[60] These were, perhaps, the Moloch lizards (Moloch horridus).
[61] It was not, of course, a hippopotamus, this creature never having penetrated, even in bygone ages, farther eastwards than India, but a dugong. The dugong is a near relation of the manati, which frequents the tropical rivers and estuaries of West Africa, the West Indies, and South America. The place of the manati is taken in the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans by the dugong, which differs from the manati chiefly in having retained in the upper jaw two of the incisor teeth. The manati has only molars, and no front teeth. These incisors of the male dugong develop sometimes into tusks of considerable size—an inferior kind of ivory in the commerce of the Pacific Ocean. The manati, the dugong, and the extinct rhytina of Kamchatka are surviving members of the Sirenian order of aquatic mammals, creatures distantly related to the Ungulate or Hoofed mammals, which adopted an existence in the water ages ago, and gradually lost their hind limbs from disuse. The Sirenians feed only on vegetable food, and the two surviving members of this order, the manati and the dugong, live chiefly on seaweed and the shore vegetation at the mouths of rivers. The manati frequents the coasts of the Atlantic and the dugong those of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
[62] An admirable description of the Island of Timor is given by Dampier, much of which might be applicable to this region at the present day. This large island (some 12,500 square miles in area, 300 miles long, and an average 40 miles broad) lies, as he remarks, nearly north-east and south-west, and consequently somewhat out of the general direction of the other Sunda Islands in the long string between Java on the west and Wetar on the east. Of all the islands of the Malay Archipelago (except the New Guinea group) it is the one which approaches nearest to the Australian continent. On its southern side are tremendously high mountains rising to a culminating altitude of more than 12,000 feet close to the seashore. But a great deal of the actual coastline is obstructed for the access of mariners, especially on the south, by an obstinate fringe of mangroves. The mangrove is a tree which grows out of the mud and shallow sea water, supporting itself by innumerable roots. It is practically impossible for anyone to make their way by land through the mangrove swamps. Beyond the mangroves, before the land rises into mountains, is a stretch of sandy country sparsely clothed with a tree which Dampier describes as a pine, which was more probably the Casuarina. The mountains form an almost continuous chain running through the middle of Timor from one extremity to the other, without outlying mountains of great height in the southern districts. The indigenous inhabitants of Timor are mainly of Papuan or Negroid stock, with a considerable intermixture of Mongolian Malay. As in Dampier's time, so at the present day, the island was practically divided between the Portuguese and the Dutch. What first drew the attention of Portuguese navigators to this out-of-the-way island of the Malay Archipelago is not known to us. They found their way to Timor in 1520, being followed soon afterwards by the ships of Magellan's expedition. The Portuguese have stuck to Timor through all the changing circumstances of their history, even after the Dutch had turned them out of all the other Malay islands. They now are admitted by Holland and the rest of Europe to be the rulers over nearly two-thirds of the island.
[63] Quite distinct from the Gunong Api of the Banda Islands.
[64] Really marking their faces and bodies with huge blobs of skin or scars.
[65] Probably the Taro, the tuberous root of a species of Arum.
[66] The largest and nearly the most northern of the group is named after him.
[67] Admiral Roggeveen is also thought to have first realized the separate, insular character of New Britain in 1723.
[68] The original South Sea Company, which became so notorious through its connection with the first great speculative mania in England in 1720, came into existence in 1711 (partly promoted, it may be, by Dampier and Daniel Defoe), for the purpose of trading with the "South Sea", viz. the Pacific Ocean, and chiefly the west coast of South America and the vaguely known islands of Oceania. It received in course of time certain concessions from Spain, such as the sole right to supply Negro slaves to the Pacific coast of Spanish America, and from the British Government the exclusive monopoly of British trade with the "South Seas". Although fraudulently speculative, it did not smash in 1720, but continued an uncertain existence till 1807. Amongst other privileges it received permission to coin the silver it brought back from Peru into shillings, and these were the "South Sea" shillings—coined mostly in 1723—so often referred to in the history of the eighteenth century.
[69] All of whom died young, from illnesses or accidents. Mrs. Cook, the widow, lived to the age of ninety-three, and died in 1835.