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So it was that Captain Johannes Maartens, Hendrik Hamel, and the twelve sea-cunies of us roystered and bawled in the fisher village while the winter gales whistled across the Yellow Sea. From the little we had seen of the land and the people we were not impressed by Cho-Sen. If these miserable fishers were a fair sample of the natives, we could understand why the land was unvisited of navigators.
Maartens, Field-Cornet of the Ward Gatsrand, District Potchefstroom, and Daniel Johannes Jansen van Vuuren, Assistant Field-Cornet of the Ward Bovenschoonspruit, declare under oath that we were present at everything stated in the foregoing sworn declaration of Commandant P.A. Cronjé, and that that declaration is correct and in accordance with the truth.
As sure as loot is loot, old Johannes Maartens would have got away and across the Yellow Sea with his booty had it not been for the fog next day that lost him. That cursed fog! A song was made of it, that I heard and hated through all Cho-Sen to my dying day. Here run two lines of it: "Yanggukeni chajin anga Wheanpong tora deunda, The thick fog of the Westerners Broods over Whean peak."
"These," I said, when the Emperor had asked me about my company, "these are my slaves, all except that old churl there" I indicated Johannes Maartens "who is the son of a freed man." I told Hendrik Hamel to approach. "This one," I wantoned on, "was born in my father's house of a seed slave who was born there before him. He is very close to me.
But we were to learn different. The village was on an in- lying island, and its headmen must have sent word across to the mainland; for one morning three big two-masted junks with lateens of rice-matting dropped anchor off the beach. When the sampans came ashore Captain Johannes Maartens was all interest, for here were silks again.
The one really arresting exception is Olive Schreiner, and she is quite as certainly an exception that proves the rule. Olive Schreiner is a fierce, brilliant, and realistic novelist; but she is all this precisely because she is not English at all. Her tribal kinship is with the country of Teniers and Maarten Maartens that is, with a country of realists.
Water was given them that they might live longer to yearn for the food, steaming hot and savoury and changed hourly, that was place temptingly before them. They say old Johannes Maartens lived longest, not giving up the ghost for a full fifteen days. Kim was slowly crushed to death, bone by bone and joint by joint, by the torturers, and was a long time in dying.
Wifey found her most delirious Joy in putting passionate Shades on all the Lamps, and sitting there in the Crimson Glow to discuss Maeterlinck and Maarten Maartens and a few others that were New Ones on the he-end of the Sketch. When they had an Evening At Home up in the Flat, it was usually a two-ring Affair. Sometimes it would take half the Night to get the Smoke out of the House.
That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda ay, he sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find still afloat unscuppered. And he found head-hunting, tree-dwelling anthropophagi instead.
Please send me reply to this within thirty minutes." I have now the honour to enclose for the information of His Excellency the High Commissioner and the British Government sworn declarations of: 1. Commandant Cronjé, substantiated by Field-Cornet Maartens and Assistant Field-Cornet Van Vuuren. Commandant Potgieter. Commandant Malan.