Mergui Archipelago

THE MERGUI or MYEIK ARCHIPELAGO

A DOCUMENTARY FROM THE PAST - around 1900, which actually is the same today, the only difference is today the only western foreigner there are scuba diving tourists on life aboard trips out of Phuket , Thailand.

It is a natural transition from the pearl divers town in the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago with its notable past, to the island country that spreads away beyond it, far into the territories of the sea. Of all that has happened amongst the islands of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago since men first came to live and move amongst them, there is no record, and there never will be any now. Here and there only the curtain of the unknown is lifted for a passing moment. Their main, and it would seem their earliest, human interest centre in the fast-dying colony of the Salon, which has made of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands its last refuge. 

Salon village on Makyone Galet Island Mergui Myeik Archipelago Andaman Sea Myanmar	When or whence they came, one can only guess ; andwhether they had any human predecessors it is difficult even to conjecture. But it is probable that they are an extremely ancient people, kindred of that aboriginal stock which peopled the mainland before the advent of the Htai. The main body of these aborigines drifted away under the pressure of the Htai to the south, there to develop into the Malay race. A fragment of them retreated to the shelter of the islands ; and there, cut off from civilizing influences, they have made no progress, and too weak to face their adversaries, they have developed the nomadic life, the habit of few possessions, of flight at the sight of a stranger.
The attrition of time and the cruelty of man have worn away the race to its present proportions. It has too long bowed down its head, too long ceased to make any effort after greater things to have any future before it. The Malay who is of kin will acknowledge no relationship, and in times that arc past he has been its most cruel oppressor. The fire of Islam, which has molten the Malay into a people, has never warmed the aboriginal Salon. A great gulf of time must therefore separate them and these islands must have known the Salon for far more than a thousand years. Almost the first account of the of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago, written by a European traveler, is that of Caesar Frederick the Venetian. It has all the charm and interest of early travel ; and is best told in the language of his time. " From ye port of Pechinco," he says, " I went to Cochin, and from Cochin to Malaca, whence I departed from Pegu - Bago eight hundred miles distant, that voyage was to be made in twenty five or thirty days, but wee were for months, and at the end of three months our Ship was without victual’s. The Pilot told us that wee were by his altitude from a city called Tenassiry - Tenasserim, a city in the Kingdome of  Pegu - Bago, and these his words were not true, but we were (as it were) in the middle of many Islands, and many uninhabited rocks, and there were also some Portugals that affirmed that they knew the land. I say being amongst these rocks, and from the land which is over against Tenassary - Tenasserim, withgreat scarcities of victual’s, and that by the saying of the pylate and two Portugalles holding them firm that we were in front of the aforesaid harbor, we determined to go thither with our boat and fetch victual’s, and that the ship should stay for us in a place assigned ; we were twenty and eight persons in the boat that went for victual’s, and on a day about twelve of the clock we went from the Ship, assuring ourselves to be in the harbor before night in the afore said port ; wee rowed all that day, and a great part of the next night, and all the next day without finding harbor, or any sign of good landing, and this came to pass through the evil counsel of the two Portugalles that were with us. " For we had overshot the harbor and left it behind us, in such wise that we had lost the land, inhabited with the ship, and we twenty eight men had no manner of victual with us in the boat, but it was the Lords will that one of the Mariners had brought a little Rice with him in the boat to barter away for some other thing, and it was not so much but three or four men would have eaten it at a meal : I took the government of this Rice promising by the help of God that Rice should be nourishment for us until it pleased God to send us to some place that was inhabited, and when I slept I put the rice into my bosom because they should not rob it from me : We were nine days rowing along the coast, without finding anything but Countries uninhabited, and deserts Island, where if we had found but grass it would have seemed Sugar unto us, but wee could not find any, yet wee found a few leaves of a tree, and they were so hard that we could not chew them ; we had water and wood sufficient, and as we rowed, we could go but by flowing water, for when it was ebbing water, we made fast our boat to the bank of one of these Islands, and in these nine days that we rowed, wee found a cave or nest of Tortugas eggs, wherein was a hundred and forty four eggs, the which was a great help unto us : these eggs are as big as a hens egg, and have no shell about them but a tender skin, every day we sodde a kettle full of them eggs with an handful of rice
in the broth thereof : it pleased God that at the end of nine days, we discovered certain fishermen, a fishing with small boats, and wee rowed towards them, with a good cheer for I think there were never men more glad than we were, for we were so sore afflicted with penuries that we could scarce stand on our legs. The first village that we came too, was in the Gulfe of Tavay -Dawai, under the King of Pegu -Bago." For the subsequent experience of the travelers, and the fortune of the ship left behind without a boat to help her, reference may be made to the original of Messer Frederick. The Portuguese Trace His adventures occurred about the year 1567, and it is certain that at that time the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands were well known to the Portuguese. For it is on record that a fleet of Portuguese ships sent by the Viceroy of Goa about the year 545, to search for an island of gold in the Bay of Bengal found it in a manner, by taking to piracy and preying on passing vessels from the shelter offered by the archipelago. " For eight months and more," says Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, " our hundred Portugals had scoured up and down this coast in four well-rigged Foists, wherewith they had taken three and twenty rich ships, and many other lesser vessels, so that they which used to sail in those parts were so terrified with the sole name of the Portugals, as they quitted their Commerce, without use of their shipping ;  By this increase of trade the Custom houses of the Ports of Tanancarim, Juncalan, Merguim, Vagarun, and Tavay fell much in their Revenue, in so much that those people were constrained to give notice of it to the Emperor of Sornan, King of Siam, and Sovereign Lord of all that Country, beseeching him to give a remedy to this mischief, whereof every one complained."
The king despatched against the pirates a fleet of " five Foists, four Galliots, and one Gally Royal," under the command .of a Turkish adventurer, named Heredrin Mahomet ; and " Within these vessels he inbarqued eight hundred Mahometans, men of combat (besides the Mariners) amongst the which were three hundred Janizaries, as for the rest they were Turks, Greeks, Malabars, Achems, and Mogores, all choyce men, and so disciplined that their captain held the victory already for most assured " The Portuguese were nevertheless victorious. " The dog Heredrin Mahomet was slain amongst the rest, and in this great action God was so gracious to our men, and gave them their victory at so cheap a rate that they had but one young man killed, and nine Portugal’s hurt."

Piracy has in short ever found the archipelago a happy resort.

In later days Ilha Grande, now known as King's Island, was bestowed on the French by the King of Siam, and might have become, with its ample bay, an important settlement. But it was never used, except in later days by French ships of war, during the wars between England and France, as a place from which to attack and capture British merchant vessels ; and as a place of refuge, when British ships of war were abroad.

Exploring the Mergui Myeik Archipelago Andaman Sea Myanmar

The Esther Brig in the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago Almost the first English attempt to navigate the islands of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago and prepare a chart of the archipelago was made by Captain Forrest, whose journal of the Esther brig, from Bengal to Quedah, narrates how, in 1783, he was driven amongst the islands by the monsoon winds, and gave to many of them names (which they still bear) " in remembrance of Friends whom I Honor and Respect," and others " according to striking appearances and figures." The ardent Helfer spent a whole winter

here in 1838-9, shortly before his death from an Andamanese arrow. Since then many persons have visited the of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands, and more than one effort has been made to reclaim the Salon to Christianity and civilization. But little has been done towards the complete exploration of  the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago. Its islands range from bare rocks to rich territories like those of Kisseraing and King's susceptible of the finest cultivation. Their fauna include elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers, and the whale may often be seen plunging amidst the calm of their interior seas.

On Our Way

The launch, with loud heart beating, drives a pathway through the narrow strait. Turning our backs upon Mergui, now hidden behind Patit, we reach a space of green sun-touched water, with low mangrove swamps upon our larboard bows. Upon our starboard the mountains of King's Island, cloven to a third of their height by dark lines of swamp forest, reach into the heart of the swooning clouds. We arc steering south by west for the island country, and the most notable object in view is the pyramid of Merghi Island, sixteen hundred feet above the sea. Nearer, several others lie in our way, outlined in solid forms against the misty blue of their lofty companion. Away under the opal sky, there is a narrow mirror-like calm, which makes the islands in its compass seem unreal ; mere phantoms of the vision suspended between earth and heaven. In striking contrast, the sailing-boats of the coast fishers are cut in black patterns against the clouds.

No two consecutive moments present the same spectacle. The clouds melt from one ecstasy of beauty into another ; the sea, played upon by the wind, is one instant billowy and placid as oil, another crimped with laughter, a third a meadow of diamonds in the sudden sun ; and the brave launch, leaping forward, overcomes space, so that the dreamiest island becomes a reality, the most palpable one of woods and precipices a dream. The sailing-junks, with their double diamonds of black sail suspended above their small hulls, fill the eye with the spectacle of their grace ; saying that man has never invented anything more in harmony with nature than a sail.

And presently we fall into company. The junks driven by the wind, come up in a great flight, with the swell of a bevy of portly matrons, all ribbons and bosom ; the wrecker, very surly and dirty, overtakes us to starboard, flinging silver from his bows ; and in the offing there is the first Salon boat moving to the impulse of a small white sail. The wrecker looks evil enough for any trade, and as he leaves us behind him in spite of all our pace, is like a big cur in a run after Jack, outpacing some gallant little panting fox-terrier, all heart and pluck, but too short dear fellow, in his legs to keep ahead. No matter ; we will come in yet.

The Salon of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago here is eloquent of the irony which relegates this country of beautiful islands to an abject and dying race. Their rich luxuriance is beyond belief. They look as if they were forests sprung from the bottom of the sea. There is scarcely an inch of them that does not teem with life. There are islands of such length and altitude that they might be portions of a continent, and others, happily, that are palpable islands, with the sea in a ring all round them, waiting for you or me to go along and give them a name. And out of the misty void each moment, new islands are born like stars on a summer night.

As the afternoon grows we steer for a silver strait, all molten and a-fire, between blue of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago island portals. And passing through them we come up a wide sea, Ross and Elphinstone in long mountains on the west, Burnett behind us, and Merghi Islands hard on our left ; dark blue, with a lane of sea between and faint purple ridges beyond. It is a lane that invites one to enter. On Cantor, a brief way ahead, with single palms in outline on its crest, there is a settlement of Salon, learning, or trying to learn, the hard alphabet of civilization. As the afternoon wanes and earth moves up against the sun, the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands that have been every color all day, from tropic green to misty northern blue, turn to their proper purple. In the cast a curtain of velvet rain blots out the main of bay and peak and cove ; but elsewhere each island stands out distinct and clear in its own serene personality. Nearest to us now and happily appropriate to the season of our voyage are the Christmas Islands. The sea is billowy, undulating, tumultuous almost. In a bigger ship it's swell would pass unnoticed, but our Marguerite is a small craft. We arc steering for the Criddles in twenty fathoms of water, but the gunner has his eyes on a sunken rock. Soon we shall turn away to the south to anchor for the night in the bay of the Amboyna disaster. The white clouds above the rain purple of Morrison's Bay catch the lessening light and fling it down upon the sea, which straight­way becomes all silver as though the moon were up. Between Court and Criddles there is nothing but the monsoon sea. And so we come upon the glory of the closing day. The sun's golden light, stealing out from under clouds, sends a long stream of fire down the sea, fills with lightning a diadem of cloud that sits upon the brows of the Mew Stone, and swiftly turns that island, purple a moment earlier, into such a haze of supernatural flame as our eyes dare not look upon. It is flame cut in flame, and no more an island. In a little while the pageant is over. The great world swings up like a porpoise in the sea ; the sun's last arc of fire is swallowed in the void, and the Mew Stone, in the instant of its passing, becomes the darkest purple under the firmament. For a rose haze still lingers upon the fringes of the sea, and clouds in a great circle catch up and reflect the fragments of prismatic color into which the pure sunlight is now broken. The sky becomes a palette, the sea a pool of pink. And as the grey closes in, the patch last touched by the sun grows iridescent as a pearl, in waves upon waves of transient blending color.

Beautiful as is the day, there is a subtle and deeper fascination in the dark.

The world closes in and leaves us the centre of a new universe. I seem by some miracle to have been brought here into the midst of these lonely islands, and the panting dauntless engine that has brought me is like another carpet of Solomon magically put at my service. For, a month ago, I was afoot in the greatest of cities, a straw on the driving tide of its life ; this morning I was ashore, near a court-house, a prison, and a town ; and now, in the company of nameless shadowy islands, I am being swiftly borne away upon the bosom of the dark. A star shines out on the horizon like a beacon or a lighthouse, larger than any star I have ever seen ; grey clouds drift like phantoms in the wake of the departed sun, and each moment the constellations grow in multitude and splendor.

Steering by instinct through the pitchy night of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago, we cast anchor at last in the wake of the wrecked Amboyna ; and the speculative salvage-man in blue garments, his feet naked, comes on board to tell me how he has fought with Chinese and Malay, been prisoner and escaped ; how he has lived for three and thirty years in the East, and has a wife and children in Scotland, but finds folk at home cold and indifferent to one who has spent his life abroad. The cry of all old wanderers.

I pass the night on the floor of the launch with nothing between my vision and the stars. The sea is but a yard below, the roof shelters me without shutting out the sky. All my world for the time is about me ; the gunner, the sea-Gunny, the engineer, and the crew. And here on the trackless seas, the sentiment of our common humanity surpasses all lesser considerations. The same conditions affect us all alike.

Some time in the night I wake, and my eyes arc dazzled by the lustrous moon hung up in the firmament above me. I sleep again, and wake to find the messengers of day abroad ; lictors with their faces, who fling themselves upon the world and hid it prepare in beauty for the coming of their lord. Strung along the east there is a chain of islands each link a mountain pyramid, the pale sea between crinkling with the first breeze of the dawn.

The first familiar object that greets me is the Marguerite's gig in the wake of the golden dawn ; the crew in her fishing with lines. Far away in the distance a ship is passing silently, a phantom amidst the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands.

Turning to look about me I find that we are at anchor in a small bay, which lies but half awake in an arm of Bentinck Island. As the sun climbs, the island turns a rich and golden green, its beauty reflected in the olive water. But for a wisp of yellow sand along the sea-edge, its entire face is covered with woods of the noblest character. Little valleys run down it to the sea, a thousand birds are singing their un­familiar matins to the day, and trees with long white trunks shining in the light, break up the mass of foliage into aisles, and make the island seem like some Gothic cathedral wrought in an Oriental texture. A few paces off lies the dishevelled Amboyna, her funnel once black, now rust-red in the sea air.

I make my way on board, climbing with some effort through the trenchant air to the upper deck. Mr. McPhairson in blue clothes cut all of a piece like the garments in which infancy is wont to pass its nights, is on board, tanned and ruddy, grizzled, large and weighty of hand and foot, smoked glasses veiling his small blue dogged eyes.

" You don't notice a smell ? " he asks—" a kind of effluvium ? " Candour and courtesy conflict in my mind.

I admit at last that I do.

" Ah," he replies, a little troubled upon the matter, " I was just wondering if it was away, or that I was growing accustomed to it a bit."

Half of her is under water. The fore-end of her is out of the wet, and a Chinese carpenter is at work drilling holes in a plank. On the hurricane ­deck—the Captain's walk—the pumps arc busy, and the glass face of the indicator, like a ship's clock, shows the pressure under which a man is working twenty feet below the level of the sea. A long tube of gutta-percha leads away across a hoarding built of planks, over the sunken middle of the ship. At the edge a'strange man in blue with a Chinese hat is standing acting as a human pulley for the tube. Another sits holding a rope connected with the diver's helmet. Yet another holds the tube of air—the life-line—and lets it slowly slip through his half-closed hand. With head bowed down and hands outstretched, he is, I can see, absorbed in the delicate work that is his. There is something electric in the slow rustle of the rope through his nervous hands. And he has in his keeping the life of the man below in the blind water.

To my unaccustomed eyes there is nothing visible but a hoarding below the surface, and a tube let into the water of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago, but the silent men clustered in the daylight above know well what is afoot below. Old McPhairson, the speculator, interjects occasional remarks. " He is walking now, along the lower deck," as the line suddenly runs out.

" Eh, but he is in the hold away below now, lifting the cargo," as a few bubbles rise to the surface.

"He would be about there now," pointing to a white stanchion out of the water ; and then quickly, "here she comes," as a sudden turbulence in the water and a rush of air bubbles herald the approach of a sack of cargo.

" Chilies," he observes sententiously, as a party of red skirmishers rise up and spread out in a fan upon the water, to be followed by a black and rotten sack, which a waiting man with a large pole thrusts away to sea. In this way rice, chilies, prawns, and tobacco come up and float away, the bay becoming alive with them.

McPhairson, who goes down frequently himself, says the prawns cut his skin, and he points to his red scarred feet.

Silently a diver comes up, has his iron helmet lifted off his collar­bones, and sits dazed and dull in the sunlight, shivering in the gills. Another takes his place.

" They get mortal cold down there," says McPhairson.

" It's a warm day," I remark.

" And may it continue so," he replies ; " for the water takes all the heat out of you down below, and the wind cuts you when you come up.

The other day now, when it was a bit cold, every time I came up I had to get them to wrap me in a blanket."

All this time there is an anxious manner about the man. His launch, the wrecker, and Captain Le Fevre has not yet come in.

" And the Lord," he says, " knows what has become of her. Oh ! hut, if she is wrecked, there will be a shindy at home when her owners come to hear of it."

At last the laggard comes in sight.

"There she is."

" Time she was," he cries out. " I have passed but a poor night because of her. If I am so fortunate as to get this job through success­fully, I will never again undertake another like it. I am fifty-five the day," he adds, mopping his strong face, " and not the man I was." Yet he looks a man of iron.

The wrecker comes up ; the captain with unkempt hair, and blue shirt flapping outside his trousers, blowing his last anxious instruction through a speaking tube to the engine-room below. The mate, with a big hand which he uses with emotion, and bare feet in white canvas shoes, out at toes and heels, steps on the hurricane deck of the Amboyna. He speaks, encouraged by McPhairson, with anger and contempt of his captain. Clearly in this triumvirate Le Fevre is in a minority of one.

" Hect," says McPhairson, " he is that sort of man who can neither lead nor follow. A coward, Sirr, always on the look-out for what he don't want to see ; a-dreamin' of rocks ten miles inside his course. Phew ! " he adds, sweeping his ruddy face with a blue bandana, " and to think of the night I've spent."

McPhairson by his venture stood to lose two thousand pounds, or win a competency. Long after, I heard with regret that he had lost.

The Pearl Diver of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago

Steaming along by South Passage Island we come suddenly upon a Salon camp. There is a fan of white sand with some boats and huts upon it, and I can see a few men and women moving. By the time I can step ashore—and it takes no more than five minutes over the transparent water—they have all effaced themselves in the primitive woodland, and only one man remains looking ill at ease. The sea-cunny goes with him, shouting to the woods, in the hope of inducing the others to return. The encampment consists of three boats and three huts ; but to call them huts is to misname them, for they arc of all human habitations the slightest. They consist of a few thin sticks—I can count six upright and three laid horizontally, in one—and a frail pleated mat laid over the top. A mat of bamboo strips is spread on the white sand within. Some of their few possessions are scattered around ; bags, baskets, and bedding of mat, and other articles showing some contact with civilization ; large Pegu – Bago jars, Chinese bowls and plates, a knife or two, an old beer bottle full of wild honey, a couple of wooden boxes—that is all. The spectacle that spreads beyond is of a purple lake, studded on its circumference with blue islands. The sunlight dances on the water, the sea hurtles very gently against the white sand, bees hum in the motionless air, and a bird pipes in the brake. From the deep recesses of the woods comes faintly the voice of the sea-cunny, calling to the trembling hidden people without avail. It is a dreamy soft and beautiful corner of the world, oceans away from this morning's bay and the Scotchman with his divers at work. The Marguerite lying at anchor in the offing, and puffing clouds of white steam against the purple seascape, looks like the denizen of another world. The shimmering heat plays a fugue before my drowsy eyes. . . . I turn with an effort to the realities about me.

The white sand is marked with the footprints of the colony. Its only representative stands half-cowed with fear, a deep, dull, suspicion linger­ing in his eyes. He is a short, strong, black-skinned man, with a sparse moustache and no beard, a loin-cloth and a bandana, both red. He tells the sea-cunny that they came here yesterday, and that they will leave as soon as they have collected enough of a palm with which to renew the upper portions of their boats. It is fiercely hot, and the sea-cunny says the heads of the Salon infants grow red in the sun. They live rough lives, and die hard.

Leaving Bentinck Island in the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago and the Perforated rock, we steer directly for the Sisters. Islands bare as Sark lie upon our right, of fantastic form. One is like a Japanese eagle, another like a palace, a third is like a cathedral in the distance.

For the first time now we come upon a pearl diver, sweeping slowly with long oars along a line of shadow, under the precipitous flanks of Maria, most northerly of the Sisters. These islands nearly all stand clean out of the water, and look as if they had no interiors but only summits to be climbed with difficulty. The first of the boats I see is the property of Olpherts the little clerk ; the second of the German Hertzog. The sea is placid as blue marble swaying with the first beat of life. Black rocks show their fangs in the sun, and deep pacific harbors lie between the islands. Between Maria and Elizabeth, where the rocks are strung in a line across the strait, there is a wonderful blaze of sea.

The pearl diver, more numerous now, are scattered like islands on the sun-steeped ocean, and with the aid of a telescope I can tell if they are at work, from the dark figure of the life-line man erect at the stern.

As we gradually approach I find that four men are working at the pump wheel, two with their hands and two with their feet. A man at the oar is slowly propelling the boat in sympathy with the buried diver below, and two men stand silhouetted against the sky, one at the life, the other at the head-line ; the latter the tender and leader of the boat.

For a little space of time we wait, listening to the monotonous screeching of the wheel ; then the rope tightens, the tender hauls, a burst of bubbles is borne up in tumult to the surface, the tenders run swiftly together, and the diver, like a strange beast hooked up from the sea-deeps, emerges and clings to the ladder over the side of the boat. And there he lies, bent over, the type of exhaustion. The crew hasten to raise his helmet, and lightened of its burden, he steps on deck, his startled Japanese head showing out of his monstrous clothes, his eyes blinking with the change from the deep sea floor to its sunlit surface. In a small brown net, like those which old ladies use in England when they go a-shopping, lie the shells he has found. Anything from sixpence each to a thousand pounds.

We move on and I find Allingham in the midst of his boats, a pile of shells about him. He uses a big flat blade and peers as he opens the shells into their lustrous depths ; flinging the meat with its food of live red prawns into a bucket of water, which he afterwards searches with fingers skilled with usage. When he has gone tragically through the entire pile finding nothing, I descend with him into his cabin, garnished with bottles of sauce, a rusty tin containing a few pearls, an iron safe, an open shell with the mark on it of a rifled pearl, a pipe or two, a tin of " Navy Cut." Enters the German Hertzog, brusque, keen, intelligent, curiosity written large in his eyes. For the coming of the Marguerite is a riddle to be solved. Meanwhile we lie at ease on the cabin roof, and get the launch to tow us to the Bertha at anchor in the shelter of an island. They talk of a Salon camp assembled in the neighborhood, and as we go, I see their fleet of boats making away across the water, in the wake of a double-sailed Chinaman, who has come to trade and barter.

It is evening, the closing hour, and there is a general movement on the seas of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago. The pearl diver-boats are coming in to their rendezvous beside an island, the home of the edible-nest builder, which from its strange picturesque outline is a landmark to them all. It is nearly bare rock, but at its corners trees droop over the sides, like parasols, and it is so much like a Japanese picture, that I give it, in emulation of the worthy Captain Forrest, the name of  Mimosa San. The last pink of the sunset turns the space between the islands into sea-ways of exquisite color. Cliffs and precipices rise up about us, and in their shelter we anchor for the night.

I spend an hour in the Bertha listening to the pleasant German talk of the pearl collectors wife.

" Ach," she says, speaking of the islands, " when I came here, I did think I could never wonder enough. Oh, but they are so beautifully."

While we talk the pearl diver cleans and searches his shells by the lantern-light ; in all he does a man of character. It was he who wrecked the Amboyna ; he has a master's certificate ; but he sits here undaunted in spirit, and he holds on while the Englishmen go, one by one, because he knows how to make an income in many ways. He takes photographs of the islanders, and sells their skulls and skeletons to anthropological institutes in Berlin. He took home a pair of orang-utangs for which he asked 20,000 francs. One died on the way, and the other, as his wife says, " did sigh with his head in his hands ; oh ! so sad, for one of his own nation." A year ago they found a pair of dwarfs, and took them away to Germany, where they are now famous and a source of unascer­tained income to the pearl diver and his wife. He has sent for whaling tackle ; and is, in short, a man of ability. His wife is a plump, bright-eyed, brown-faced girl, with some English which she has learnt since she came to these seas, and many pretty Germanisms. She talks well, and is full of appreciation of every kind of beauty, and what she calls " the Nature.",it is so beautifully. It do make such a theme for the letters home."

Allingham, a red man, sad and bashful, sits on a stool offering a word only now and then.

They talk of ambergris, and whales, and divers' risks ; of two recent deaths from the snapping of the tube (the life-tender hauled hand-over­hand, but not quick enough to save his man, who came up dead and black in the face) ; of divers half-paralyzed and scarce able to walk, who still dive ; of one who tired of life as a cripple, shot himself ; of the man whose helmet being unadjusted let in the water (he signaled, but was kept down, being supposed nervous, and ultimately came up, dead) ; of one whose head swelled up, so that they could scarcely remove the helmet. The diver's life in these seas is risky, short, riotous, lucrative, and there is no lack of apprentices to the trade. And so as we talk, the German finishing his work, falls back into a long armchair ; the poultry in the hen-coop cackle and fill the air with the scent of feathers ; the schooler's dog still wet with the sea, dozes under the lantern's light ; a kettle boils on the hob in the cabin below, and oars splash in the dark­ness, as boats go to and fro. From the distance there are borne upon the swaying sea the voices of the assembled crews, in song, in laughter, in the telling of strange tales before they sleep.

" Well," says Allingham mournfully, " I haven't given up hope yet. From now till April there are still four months to run, and who knows what we may find."

She.—" Oh, but England is already—what you say ?—internatsio ; but in Shermanie they do think much of a tiger-claw necklace. Nicht Mark ? " and at intervals she says soothingly : " So " . .. " So."

With The Salon of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago

During the night the launch and the schooner Bertha developed an intimacy, and the dawn as it came stealing over the seas, found them linked in an embrace of their anchor chains. When at length we got away, day had broken, and we steered into the lake of water between Jane and Charlotte, and thence across the sea to Bushby in the track of the departed gypsies. In the far distance I could trace the smoke of their moving fires, and the gleam of an oar blade as it caught the sun. Skate were flapping about in the sea, and a shoal of small fish leaped and plunged, pursuing and pursued ; the war of nature incessant under the smiling surface of life. The Sisters, all blue and green now, lay strung in a line upon the western sea, and 0 Mimosa San was fading out of sight. Father and Son, a solemn couple, greeted us on the south. I hailed the Chinaman as we came up to him, and he sent off a present of green-snail shells, and a polite message to say that the Salon would rendezvous in his neighborhood in the evening after the day's work.

The green-snail shell is a beautiful object, deep sea-green without, white and iridescent within. All the beauty of the sunset is by some miracle of nature caught and imprisoned in the mould of this deep-sea dweller. And so as we went on, I came upon the Salon in the clear green water, under a rocky coast. There were several boats, and from one a man with a Burman air about him, a very merry fellow, signaled to us to come up that he might look upon us. In the boats before me there were men and women, children and boys, but the young unmarried girls must have hidden themselves away, for I could sec none. The children were of a fairer complexion than their parents, and all but the very youngest were at work with oar or punting pole. The most attractive child of all was a girl almost grown up, bedecked with beads, and swathed in a single garment of blue cloth. She had brown eyes and dark ringlets, and was so frightened at being photographed, that she broke into tears, and was with difficulty reassured. As it was, the tears lay in a rim about her eyes long after she had ceased to cry ; and she could not be persuaded to resume the pole, which she used at the prow of her father's boat with an admirable grace. Behind her in the recesses of the boat crouched her grandmother, a midnight hag—type of the terrible old age of the Salon woman. I do not suppose that there is anywhere in the world any one more ugly than an old woman of the Salon.

Harpooning Some of the men plunged with harpoons to show me how they did it, and the exhibition was greeted with peals of laughter from the assembled boats. The harpooner before plunging strains forward, every muscle taut, the whole weight of his body resting on the ball of his foot—a missile incarnate. Then he flings
Salone Harpooning Mergui Myeik Archipelago Myanmar	his harpoon with a whirr through the sunlight, and leaps after it into the water. Spear and man are lost to sight. A moment later up he comes with dripping hair, clutches the cut in the shapely gunwale, and climbs with a swift action into the boat. When engaged in the serious business of fishing, the Salon spear a large fish, like a skate, which lies upon its back in the water and paddles with its wide fins. When the agitation reaches the surface and is caught in the straining vision of the fisher, his boat flies forward, and the harpoon-man, poised on its prow, plunges swiftly on seeing the white stomach of the fish, and drives home his weapon with the weight of his body.
This done, he loosens the spear-head from the shaft and climbs hack into his boat, now speeding over the water in the wake of the maddened fish. Gradually its strength fails it, its speed slackens, it can go no farther. Then it is hauled on board, cut into strips, and dried in the sun. The Salon also dive for pearls, but only in shallow water of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago, now rifled for the most part by the regular pearl diver. " But Lord ! there was a time," as the old sea-captains say, " when good pearls could be had for a pouch of tobacco." That was when the Salon had his island seas to himself, and knew nothing of the value of pearls. But the coming of the pearler has brought enlightenment, and with it scarcity, and the Salon when he does find a pearl, sells it to advantage. The Beche-de-mer is caught by him in baskets of rattan, trailed slowly over the muddy shallows. It is dried in the sun and looks unappetizing enough ; but when soaked in water it becomes like a clean white jelly, and makes a soup that is esteemed good and delicate by the Chinese gourmet. When you think of the Salon's place on the ladder of human life, of his limitations, his approaching extinction, you pity him ; but he has his compensations. His toil is to his liking. He is ever plunging in the warm transparent water, or chasing the wild hog with his dogs. Save that he must live, he is burdened with few cares ; and all said he lives a free, wild, and unfettered existence. That must be dearer to him than the sordid drudgery of his brother, learning here and there the slow lesson of the primitive tiller of the soil. As to schools and so forth, who on earth would willingly exchange the sunlit water, the white sands, and the wandering life, for the finest school in the world ? And religion ? his immortal soul ? It is true the poor Salon is limited in his religious notions. He is much concerned with the devil, whom he finds active in many uncomfortable forms ; he has glimmerings of a good spirit, whose power is unhappily, he finds, usurped by the devil. But the world that might teach him is itself oppressed with such burdens.

The Harpooner Asked where the spirits of evil reside, my cheerful friend to-day, stretch­ing forth his hands, replied : " Everywhere ; in the sea, in the air, in the forests, in the mountains ; sometimes behind one island," pointing vaguely to Eliza, " sometimes behind another," pointing to Jane. He spoke with conspicuous gaiety at the moment, but a mental weariness crept over his eyes as he answered my unfamiliar questions. He grew bored, and his fellow at the prow of their boat began to unfasten the cane that bound it to the launch.

Salone Harpooner Mergui Myeik Archipelago Myanmar

I hastily changed the subject, and with revived interest they came