devouring a portion of my mosquito curtain!
April 28th.—Last evening we had a grand consultation, which had evidently
been arranged and discussed beforehand. A number of the natives gathered
round me, and said they wanted to talk. Two of the best Malay scholars helped
each other, the rest putting in hints and ideas in their own language. They told
me a long rambling story; but, partly owing to their imperfect knowledge of
Malay, partly through my ignorance of local terms, and partly through the
incoherence of their narrative, I could not make it out very clearly. It was,
however, a tradition, and I was glad to find they had anything of the kind. A long
time ago, they said, some strangers came to Aru, and came here to Wanumbai,
and the chief of the Wanumbai people did not like them, and wanted them to go
away, but they would not go, and so it came to fighting, and many Aru men were
killed, and some, along with the chief, were taken prisoners, and carried away by
the strangers. Some of the speakers, however, said that he was not carried away,
but went away in his own boat to escape from the foreigners, and went to the sea
and never came back again. But they all believe that the chief and the people that
went with him still live in some foreign country; and if they could but find out
where, they would send for them to come back again. Now having some vague
idea that white men must know every country beyond the sea, they wanted to
know if I had met their people in my country or in the sea. They thought they
must be there, for they could not imagine where else they could be. They had
sought for them everywhere, they said—on the land and in the sea, in the forest
and on the mountains, in the air and in the sky, and could not find them;
therefore, they must be in my country, and they begged me to tell them, for I
must surely know, as I came from across the great sea. I tried to explain to them
that their friends could not have reached my country in small boats; and that
there were plenty of islands like Aru all about the sea, which they would be sure
to find. Besides, as it was so long ago, the chief and all the people must be dead.
But they quite laughed at this idea, and said they were sure they were alive, for
they had proof of it. And then they told me that a good many years ago, when
the speakers were boys, some Wokan men who were out fishing met these lost
people in the sea, and spoke to them; and the chief gave the Wokan men a
hundred fathoms of cloth to bring to the men of Wanumbai, to show that they
were alive and would soon come back to them, but the Wokan men were thieves,
and kept the cloth, and they only heard of it afterwards; and when they spoke
about it, the Wokan men denied it, and pretended they had not received the
cloth;—so they were quite sure their friends were at that time alive and
somewhere in the sea. And again, not many years ago, a report came to them that