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Only a relative poverty belongs to a clime where the shaking of a sago-palm provides a large family with rations for three months, but the physical energies of Boeroe have ebbed to a point where "desire fails," and the unsatisfactory conditions of life meet for the most part with apathetic acceptance.
The presence of the steamer awakens a faint simulacrum of life and interest in sleepy Boeroe, and a native woman, in the rusty black calico wherewith Dutch Calvinism counteracts the Eastern love of glowing colours, brings a rickety chair from her dingy hut, and sets the precious possession under a shadowy nutmeg-tree in the village street.
A little crowd assembles, for local excitements are few, and the Malay phrase-book, an inseparable companion, aids in carrying on a halting conversation, eked out with signs and facial contortions. No school is found on Boeroe, and the simple people assert with submissive sadness that nothing is done for them.
Before that moment arrived, however, a little air of wind came along out from the westward, and, with our port braces slightly checked, we began to creep away on a nor'-nor'-east course for Boeroe Strait.
Crescent-shaped Boeroe, where difficulties in landing involve launch, bloto, and paddling through a long reach of shallow water to a black swamp, possesses a commercial rather than an artistic value, being the only place in the Archipelago which exports eucalyptus oil, locally known as kajopoetah.
The ruddy trunk of the candelabra-tree towers above the ferns and oil-palms of the tall undergrowth, the glossy sword-like leaves, often ten feet long, being woven into the cocoyas, or sleeping mats, peculiar to Boeroe. The whistle of the steamer proves a welcome summons from this melancholy island, a solitary exception to the divine beauty and irresistible witchery of the Molucca group.
The religious interests of Boeroe are represented by two ruinous Messighits, and a deplorable Dutch conventicle.
There were two alternative routes open to me; one and that, perhaps, rather the safer of the two from the navigator's point of view to the south and east of Australia, then northward between the Solomon and Admiralty groups to the waters wherein our search for a sort of earthly Paradise was to be prosecuted; and the rather shorter but more dangerous route up the western coast of Australia, then through the Ombay Passage into the Banda Sea, and thence, through the Boeroe Strait, into the Molucca or the Gillolo Passage, the successful negotiation of either of which would bring us to the spot where our search was to commence.
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