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Last year, I went ashore at a large village called Taive, about seven miles from the scene of our disaster. Many canoes came to us from that spot, and we stood in quite close in the vessel, so that people swam off to us. 'They are all fighting among the various villages and neighbouring islets of the Reef Archipelago, twenty miles north of the main island.
Two hours steam off the towering promontory which guards the entrance to Sandakan harbor lies Baguian, a sandy islet covered with cocoanut-palms, which is so small that it is not shown on ordinary maps. Though the island is, for some unexplained reason, under the jurisdiction of the British North Borneo Company, it is a part of the Sulu Archipelago and belongs to the United States.
The Turcomans, a Nornase tribe, who sometimes pitch their tents on the shores of the Archipelago, and who pay but a moderate tribute to the Porte, are also another cause of devastation.
The outrigger is always kept to windward, and as these canoes have both ends constructed alike, they sail equally well either way. The mast and single sail, being portable, are easily shifted from one end to the other, or adjusted to suit. The similarity of these rude boats to those one sees throughout the Eastern Archipelago shows us whence the idea was probably borrowed.
Yet what frightful historic memories brood over these deep waters of the Archipelago, where for nearly two centuries floated and fought the ships of sea-robbers of every nationality, and where the cunning but guilty slave-clippers, fresh from the coast of Africa, loaded with kidnapped men and women, made their harbor!
Nearer we look down on the small desert archipelago of the four Morros del Tunal, the Caribbee and the Lobos Islands. The mica-slate changed suddenly into carburetted and shining clay-slate.
I know not where the Indians had gone, but they were not there save a sick squaw or two. Probably, being fishermen, the tribe had gone out with their canoes, and were now busy with the spoils somewhere among the thousand passages of the archipelago. The totem poles at Tongass are richly carved, brilliantly colored, and grotesque in the extreme.
We have already seen what this phrase had come to mean. It had now no reference to the uses of commerce. The question was purely one of geography. The ocean lying north of America was known to be largely occupied by a vast archipelago, between which were open sounds and seas, filled for the greater part of the year with huge packs of ice.
Not only does the island completely command the Straits of Malacca, the gate of the ocean highway to China and the Eastern Archipelago, but, lying at a convenient distance from the Chinese, the Indian, and the Javanese ports, it was admirably adapted to serve as an entrepôt and centre of English trade.
A hundred varieties of the weapon are found in the Malay Archipelago, from the gold-hilted and diamond-studded royal kris to the boat-handled dagger of common use, permitted to all but peasants; women of the higher class wear it in the girdle, and though unrepresented in the sculpture of Javanese temples, the kris is ascribed to the days of Panji, a Hindu warrior whose feats form the libretto of a popular drama, though his authenticity appears uncertain.
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