How could I resist? I signed up to stay there the very next night.

It was already dark when I pulled up at the lonely tower, which was built in 1848 and had three-hundred-degree views of moonlit, whitecapped ocean. I called out to see if anybody was around, but the words were lost in the howling wind. Then I spotted the caretaker prowling the empty grounds—a wild-eyed, lumbering giant in overalls and galoshes who introduced himself as Adrian. After fishing through a fistful of keys, he pushed open the creaking wooden door to the dark sandstone lighthouse keeper's residence. This was the place for history, all right; in fact, it looked as if it had barely been cleaned in 160 years.

"That fireplace sort of works," Adrian said, nodding at a stone chimney hung with a faded portrait of Queen Victoria. "But the wind usually blows the flames out." On the mantelpiece stood a photograph of one former resident who had been dismissed for drunkenness and had committed suicide. ("They reckon the mercury in the lights used to drive 'em mad.") Then, in the shadowy lounge room, Adrian proudly showed off an ancient TV-and-video unit he had hooked up. "I've collected a few beaut horror movies about lighthouses. The Fog's not bad—lots of zombies clawing up the walls."

I laughed a little too heartily. That night, I sat nervously in the freezing, half-lit residence. I could barely sleep as the floorboards creaked and the gusts tore at the roof. This was about as much period atmosphere as I could take.

But in Australia, these forgotten outposts are where stories are passed on, as I found the next morning when I wandered bleary-eyed to the lighthouse tower and scaled the narrow steps. At the top sat the guardian, who had a flowing gray beard like the oracular Lorax from Dr. Seuss. Clutching a folder of yellowed newspaper clippings from the 1800s, he talked about old looting trips—"shipwreck parties"—with such relish that I felt sure his ancestors would have been in the front of the fray. ("Kids used to pray that there'd be another wreck so their dads would get some more tobacco to sell!" he gloated.) I asked him if there were any other shipwrecks to be found nearby. "Well, there's still Eric the Red," he said. "It's exposed at low tide sixty days of the year."

By midafternoon, I was hiking to Parker Hill Bay along rocky ledges decorated with mussel shells and garlands of kelp. At last, in the creamy sands of the beach, I stumbled upon a mossy green rib cage—the remains of a wooden hull. Eric the Red was an American ship that left New York Harbor in 1889 and came to grief here with four lives lost. Was it the same wood as the piece my uncle had given me? No matter. The seawater had formed wading pools between the planks, and I just sat there in the warm sun, soaking my feet and dreaming. The disaster must have provoked quite a fiesta, since looters had their pick of the latest newfangled American goods—sewing machines, bicycles, croquet mallets, and crates of sarsaparilla. It was a sorry fate for a vessel that had departed from Manhattan eighty-one days earlier, from right next door to my apartment: I should never again complain about jet lag.