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Our chief object is to visit a valley where the sandal-wood grows, to learn on what supply we can depend. High up the valley we come suddenly on a platform on which grows a large grove of bread-fruit, cocoa-nut, toa, and other trees. Amid them is a large idol of hewn stone of a man in a squatting posture. The figure is not ill sculptured.
They made a hearty meal of bananas and cocoa-nut milk, and then all lay down in the canoe and dozed for some hours. The two lads were roused by Wilcox saying: “I think, gentlemen, we can paddle on quietly now; the sun will be setting in less than an hour.” Resuming their seats, they paddled gently on until the sun disappeared, then quickened their pace, and in another hour reached the shore.
A wide belt of low land borders the ocean side of Guiana on the north-east of the continent, where white men dwell, in houses elevated on piles of timber, among sugar-estates and cotton-plantations, tall windmills, and numerous canals crowded with shipping, which would present a thoroughly Dutch scene were it not for the stately cocoa-nut and cabbage-palms rising amid them, the dark-skinned labourers, the blue sky, and burning heat.
It is the true Malay curry rich, as you perceive, in flavour, and more than half of it gravy which gravy, I beg you particularly to take notice, is full of minced vegetables, while the whole is softened with some of the youngest kind of cocoa-nut, plucked this very evening since the sun went down."
'The house itself is built, after the fashion of these islands, of wattle plastered with coral lime, the roof thatched with the leaves of the cocoa-nut and pandana; the fences of the garden were made of cane, prettily worked together in a cross pattern; the path neatly kept, and everything looking clean and tidy.
"Cam out, you hangman tiefs, cam out! only wish had rock stones to mash your heads with," cried the mob of negroes. The officers now sallied out in a body, and were saluted with every variety of missile, such as rotten oranges, cabbage-stalks, mud, and cocoa-nut shells.
It was then strained; and after more water had been added it was poured into cocoa-nut calabashes, and handed round. Its appearance eventually was like weak, frothy coffee and milk. The appearance of purely animal gratification on the faces of those who drank it, instead of being poetic, was of the low gross earth.
I was reluctant to add another mouth to the number we had to feed; but Fritz earnestly begged to keep it, offering to divide his share of cocoa-nut milk with it till we had our cows. I consented, on condition that he took care of it, and taught it to be obedient to him. Turk, in the mean time, was feasting on the remains of the unfortunate mother.
Any ordinary thief would be terrified to touch a tree from which this was suspended, he would expect that the next time he went to the sea, a fish of the said description would dart up and mortally wound him. The white shark taboo was another object of terror to a thief. This was done by plaiting a cocoa-nut leaf in the form of a shark, adding fins, etc., and this they suspended from the tree.
Remove the central land, and an annular reef like that of an atoll in an early stage of its formation is left; remove it from Bolabola, and there remains a circle of linear coral-islets, crowned with tall cocoa-nut trees, like one of the many atolls scattered over the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
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