Captain J. H. Adeney was born in Geelong in 1862. His father was a Church of England clergyman, his mother a niece of Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of the famous system of shorthand. Adeney left Melbourne Grammar School to go to sea before he was fourteen, and sailed for the South Seas in the barque Don Diego. In 1887 he became a master mariner, and for many years sailed out of London and Liverpool for Calcutta, Capetown, Mauritius, Buenos Aires, the ports of Brazil, the West Indies and the United States. (The Australian Journal, V 79, No. 925, April 1943, p. 196)
