A Pearling Master's Journey: In The Wake Of The Schooner Mist
Australian History Local History Cultural Studies Adventure Biography & Memoir Maritime History Transportation Industry History
A Pearling Master’s Journey: In the Wake of the Schooner Mist is the only complete first-hand account of Australia’s last great sailing-ship pearling fleet, told by the man who skippered the legendary schooner Mist through the shark-rich waters of Broome and Thursday Island from 1929 to 1959. Over 338 heavily illustrated pages, John Edgar deBurgh Norman records how a 100-ton wooden vessel and her multicultural crew of Japanese, Malay, Koepanger and Aboriginal divers lived for months on isolated reefs, hand-harvesting the mother-of-pearl shell that once underpinned the nation’s economy. Alongside cyclones, mutiny and wartime minefields, Norman captures the vanished social fabric of the industry: shell-opening contests on deck, pearl grading by hurricane-lamp light and the strict “pearling master” code that kept the peace in remote anchorages.
Collectors prize this 2007 hardcover textbook because it doubles as a ready-reference for historians: fold-out sail plans, tide tables, crew lists, shell prices and rare photos of the Mist’s engine-room telegraph and pearl-sorting sheds. Libraries originally acquired the title for senior-school Australian-history courses, so ex-library copies like this one survive in sturdy laminated boards with tight bindings—ideal for researchers who need a copy that can travel from archive to classroom without falling apart. The crisp photographic plates, many shot by Norman himself, remain unfaded, showing the schooner’s graceful lines and the famous “Saturday-night pearls” that financed her refits.
For readers beyond academia, the memoir reads like a high-seas adventure: midnight escapes from Japanese warplanes, a cyclone that rolled the Mist on her beam-ends, and the moment Norman bartered a single perfect pearl for a replacement mainmast in Darwin. Yet it is also a love letter to the Kimberley coast, mapping every safe anchorage and freshwater soak still used by modern cruising yachts. Whether you’re chasing regional history, maritime transportation details or a ripping true story set on Australia’s final frontier, A Pearling Master’s Journey delivers a rare, out-of-print window into a world that disappeared with the invention of plastic buttons.
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