Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

I learned one morning during my stay that the people of Ternate had been considering me, and had concluded that I must be there because I wanted pearls. Pearls were brought to me. Patient figures would squat for hours on the veranda, waiting for my return, and would then approach in disarming politeness with small packets on outspread palms. These contained globules of many shades, some of them attractive. But I was as well satisfied in looking at them as if I had possessed them. Could I have done more than admire them if I had bought the lot. My knowledge of Malay, however, is insufficient for me to convey to pearl merchants my oddities in esthetics and the ethics of property, and so they left me, most reluctantly, and I believe under the impression that I am an extremely knowing purchaser of pearls, and one it is hard to deceive. Then the merchants of Ternate, finding that I had rejected their entire stock of pearls, tried me with some gems and stones of these volcanic islands which were more interesting than the pearls, but very poor relatives, nevertheless, of tourmaline, jacinth, rock crystal, peridot, and such. These failed. Then to my veranda came coins of the old Dutch East India Company, and even some ancient Portuguese silver, and two eighteenth-century Dutch glass tumblers. I held an audience with curios every morning after breakfast, and was startled once to find in a packet containing shells two of Queen Victoria's sovereigns. The last time I saw sovereigns was in Paris in 1914, and then they were mine.

I touched those relics reverently, to the great approval of their owner, who thought at last he had found me at home. In a week I supposed I had seen all Ternate's jewels and oddities outside the old palace of the last sultan (who is now safely sequestered in Java), but one morning a box was placed at my feet, and a cus-cus was released. I saw at once I did not require a cus-cus, but encouraged the keeper of it with money to let the little creature play about. No evidence could have assured me with greater certainty that I was nearly as far from Singapore as I was from home. That zoölogical freak belongs to a region sundered from Asia by an oceanic gulf nearly as profound as its age in time.