Description
The Mahogany Ship – an historical reality waiting to be disinterred or a fable created by romancers for a credulous audience?
The authors pose cogent arguments about the basis of the enduring mystery – why are elements of the foundation story inconsistent and improbable? Why are the recollections of the dozen or so people who offered their testimony about the supposed wreck so conflicted?
Indirectly linked with the story of the first sighting of the buried vessel is the whaling station on Griffiths Island – an an opportunistic venture by the businessmen from Launceston. Seeking profitable commitments and driven by the expedience, John Griffiths and Michael Connolly (and initially James Henty) developed the bay whaling station and then seized upon the fertile lands beyond the coast. Their inadequate capital resources and mercantile collapse in the early part of the 1840s decade brought them to insolvency. Their faithful factotum, Captain Alexander Campbell, remains the best known of this coterie before the arrival of James Atkinson. The story of their short, but significant, time at Port Fairy, has been outlines in this interpretation of the original adventurers.
ISPN: 978 0 9579295 4 8
Paperback, 122pp, 2022
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