Even more likely to jump ship were African Americans, who made up a third or more of the crew on the American whaling ships that were so common in the South Pacific in the nineteenth century (Bolster, 1997; Newton, 2013). Whaling concentrated the worst elements of the maritime industry, especially for a black sailor, and desertion rates were high, particularly in the Southern whale fishery. Sometimes American whaling ships found themselves entirely bereft of crew as men deserted throughout the Pacific: in Australia, in New Zealand, and in a whole raft of small Pacific islands. This rash of desertion among American seamen reached epidemic proportions during the gold rush that began in 1851 in the Australian colony of Victoria. Police records from the subsequent decade reveal dozens of African American men, often known as Black Jack or Black Harry or Black Pete, arrested in the goldfield regions for vagrancy or being a 'rogue and vagabond'. ${ }^{20}$ These men invariably gave mercantile occupations, such as sailors, cooks or carpenters, and they probably jumped ship in the hope of finding gold, then found themselves stranded with no visible means of support. Thomas Johnson was one African American who was charged with vagrancy in 1865. This man, who gave his place of birth as North Carolina, was described as a woodcutter when he married the Irish woman Mary Gallagher in Melbourne on 16 April 1868. ${ }^{21}$ Their son Thomas Creighton Johnson was born in 1874. ${ }^{22}$ In his adult years, Thomas Creighton Johnson moved to Western Australia, where in 1924 he married. Already quite an old man, he had poor luck with farming and he died in 1937, leaving his wife pregnant with her fifth child and completely destitute. Four children were placed in care at St. Joseph's orphanage and nine years later, the last child, Colin, was also placed in care. Colin Johnson went on to transcend this miserable background, becoming internationally renowned as Mudrooroo, Australia's premier Aboriginal writer. Since the revelation in the 1990s that Mudrooroo's heritage was African