THIS is the story of an Australian boy and three American sailors who loved a ship--the Randy. It tells how the boy, Ginge, went to sea and sailed around the world in search of the Randy, and how he came to solve the mystery of the death of his beloved friend "Jeem". It is the story of the strange, secret adventures of the Randy along the lonely coast of Western Australia and among the islands and reefs of the Indian Ocean, where mystery ships were not unknown in the early Nineteen-Forties. When Joe, one of the Americans, pitched a few yarns about a ship to a young boy lazing on the beach in the sunshine he did not know that he was starting a sequence of events that were to shape the boy's destiny and result in the death of his friend. Nor could he know that his words were to influence the lives of a group of American soldiers castaway on a lonely island in the north. Because of the hold the Randy took on his imagination, the boy was to travel many miles in his search for this wonder ship and to recount stories of her exploits which made him famous all over the Pacific. But like a magnet the Indian Ocean always drew him homeward and it was there, within sound of the wailing of the ghosts of the castaway Dutchman of Pelsart's crew, that at last he found the Randy.