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Updated: June 16, 2025
His proa is the only vessel provided with a compass; it also has one or two swivel or small guns, and is perhaps armed with musquets. Their provisions chiefly consist of rice and cocoa-nuts, and their water which during the westerly monsoon is easily replenished on all parts of the coast is carried in joints of bamboo. Besides trepang, they trade in sharks' fins and birds' nests."
The mode of preserving it is thus the animal is split down on one side, boiled and pressed with a weight of stones, then stretched open by slips of bamboo, dried in the sun and afterwards in smoke, when it is fit to put away in bags, but requires frequent exposure to the sun. There are two kinds of trepang, the black and the white or grey slug."
Half an hour later the proa's cargo of sago and trepang, as well as a doubtful-minded compass, was in the Haliotis. The two huge triangular mat sails, with their seventy-foot yards and booms, had followed the cargo, and were being fitted to the stripped masts of the steamer. They rose, they swelled, they filled, and the empty steamer visibly laid over as the wind took them.
Lieutenant Grey, too, like ourselves, had seen certain individuals, in company with the natives, much lighter in colour, and widely differing in figure and physiognomy from the savages by whom they were surrounded, and was inclined to believe that they are descended from Dutch sailors who, at different times suffering shipwreck upon the coast, have intermarried with its native inhabitants; but as no authentic records can be produced to prove that this portion of the coast was ever visited by Dutch navigators at all, I am still more disposed to believe that these lighter coloured people are Malays captured from the trepang fishers, or, perhaps, voluntarily associating with the Australians, as we know that the Australian not unfrequently abandons his country and his mode of life to visit the Indian Archipelago with them."
He did not want to buy gutta-percha or beeswax, because he intended to employ his numerous crew in collecting trepang on the coral reefs outside the river, and also in seeking for bird's nests on the mainland. Those two articles he professed himself ready to buy if there were any to be obtained in that way.
Some of the islands are turned to profitable account by the export of guano. On Raine Island, so extensive are the deposits of guano that a railroad has been built to facilitate handling the product. Bêche-de-mer, or trepang, is a name applied to the flesh of certain sea slugs or sea worms found in the Indian seas. Of this substance great quantities are gathered annually.
At length we reached the Arru Islands, and entered the port of Dobbo, which is a place of considerable trade with the neighbouring countries, and much frequented by the Bugis and Macassars of Celebes. These islands export a considerable quantity of trepang, tortoise-shell, edible birds' nests, and pearls. The trepang is a sort of sea-slug, which is dried and used by the Chinese to make soup.
The principal exports of the island are coffee, rice, nutmegs, cloves, dammer, copal, rattan, copra, tobacco, trepang, and tortoise-shell; coffee greatly outranking all the other products. Hot, damp, and swampy along the coast lowlands; rugged and fairly pleasant in the high plateau lands that is Borneo, an island as large as the State of Texas.
I climbed into the branches of one, and drank water from a stream passing near its roots, without suffering the slightest inconvenience; at the same time, perhaps, under some circumstances, it may be more hurtful. The chief articles exported by my captors were bees' wax and camphor, honey, vegetable tallow, areca-nuts, trepang dawma, sharks' fins, tortoise-shell, edible birds' nests, and pearls.
Nine months after their landing, a small schooner had called to replenish their supplies, and ship the cured trepang, which by the most assiduous labour and daring enterprise they had accumulated; and when this story opens, the schooner had been gone some weeks, and they and their native workers were preparing their boats for another cruise along the great barrier reef of New Britain.
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