Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life.

He wouldn't have lived at all, if a breeze hadn't come up and let us get away to the coast.

It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went bowling down towards Port Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake.
However, the poor beggar thought he was going to die, and one night he told me his story.

He was an escaped convict from Freemantle, Western Australia.

He had, with others, been taken up to the northern coast to do some Government work, and had escaped in the dingey.