Besides A Small Cottage Occupied By The Workmen, There
Was A Large Shed For Tobacco Drying, A Corner Of Which
Was
offered me; and thinking from the look of the place that I should
find- good collecting ground here, I
Fitted up temporary tables,
benches, and beds, and made all preparations for some weeks'
stay. A few days, however, served to show that I should be
disappointed. Beetles were tolerably abundant, and I obtained
plenty of fine long-horned Anthribidae and pretty Longicorns, but
they were mostly the same species as I had found during my first
short visit to Amboyna. There were very few paths in the forest;
which seemed poor in birds and butterflies, and day after day my
men brought me nothing worth notice. I was therefore soon obliged
to think about changing my locality, as I could evidently obtain
no proper notion of the productions of the almost entirely
unexplored island of Ceram by staying in this place.
I rather regretted leaving, because my host was one of the most
remarkable men and most entertaining companions I had ever met
with. He was a Fleeting by birth, and, like so many of his
countrymen, had a wonderful talent for languages. When quite a
youth he had accompanied a Government official who was sent to
report on the trade and commerce of the Mediterranean, and had
acquired the colloquial language of every place they stayed a few
weeks at. He had afterwards made voyages to St. Petersburg, and
to other parts of Europe, including a few weeks in London, and
had then come out to the past, where he had been for some years
trading and speculating in the various islands. He now spoke
Dutch, French, Malay, and Javanese, all equally well; English
with a very slight accent, but with perfect fluency, axed a most
complete knowledge of idiom, in which I often tried to puzzle him
in vain. German and Italian were also quite familiar to him, and
his acquaintance with European languages included Modern Greek,
Turkish, Russian, and colloquial Hebrew and Latin. As a test of
his power, I may mention that he had made a voyage to the out-of-
the-way island of Salibaboo, and had stayed there trading a few
weeks. As I was collecting vocabularies, he told me he thought he
could remember some words, and dictated considerable number. Some
time after I met with a short list of words taken down in those
islands, and in every case they agreed with those he had given
me. He used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned
from some Jews with whom he had once travelled, and astonished by
joining in their conversation, and had a never-ending fund of
tale and anecdote about the people he had met and the places he
had visited.
In most of the villages of this part of Ceram are schools and
native schoolmasters, and the inhabitants have been long
converted to Christianity.
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