Correspondence with the Colonial Secretary's Office

(1) [centred]

[oval stamp, very faint] COLONIAL [GOVERNMENT?] QUEENSLAND

M^r Chester 2499: 26.Oct.71. Narration [if to train?], N.E. Channel

Notwithstanding that a considerable portion of our commerce with India and China passes annually through Torres Strait, it has rarely attracted public attention since the Surveys of Capts. [Captains] Blackwood and Stanley in 1843-46, and except for a passing paragraph in an Eastern newspaper recording some wreck or masSacre [massacre], which tended to keep up the high rate, 12^1/2 per cent:, charged by Insurance Companies it was, perhaps, seldom thought of except by those whose business it was to encounter its risks and dangers - The foundation of the Settlement at Port Albany in 1864 seventeen years after it had been strongly urged upon the home Government was the result of newly awakened public interest. It was fully anticipated that besides affording a harbor of refuge to vessels wrecked in those waters, it would act as a check upon the treacherous and bloodthirsty natives of the neighbouring islands, and prevent in future such masSacres [massacres] as are recorded in the book of sailing directions for Torres Strait and the Coral Sea. So far from this having been the case, so late as the beginning of 1869 a vessel was taken within thirty miles of Somerset, and her crew cruelly murdered by natives who for the preceeding [preceding] five years had constantly maintained friendly intercourse with Europeans.

During all this time the people at the Settlement were without the means of ascertaining what was going on in their immediate vicinity, and where, three months afterwards the news reached Somerset there was not a boat fit to venture outside Albany.

More recently, news of the wreck of the Schooner "Honolulu" in the N. E. channel reached Somerset from Batavia via Sydney three months after it occurred, and, but for an accident, - the discovery of the valua

[Marginalia] [signature in left margin] HMC