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The Industry sailed along over the ocean for about two weeks and nothing much happened, and she wasn't so very far from the coast of Spain; perhaps she was three or four hundred miles away. For, on that voyage, she was bound to Leghorn, first, and then she was going to Java and Manila.
There are authorities, such as Deniker, who hold that even the latest research shows these remains to be Pliocene, but it is disputed. The Java race may be a surviving remnant of an earlier phase of human evolution. The most interesting subject for inquiry is the fortune of our human and prehuman forerunners during the Pliocene and Pleistocene periods.
We at length passed through the straits of Patientia, but did not get the breeze until we sighted the Isle of Bouro. Passing through the Bonta passage, straits of Salayer, and Java sea, we arrived at Sincapore on the 28th of June. Here we found the Harlequin, which had had a brush with the pirates on the coast of Sumatra.
On the 30th, as we were steering south-west, we kept a good lookout all night for the islands called Keelings, or Cocos Islands; being uncertain whether their situation was well ascertained: at noon on the 31st, the latitude observed was 12° 10' south; this I supposed to be rather to the southward of them, and altered the course to west-south-west: at three in the afternoon, we discovered the islands under our lee, distant about four leagues: there are three of them well covered with wood, but they are very low and flat; there are several smaller spots like rocks above water; the larger islands have sandy beaches, and in many places there were very high breakers: the latitude of the south side is 12° 06' south; the longitude by account from Java Head, but afterwards confirmed by observations of is 98° 03' east.
What is still more singular, these lakes are the craters of inactive volcanoes. But Sumatra, like Java, has many active volcanoes. One of these, Dempo, is almost constantly active. Every now and then it discharges great quantities of sulphur gases; these are caught by the rain and, falling on the cultivated lands, kill pretty nearly everything touched.
There is a poison-tree in the island of Java, which is said by its effluvia to have depopulated the country for 12 or 14 miles round the place of its growth.
Early in this year Andreas Hurtado de Mendoza with a stately fleet of galleons and smaller vessels, more than five-and-twenty in all, was on his way towards the island of Java to inflict summary vengeance upon those oriental rulers who had dared to trade with men forbidden by his Catholic Majesty and the Pope.
A Genoese had led the way to America, while one Portuguese mariner had been the first to double the southern cape of Africa, and another, at the opposite side of the world, had opened what was then supposed the only passage through the vast continent which, according to ideas then prevalent, extended from the Southern Pole to Greenland, and from Java to Patagonia.
He came staggering under his double burden, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament.
I always feel that I taste my coffee mostly with my nose nothing refreshes me like the clean, keen fragrance of it especially after broken rest. It is idle to talk as so many authorities do, of using "Java and Mocha blended." All the real Java and Mocha in the world is snapped up, long before it filters down to the average level.
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