Among these
gold-diggers, were Captain Spade and Engineer Serko, two outcasts,
whom a certain community of ideas and character soon bound together in
close friendship.
These intelligent, well educated, resolute men would most assuredly
have succeeded in any career. But being without conscience or
scruples, and determined to get rich at no matter what cost, deriving
from gambling and speculation what they might have earned by patient
and steady work, they engaged in all sorts of impossible adventures.
One day they were rich, the next day poor, like most of the
questionable individuals who had hurried to the gold-fields in search
of fortune.
Among the diggers in New South Wales was a man of incomparable
audacity, one of those men who stick at nothing--not even at
crime--and whose influence upon bad and violent natures is
irresistible.
That man's name was Ker Karraje.
The origin or nationality or antecedents of this pirate were never
established by the investigations ordered in regard to him. He eluded
all pursuit, and his name--or at least the name he gave himself--was
known all over the world, and inspired horror and terror everywhere,
as being that of a legendary personage, a bogey, invisible and
unseizable.
I have now reason to believe that Ker Karraje is a Malay. However, it
is of little consequence, after all. What is certain is that he was
with reason regarded as a formidable and dangerous villain who had
many crimes, committed in distant seas, to answer for.
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