A huge fifteen-foot swordfish with a short bill and broad stripes has been seen by market fishermen. And a species of sailfish, different from those I was the first to catch in the Gulf Stream, on the Pacific Coast, and in the South Seas, has been taken by market fishermen. This sailfish has a dorsal fin that is highest at the forward end and slopes back to the tail. These three fish alone will make the fame of the Barrier.

  The queen fish, a beautiful silvery dolphin-like leaper, is one of the greatest fish I have caught, equal to the gallo, or rooster fish, of the Mexican coast. The mackerel that occurs in large schools is a fine light-tackle fish for anglers who do not care for the strenuous work. There is also a sea pike, a big barracuda-like fish that grows to twelve feet and more and which would be wonderful game. Undoubtedly there are more and larger fish to discover around these reefs.

  The future of Australian fishing is no longer problematical.

  Marlin have been sighted off Sydney Heads every month in the year. Three days before I sailed on the Mariposa, August 16th, a market fisherman saw five Marlin riding the swells not far offshore. In winter! A few days before that one of my men, flying down from Newcastle, saw a school of huge tiger sharks, none, he claimed, under eighteen feet, attacking a baby whale and fighting its mother. The airmen circled lower and flew round and round, not only to observe the fight, but to make sure of what was happening; and they saw the tiger sharks tear the baby whale to pieces.

  Another market fisherman quite recently saw a white shark much longer than his boat, which was twenty-two feet.

  Then, as I have written about before, and wish to repeat, there are a number of cases where market fishermen were towing sharks too large to pull on board, and have had these huge white devils take them in one bite. A ten- or twelve-foot shark snapped off in one bite!

  A thirty-nine foot white shark was stranded at Montague Island after swallowing a small shark that had been caught on a set line. A nineteen-foot white shark was shot and harpooned off the pier at Bermagui.

  Dr. David Stead, of Sydney, a scientist of international reputation, corroborates my claim that there are white sharks up to eighty feet and more. If there are not, where do the white-shark teeth, five inches across the base, come from? These have been dredged from the ocean bed.

  This matter of Australian sharks is astounding. The waters around Australia are alive with many species of sharks. Why not some unknown species, huge and terrible? Who can tell what forms of life swim and battle in the ocean depths?

  I predict that if I myself do not catch one of these incredible monsters, some one else will. I believe there are eighty-foot sharks. Rare, surely, but they occur! I believed in the sea serpent before the English scientist, Lieut.-Commander R. T. Gould, collected his authentic data and made the myth a fact.

  It takes imagination to be a fisherman — to envision things and captures to be. Every fisherman, even if he is a skeptic and ridicules me and any supporters about these great fish, betrays himself when he goes fishing, for he goes because he imagines there are trout or salmon or Marlin, and surely a big one, waiting to strike for him. If I had not had a vivid and fertile imagination I would not have been the first to catch sailfish and swordfish in different and unfished waters of the world.

  Off Freemantle large tunny have been caught by marketmen and hundreds too large to hold have broken away.

  Then the West Coast of Australia! Here will be found the grandest fish. For years I have known that the Indian Ocean contains the most marvelous unfished waters, and the greatest of fish in numbers and size. I have been on the track of the monster Indian Ocean sailfish for years. But never until I met the Danish scientist, Schmidt, world authority on eels, who had seen these sailfish, did I really believe the data I had accumulated.

  “Sailfish?” he repeated after me. “Oh yes indeed. I have seen them like a fleet of sailing schooners.”

  “And — how big?” I choked, now realizing I was on the eve of my most wonderful discovery.

  “Thirty to forty feet, I should say. Their sails were easily ten feet high and fifteen feet long.”

  Shark’s Bay, three hundred miles north of Perth, is known to contain schools of huge sharks.

  Schools of sharks do not inhabit waters that are not full of fish. All the way up the West Coast to Darwin, these great fish I believe in and have been writing about have been seen.

  I could fill pages with data I have collected. Some of it, most of it, is fact.

  So I make my claim for Australian waters and reiterate it and will stand by it. So great is my faith that already I have enlisted the help of the Australian Government and my influential friends there, motion-picture and radio people, all of which, added to private resources and unlimited tackle, will be used to prove that Australia has fish and fishing which will dwarf all the rest known in the world today.

  As for the dream and the color and the glory of such a romance, such an adventure, these are for the time being overshadowed by the immensity of the plan, and its scope, and its appalling difficulties. But these will pass and then there will come the joy of anticipation — of trolling sunny strange waters, of purple coral reefs and strips of white sand, and the shore haunts of the aboriginal — the myriads of shells, of weird birds and grand trees — and always the striving for the unattainable, whether it be a great fish or the ultimate beauty.

  I have been ridiculed and criticized for claiming that Australia’s thirteen thousand miles of coast would yield the greatest game fish of any waters yet discovered in the world, and all the year round.

  Years ago when I predicted seven-hundred-, eight-hundred-, and thousand-pound Marlin for New Zealand, I was laughed at, even in New Zealand itself. But I and my fishing partners caught black Marlin of these weights, and established the marvelous fishing that New Zealand has enjoyed for a protracted and waning period.

  After five years of correspondence with Australian scientists, missionaries, market fishermen, and sportsmen, and seven months of practical and strenuous observation and fishing, I stake my reputation that Australia will yield the most incredible and magnificent big-game fish of known and unknown species that the fishing world has ever recorded.

  Added to what I just wrote about Great Barrier fish, let me append one more fact.

  I have located broadbill swordfish, the genuine Ziphias gladius, in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, spawning on the white sand, as thick as fence pickets!

  THE END

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

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  Series Contents

  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

  Charles Dickens

  D.H. Lawrence

  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  George Eliot

  H. G. Wells

  Henry James

  Ivan Turgenev

  Jack London

  James Joyce

  Jane Austen

  Joseph Conrad

  Leo Tolstoy

  Louisa May Alcott

  Mark Twain

  Oscar Wilde

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Sir Walter Scott

  The Brontës

  Thomas Hardy

  Virginia Woolf

  Wilkie Collins

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Series Two

  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

  Anthony Trollope

  Bram Stoker

  Christopher Marlowe

  Daniel Defoe

  Edith Wharton

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  G. K. Chesterton

  Gustave Flaubert (English)

  H. Rider Haggard

  Herman Melville

  Honoré de Balzac (English)

  J. W. von Goethe (English)

  Jules Verne

  L. Frank Baum

  Lewis Carroll

  Marcel Proust (English)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Nikolai Gogol

  O. Henry

  Rudyard Kipling

  Tobias Smollett

  Victor Hugo

  William Shakespeare

  Series Three

  Ambrose Bierce

  Ann Radcliffe

  Ben Jonson

  Charles Lever

  Émile Zola

  Ford Madox Ford

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  George Gissing

  George Orwell

  Guy de Maupassant

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Henrik Ibsen

  Henry David Thoreau

  Henry Fielding

  J. M. Barrie

  James Fenimore Cooper

  John Buchan

  John Galsworthy

  Jonathan Swift

  Kate Chopin

  Katherine Mansfield

  L. M. Montgomery

  Laurence Sterne

  Mary Shelley

  Sheridan Le Fanu

  Washington Irving

  Series Four

  Arnold Bennett

  Arthur Machen

  Beatrix Potter

  Bret Harte

  Captain Frederick Marryat

  Charles Kingsley

  Charles Reade

  G. A. Henty

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Edgar Wallace

  E. M. Forster

  E. Nesbit

  George Meredith

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Jerome K. Jerome

  John Ruskin

  Maria Edgeworth

  M. E. Braddon

  Miguel de Cervantes

  M. R. James

  R. M. Ballantyne

  Robert E. Howard

  Samuel Johnson

  Stendhal

  Stephen Crane

  Zane Grey

  Series Five

  Algernon Blackwood

  Anatole France

  Beaumont and Fletcher

  Charles Darwin

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  Edward Gibbon

  E. F. Benson

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  George Bernard Shaw

  George MacDonald

  Hilaire Belloc

  John Bunyan

  John Webster

  Margaret Oliphant

  Maxim Gorky

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Radclyffe Hall

  Robert W. Chambers

  Samuel Butler

  Samuel Richardson

  Sir Thomas Malory

  Thomas Carlyle

  William Harrison Ainsworth

  William Dean Howells

  William Morris

  Series Six

  Anthony Hope

  Aphra Behn

  Arthur Morrison

  Baroness Emma Orczy

  Captain Mayne Reid

  Charlotte M. Yonge

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  E. W. Hornung

  Ellen Wood

  Frances Burney

  Frank Norris

  Frank R. Stockton

  Hall Caine

  Horace Walpole

  One Thousand and One Nights

  R. Austin Freeman

  Rafael Sabatini

  Saki

  Samuel Pepys

  Sir Issac Newton

  Stanley J. Weyman

  Thomas De Quincey

  Thomas Middleton

  Voltaire

  William Hazlitt

  William Hope Hodgson

  Series Seven

  Adam Smith

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Confucius

  David Hume

  E. M. Delafield

  E. Phillips Oppenheim

  Edmund Burke

  Ernest Hemingway

  Frances Trollope

  Galileo Galilei

  Guy Boothby

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Ian Fleming

  Immanuel Kant

  Karl Marx

  Kenneth Grahame

  Lytton Strachey

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Michel de Montaigne

  René Descartes

  Richard Marsh

  Sax Rohmer

  Sir Richard Burton

  Talbot Mundy

  Thomas Babington Macaulay

  W. W. Jacobs

  Series Eight

  Anna Katharine Green

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  The Brothers Grimm

  C. S. Lewis

  Charles and Mary Lamb

  Elizabeth von Arnim

  Ernest Bramah

  Francis Bacon

  Gilbert and Sullivan

  Grant Allen

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Hugh Walpole

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  John Locke

  John Muir

  Joseph Addison

  Lafcadio Hearn

  Lord Dunsany

  Marie Corelli

  Niccolò Machiavelli

  Ouida

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Sigmund Freud

  Theodore Dreiser

  Walter Pater

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Series Nine

  Aldous Huxley

  August Strindberg

  Booth Tarkington

  C. S. Forester

  Erasmus

  Eugene Sue

  Fergus Hume

  George Moore

  Gertrude Stein

  Giovanni Boccaccio

  Izaak Walton

  J. M. Synge

  Johanna Spyri

  John Galt

  Maurice Leblanc

  Max Brand

  Molière

  Norse Sagas

  R. D. Blackmore

  R. S. Surtees

  Sir Thomas More

  Stephen Leacock

  The Harvard Classics

  Thomas Love Peacock

  Thomas Paine

  William James

  Series Ten

  A. E. W. Mason

  Abraham Lincoln

  Baruch Spinoza

  Carolyn Wells

  Charles Brockden Brown

  Earl Derr Biggers

  Evelyn Waugh

  F. Marion Crawford

  Fred M. White

  Frederick Douglass

  Gaston Leroux

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  George Berkeley

  Howard Pyle

  John Kendrick Bangs

  John Steinbeck

  John Stuart Mill

  Martin Luther

  Penny Dreadfuls Collection

  Sherwood Anderson

  Thomas Dekker

  Thomas Hobbes

  Thomas Jefferson

  Willa Cather

  William Faulkner

  William Le Queux

  Ancient Classics

  Achilles Tatius

  Aeschines

  Aeschylus

  Ammianus Marcellinus

  Apollodorus

  Appian

  Apuleius

  Apollonius of Rhodes

  Aristophanes

  Aristotle

  Arrian

  Athenaeus

  Augustine

  Aulus Gellius

  Bede

  Callimachus

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  Clement of Alexandria

  Cornelius Nepos

  Demosthenes

  Dio Chrysostom

  Diodorus Siculus

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus

  Diogenes Laërtius

  Ennius

  Epictetus

  Euripides

  Florus

  Frontius

  Fronto

  Herodotus

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  Hippocrates

  Homer

  Horace

  Isocrates

  Josephus

  Julian

  Julius Caesar

  Juvenal

  Livy

  Longus

  Lucan

  Lucian

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  Marcus Aurelius

  Manetho

  Martial

  Nonnus

  Ovid

  Pausanias

  Petronius

  Pindar

  Plato

  Plautus

  Pliny the Elder

  Pliny the Younger

  Plotinus

  Plutarch

  Polybius

  Procopius

  Propertius

  Quintus Curtius Rufus

  Quintus Smyrnaeus

  Sallust

  Sappho

  Seneca the Younger

  Septuagint

  Sidonius

  Sophocles

  Statius

  Strabo

  Suetonius

  Tacitus

  Terence

  Tertullian

  Theocritus

  Thucydides

  Tibullus

  Varro

  Virgil

  Xenophon

  Delphi Poets Series

  Adam Mickiewicz

  A. E. Housman

  Alexander Pope

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Andrew Marvell

  Beowulf

  Charlotte Smith

  Christina Rossetti

  Confederation Poets

  D. H Lawrence (poetry)

  Dante Alighieri (English)

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Delphi Poetry Anthology

  Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)

  Edmund Spenser

  Edward Lear

  Edward Thomas

  Edwin Arlington Robinson

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Emily Dickinson

  Epic of Gilgamesh

  Ezra Pound

  Friedrich Schiller (English)

 

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