[?] Link With

[?]Gedy Of 1880

[?] Link With De Rays Horror

ee also Talk-Talk this issue ) E last known surviving link with the cruel Marquis de Rays hoax )f the early 1880’s was broken on lary 14, when Miss Josephine hnthe Niau died in a private ital in Sydney, aged 83. She was laughter of a French couple who )ed alive from the colony, named tfouvelle France, established by Marquis at Port Breton, at the lern tip of New Ireland. shameless publicity, the juis induced some 600 French Italian sympathisers and would colonists to subscribe about 000, and he shipped about 600 iem to the new country in four badly equipped ships. They so poorly provisioned, and the i was so palpable, that the ch Government would not allow jhips to sail. The Marquis beat French laws by sending his ants to Dutch and Spanish , and the ships sailed from No less than 100 of the mts died of hardships on the )le four-months’ voyage, conditions on the ships were •rable, they were luxurious ared with what the wretched mts experienced when they landed in desolate, primitive Breton. They had insufficient sions and equipment, they were antly attacked by the jungle es, and they succumbed quickly nalaria and other tropical ses. re than half the people died e next 18 months, before they rescued, mostly by parties from Australian colonies. The sur -3 mostly settled in New lonia and Australia. The uis in due course was seized he French Government and hed with six years’ gaol, is Niau spent her life in Syd is a teacher of languages. She ibed the monstrous De Rays in a book entitled Phantom Use, published about 20 years ? full story of the de Rays y was published in the PIM in ary, 1949. At that time w r e had >ent a photograph of an old cir stone (see above) marked with lese characters with the in ition that it was a monument iehind by the Japanese. Actu fc was the mill-stone which the ais had sent out to his starv- Dlonists to “grind their wheat.” colonists, of course, never had /heat or anything else to grind pt, no doubt, their teeth which probably ground plenty when they thought of the Marquis), ild mill-stone had been rescued

from Port Breton in the late 30’s, towed across to Rabaul on a raft b y Commander C. J. Webb, then harbour-master at Rabaul, and erected in the town, with an appropriate brass plaque (supplied b y Wunderlich Ltd., of Sydney) attached.

While the rest of Rabaul was completely levelled during the Allied blitz between 1942 and 1945, the old stone remained.

We do not know what the Japanese characters meant, but someone has suggested that they meant “This way to the canteen.”

The mill-stone photographed after the war by Whites Aviation. "Tolala", who visited Rabaul in 1955, says it now is in Mango Ave.,

with no identification on it. He says most Rabaulites think it a Jap relic. What about it, you historically-minded Territorians?