He could remember perfectly all he read and .all he heard. He would describe rocks and trees* places, people, and things with such accuracy that even those who were quite familiar with what he was talking about would not believe that he was not speaking of what he had seen.- ‘ If the sailors spoke of any place they had been at he’d tell them that be’d been there, and tell them even more about the place than they knew themselves ; if the rest of us told them that in reality Pauley had never been out of the colonies they would not believe us. ‘ But it was the fun of the world to
hear him talking to a stranger. We used to sit and listen, alternately marvelling and half-choking in our efforts to keep from laughing aloud. ‘ He’d tell tell them that he came out from England as a great botanist, that he went through all his fortune, but that he hoped in time to be reinstated. He always spoke so seriously and with such conviction that very few disbelieved him. ‘He used to say, too, that when in Russia the Czar’s daughter fell so desperately in love with him that he was in a very embarrassing position. “ She used to bother me so, and write to me so often,” Pauley would say, “ that at last I had to give her a plump denial.” ‘ That yarn alw r ays finished us, and we used to roar at him, but he was never disconcerted a whit. Poor old Pauley ! One thing is certain, his remancing never did anyone the least harm, although it often amused a good many of us. He never turned his “ gift of the gab,” as the sailors used to call it, to evil account. ‘ How, boys, that will have to do for to-night; it’s time you were all in bed, and I’m tired, too.’
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/SOCR18940714.2.7
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Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 15, 14 July 1894, Page 5
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833Grandfather’s Yarns Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 15, 14 July 1894, Page 5
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