On the night of 2-3 January 1864 the Grafton, a merchant schooner, was shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand. The five men who were parting the crew found refuge on an uninhabited islet. They were Captain Thomas Musgrave, a "sensible and good-hearted" Australian; George Harris, a young 20-year-old British sailor, "naive, as brave as he is robust and well-knowledgeable of his craft"; Alexandre MacLarren, Alick, Norwegian, about twenty-eight years old, "something taciturn, which almost never laughed, illiterate but obedient, submissive and exemplary sailor"; Henri Forgés, the cook, a young Portuguese of twenty-three years, "chaparro and very ugly because of a kind of leprosy that had corroded almost most of his face so that his nose was little more than a scar"; and Francois Odouard Raynal, administrator of a plantation in Mauritius, who decided to embark on Australia to become a gol...read more