This 'biography' of 'Captain Ingram Morgan' appeared in the September 1937 issue of the Australian Journal: ' ...I was born in Charters Towers, Queensland...Parents moved to Sydney. I... became an apprentice in a line of British cargo steamers. No adventures out of the ordinary, but a lot of jolly hard work. Soon found I didn't like the sea as much as I thought I would. One thing about it; though; it gave me plenty of time for reading. I read everything I could lay my hands on, from out-of-date newspapers to the Classics. When I had nothing to read I nearly went mad, like a dope addict who can't get his favourite drug. Read my way around the world a few times...Then I started to write. Kicked off with a long novel - 200,000 words of it, all written in pencil, of course and on both sides fo the paper. I set it off to a publisher in New York....I waited three years expecting to hear from him any day, but nothing happened, so I kept right on being a sailor. Got my master's ticket. Became that mighty potentate, the captain of a ship. Then things got bad in the shipping line, and so I left the sea. By this time I'd got a whole bundle of short stories in my dunnage. I left them in a Sydney newspaper office and went off with a party of friends gold prospecting in Central Australia...I went back to Sydney, sad, wise and thirsty. I called at the newspaper office. They'd printed a couple of my stories...they offered me a job...Finally I decided that if I were going to make the name Morgan immortal it was time to do something about it. So I left for England were I had a little success and hope for more. My stories seem to o down well with Americans, too, and I hope they'll find equal favour in my native country. (Source: The Australian Journal, 'In Passing', 1937; v73 no. 858; pp 1284-1285)
A photographic portrait of the purported 'Captain Ingram Morgan' appears in the September 1937 issue of the Australian Journal, p 1285.
