“What about?” I asks.
“The beauty of the scenery,” he replies.
Off we started. Germans are some good, they can make roads—if I haven’t told you Levua was a German island, I’ll tell you now. I’m saying Germans can make roads, and if you doubt me, go and see the twelve-mile coral road they’ve made round Nauru or what they’ve done in German New Guinea, and the road to Marks’ plantation was as good as those.
Coming along for late afternoon we hit the place, and found Marks in. Marks was like one of those Dutchmen you see in the comic papers, long china pipe and all, but he was the most level-headed man in the Islands, and I soon found that Buck had come to him for information and not to talk about the beauty of the scenery.
We had drinks and cigars, and presently Buck says to Marks, “Look here,” he says, “you’re a man that knows everything about the West Pacific, s’pose I found an island that wasn’t on the charts and didn’t belong to anybody, which of the blessed nations would make a claim to it; would it be the one whose territory was closest to it?”
Marks leans back in his chair and lights his pipe again, then he says: “If you find an unknown island, it would belong to England or Germany, all depends on where it lies in the West Pacific.”
“How’s that?” says Buck. “Why wouldn’t the French or Dutch have a look in?”
“It’s this way,” says Marks, “Germany in old days wasn’t a sea-going nation much, and so the English and French and Dutch took up nearly all the islands of the Pacific, leaving Germany in the cold till 1865, when she began to want things and show that she could get them. She took a big bite of New Guinea, then she came to an arrangement with England that she and England would take all the lands and islands in the West Pacific no one else had seized and divide them between them. Get me?”
“Yes,” says Buck.
“The line starts from New Guinea,” says Marks, “then goes east, then north to fifteen degrees north latitude, and 173 degrees, 30 seconds east longitude; anything new found west of that would be German, anything to the east, British.”