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How many of the race of man are there whose post-mortem glory outshines life tenfold? Beneath a slab of dead coral on the reef there was revealed one of those primitive and curious marine animals which has no common name, but which science recognises as SYNAPTA BESELLI. It is a relation of the beche-de-mer, of snake-like form, with a group of gills differentiating the head.
Australian gourmands are beginning to appreciate this delicacy, which is said to be marvellously strengthening, though without elaborate cooking it is almost tasteless, and therefore unlike dugong soup, which surpasses turtle in flavour and delicacy, and would fatten up a skeleton. Beche-de-mer is merely a substantial foundation or stock for a more or less artistic culinary effort.
Prior to the year 1890 they were occupied by a BECHE-DE-MER fisherman, whose headquarters were on the chief of the South Barnard Islands some 12 or 14 miles to the north. In fateful March of that year a cyclone swooped down on this part of the coast with the pent up fury of a century's restraint.
The other head, equally ancient, was a white man's, as the heavy blond moustache, twisted and askew on the shrivelled upper lip, gave sufficient advertisement; and Sheldon wondered what forgotten beche-de-mer fisherman or sandalwood trader had gone to furnish that ghastly trophy.
"It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory- nuts, running niggers and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating long-pig.
And he told the why and wherefore of his fear of the sea. With a mate he had been for many months, beche-de-mer fishing, their station or headquarters a lonely islet in Whitsunday Passage, which winds about that picturesque group of islands through which Captain Cook passed in the year 1770.
Beche-de-mer lay in shallow water, thick and big, by the ton.. The reef, with its clear sandy patches, seemed to be the gathering-ground, the metropolis, the parliament of the curious creature which makes feeble eddies with its distended gills, moves with infinite and mysterious deliberation, and which, though it may be two feet long and three inches thick, can pass through a half-inch space, constricting its bulging body during the progress.
Beche-de-mer, is now invariably cooked in iron vessels, the bottom half of a malt tank being a common boiler, and the "red prickly," after being absolutely worthless for many years so quaint are Oriental prejudices is now regaining favour in that market. Beche-de-mer, though called fish by tradesmen, neither swims nor floats; neither does it crawl, nor wriggle, nor hop, skip nor jump.
There are many productions of the archipelago which are only valued in the East, such as bêche-de-mer, or trepang; edible birds' nests, &c. This trade we might very soon monopolise to ourselves, and a most lucrative one it would prove.
As he had foreseen, all the able-bodied men were down at the boat-landing working cargo. The grass houses seemed lifeless, but at last, from one of them, came a challenge in the querulous, high-pitched tones of age: "What name?" "Me walk about plenty too much," he replied in the beche-de-mer English of the west South Pacific. "Me belong along steamer.
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