Some yarns of an exceedingly tough and Munchausen-like character have been spun and printed by men of their adventures in Australian waters or the South Seas, but an examination of such stories by any one with personal knowledge of the Pacific and Australasia has soon, and very deservedly so, knocked the bottom out of a considerable number of them. Yet there are stories of South Sea adventure well authenticated, which I are not a whit less wonderful than the most marvellous falsehoods that any man has yet told, and the story of what befell John Renton is one of these. A file of the _Queenslander_ (the leading Queensland weekly newspaper) for 1875 will corroborate his story; for that paper gave the best account of his adventures in one of their November (1875) numbers, and the story was copied into nearly every paper in Australasia. Like Harry Bluff, John Renton "when a boy left his friends and his home, o'er the wild ocean waves all his life for to roam." Renton's home was in Stromness, in the Orkneys, and he shipped on board a vessel bound to Sydney, in 1867, as an ordinary seaman, he then being a lad of eighteen. When in Sydney he got about among the boarding-houses, in sailor-town, and one morning woke up on the forecastle of the _Reynard_ of Boston, bound on a cruise for guano among the South Pacific Islands. Renton had been crimped, and finding himself where he was, bothered no more about it, but went cheerfully to work, not altogether displeased at the prospect of new adventures, which would enable him to by and by go back to the old folks with plenty of dollars, and a stock of startling yarns to reel off. He was a steady, straightforward lad, though somewhat thoughtless at times, and resolved to be a steady, straightforward man. The vessel first called into the Sandwich Islands, and there shipped a gang of Hawaiian natives to help load the guano, then she sailed away to the southward for McKean's Island, one of the Phoenix Group, situated about lat. 3? 35' S. and long. 174? 20' W.