Eight bells. A tale of the sea and of the cannibals of New Guinea

London : Ward and Downey, 1892. Third edition. Octavo, yellow back, pictorial papered boards (worn, rubbed, lacking the backstrip), advertisements to endpapers, vignette illustration by the author, pp. vi; 334; a few light marks, a little shaken, a good copy.

A tale of fiction set in New Guinea, where Hume Nisbet had travelled to personally during one of his sojourns in Australia.

Nisbet was a prolific author who published no fewer than 40 novels between 1888 and 1905. He was a great traveller, and closely associated with Australia: in the mid 1860s, as a young man, he made his first visit to the Antipodes, where he spent seven years in Melbourne, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands, painting, sketching, writing poetry and stories, and making notes for future work. Much of his later fiction writing is based on his experiences during this period. Nisbet managed to pursue an artistic career as well as a literary one: in the mid 1870s in Edinburgh he worked as a scene-painter; in 1878-85 he taught freehand drawing at the Watt Institution and School of Arts; and he also exhibited oil and watercolour paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy. His large-scale oil painting The Flying Dutchman is one of his best known artworks. Nisbet would again visit Australia (and New Guinea) in 1886, and Australia for a third time in 1895.