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again. One doesn’t care to speak of these things – but breeding does count. Colin Buzfuz was one of us.’
    Appleby (who had certainly never expected to hear this celebrated Conradian sentiment drop from living lips) felt it incumbent upon him to nod gravely. He also wondered whether the tempo of the narrative might with advantage be speeded up.
    ‘Was Buzfuz driven mad?’ he asked.
    ‘Oh, most decidedly – although not, fortunately, in a permanent way. And not spectacularly, either. In fact, it was some time before we tumbled to the thing. Indeed, it might have escaped us entirely – and, I suppose, with the oddest consequences – if I hadn’t myself, through pure good luck, happened to get at the truth of the matter.’
    ‘My dear Tim,’ the judge said, ‘none of us doubts that you will be constrained to exhibit yourself as having displayed uncommon perspicacity. But proceed.’
    ‘Very well, George, I’ll proceed.’ Budgery had accepted the small barb with good humour. ‘And I’ll begin with the Jabberwock , when it came sailing up St Vincent Gulf. There was nothing out of the way about it, except that it had evidently taken a bit of a battering. More exactly, it had done that, and had then in a rough and ready way been fitted out again. This was evident when people got round to inspecting it. The steering mechanism might have been repaired by a village blacksmith; a jury-mast had been stepped but was now lashed to the deck once more; the mast actually in use might have been waving in a jungle no time ago. And so on. I’m no authority on such things.
    ‘Well, this craft, it seems, had come up the Gulf in a perfectly commonplace and unnoticeable way, and had steered into the Outer Harbour. And there, under the nose of that week’s mail-boat – a whacking great Orient liner – it simply started tizzying around. Somebody got aboard, therefore, and what they found was this chap Buzfuz in the last stages of exhaustion and inanition. He simply had to be carted off to hospital.
    ‘I needn’t tell you that it didn’t make much sense. Wherever he’d come from – and his logbook was a blank for weeks – he must have made his landfall quite some time before. Had he passed through the Tasman Sea? It can be the hell of a stretch of water, they tell me, whether for vessels large or small. But after that – or even if he’d come from the South Ocean by way of the Great Australian Bight – he’d have been virtually in traffic lanes during what must have been his final desperate days. Or why hadn’t he simply put into Victor Harbour in the one event, or into Port Lincoln in the other? He’d have found a passable hotel – and more than passable doctors, had he wanted them – in either of these respectable resorts! Instead of which, you see, he was determined to honour us here in Adelaide. Did he imagine that, outside its capital cities, Australia is inhabited only by black fellows hurling boomerangs? It’s an intriguing thought, but unfortunately it won’t wash. Buzfuz proved eventually to be a highly educated chap.
    ‘In fact, we were left with two possible explanations of this odd nautical performance. The man may simply have been holding tenaciously to a fixed purpose. He had set out for Adelaide, and was determined to make it. Tenacity was at least a quality we had to credit him with in a general way as soon as we began to get hold of something of his story. On the other hand – but, of course, the two explanations don’t totally exclude one another – he may have been quite dotty for some time – more or less capable of navigation, but in some hallucinated state which precluded a rational course of action.’
    ‘Perhaps Buzfuz believed himself to be still surrounded by blue water.’ This suggestion came from a man called Merryweather, whom Appleby had at once recognized, upon being introduced, as the most notable person present. The name of David Merryweather was written rather large in the