This was the only approach to a "religious service" I ever saw, and was partly intended to propitiate or frighten away the spirits of the departed, of whom the Australian blacks have a great horror.
The blacks had been with me two or three weeks, when one evening the man approached and intimated in unmistakable terms that he wanted to get away from the island and return to his own land.

He said he thought he and his family could easily return to their friends on the mainland by means of the catamaran that had brought them.
And Yamba, that devoted and mysterious creature, solemnly pointed out to me a glowing star far away on the horizon.

There, she said, lay the home of her people.

After this I was convinced that the mainland could not be more than a couple of hundred miles or so away, and I determined to accompany them on the journey thither, in the hope that this might form one of the stepping-stones to civilisation and my own kind.

We lost no time.