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Updated: May 28, 2025
Its northern edge did not reach Coepang, but a strong gale from the south-west on the 26th showed that it was passing. Most probably it took a more southerly course before reaching Timor.* We were informed at Timor that hurricanes were never felt there, but occur once in four or five years to the southward of it.
When at Coepang we saw some specimens of the gold, collected after heavy rains from the washings of the hills, and brought down for barter to the merchants in grains enclosed in small lengths of bamboo, containing each from six to eighteen drams. Thirty miles south-west of Diely, also, are some mines of virgin copper.
Having done much to determine the size and formation of the great bight called Shark's Bay, the NATURALISTE resumed her voyage, and joined her consort at Coepang, finding the GEOGRAPHE had arrived there more than a month before. The NATURALISTE, more fortunate than her companion, had few cases of scurvy on board, owing principally to their many and long stoppages on shore.
Another of the many instances of the hasty and fallacious deductions of first discovery, a second proof of which was afforded on the arrival of the BEAGLE at Swan River, whither, after calling at Coepang, they directed her course. Here they found the colonists in a state of doubt as to the existence of an inlet called Port Grey.
The Rajahs of the western portion of Timor receive their appointment from the Resident at Coepang; and their installation I am told is rather a grand affair. Nearly all the Timorees speak Malay, a soft pleasant-sounding tongue, apparently easy to be acquired; but there were few of the Coepang people that spoke the native language.
The guns were very much out of repair, and when the remark was made to the old Spaniard who showed the fort, that they would not bear to be fired out of ONCE, with a shrug of his shoulders he replied that he thought they would bear it TWICE! But to return to Fort Concordia: it stands on a madreporic rocky eminence, about 60 feet in elevation, commanding the straggling town of Coepang, which, certainly, from the anchorage does not impress the stranger with a favourable opinion of the industry of its inhabitants, though it improves in proportion as you retreat from the beach.
Their hair, which is neither woolly nor straight, but crisp, and full of small waves, is worn long behind, and kept together by a curiously formed comb. There is altogether a degree of wildness in their appearance that ill accords with their situation; for nearly all the Timorees in Coepang are slaves sold by the Rajahs of the different districts, the value of a young man being fifty pounds.
Some of the Timor customs are singular: if a woman, for example, dies in childbirth, she is buried on the spot where she breathes her last. During our stay at Coepang I met the doctor of the Dutch settlement at Triton Bay, on the west coast of New Guinea. He gave me a very poor account of the inhabitants.
These by irrigation are turned into paddy plantations, the winds blowing over which give rise to those insidious fevers, intermittent, I am told, in their character, which are so prevalent at Coepang, as well as dysentery, from which indeed the crew of the Beagle afterwards suffered. The whole force the Dutch have at Coepang is sixty soldiers, half of whom, too, are Javanese.
The winds were singularly light from the eastward, until we approached Timor, the South-West end of which we saw in the morning of the 15th,* when, after passing through Samow Strait, we anchored in 13 fathoms off Coepang; the flagstaff of Fort Concordia bearing South-South-East a quarter of a mile.
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