Ebook The Romance of the South Seas

Often at the Brisbane Observatory, when seated in the official chair at the Central Weather Bureau — preparing the daily isobaric charts by which we were enabled to issue fore casts for all Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand — did we long for data from the coral strand and palm-clad vistas of New Caledonia, distant but 750 miles from the coast of Queensland. Every one knows that La Nouvelle, as it is popularly called, is a French penal settlement, and thereby hangs a tale.