Barney Duffy's Curse

      Barney Duffy was a giant of a man. He towered over the two young soldiers, uttering a terrible curse: "Take me or report me, ye red-coated, lily-livered lice! Aye! And then I'll hang--but hear me curse on ye! So surely as ye do this, before me corpse has hung a week on King's Town gallows, ye'll meet a violent death, the pair of ye!'

      Duffy, and Irishman, had been imprisoned by the British on Norfolk Island, in the Pacific Ocean, 900 miles north-east of Sydney. The island is one of the most beautiful in the world, but its part is a long tale of blood.

      Scores of its present residents claim they have seen ghosts--ghosts of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, who outgrew tiny Pitcairn Island and moved to Norfolk in the 19th century, and ghosts of rebellious Irish convicts, hanged there after the British authorities shipped them from Botany Bay.

      The convict's life was a continuous nightmare. Men got 50 lashes for possessing tobacco or singing. They ate with their fingers and drank water from buckets. Those sentenced to hang thanked God for deliverance, while the remainder prayed not for freedom but for death.

      Barney Duffy escaped from this hell and hid in a hollow pine in the thick rain forest. He emerged at night to raid the vegetable gardens of the settlement. His beard and hair were long and matted, and he had just few rags to cover himself when the two soldiers, who were out fishing, discovered him.

      They shrugged off his cursed and pushed him back to the settlement with their muskets. Duffy was hanged, and two days later the soldiers went to fish at the same spot near the hollow pine.

      Shortly after, a foot patrol found their bodies, battered and broken, drifting in he tide near by.

      To this day Norfolk Island maps show Barney Duffy Gully--where two soldiers ignored Barney Duffy's curse and pais with their lives.