Five Years in China

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. HOW WE REACHED CHINA. Anjer?Fruits?Purveyors?Banyan Tree?Dutch Fort?Maylay In fants? Osmond ?Mohammedans?Shock of an Earthquake? Java Sea?Straits of Banca?Tin Mines?Malay Pirates?China Sea?Beautiful Sunsets?A School of Whales?Coast of China? Chinese Sailors and their Junks?a Pilot?Hong-Kong. We...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. HOW WE REACHED CHINA. Anjer?Fruits?Purveyors?Banyan Tree?Dutch Fort?Maylay In fants? Osmond ?Mohammedans?Shock of an Earthquake? Java Sea?Straits of Banca?Tin Mines?Malay Pirates?China Sea?Beautiful Sunsets?A School of Whales?Coast of China? Chinese Sailors and their Junks?a Pilot?Hong-Kong. We had anchored off Anjer?a Dutch settlement and military post on Java. Daring the two days of our tarrying, the natives brought large quantities of the finest tropical fruits to the ship, in their canoes, to sell or barter, as the case might be, for money or old clothes. Monkeys, also, Java sparrows, birds of paradise, parrots, and other birds of rare and beautiful plumage, and some of sweet song, were among the commodities offered for sale. Some of these natives were regular purveyors to ships, and had small memorandum-books in which were written certificates from the captains whom they had supplied. These were not always as flattering as the holders imagined. They sometimes ran in this style?If you buy anything from the bearer, watch him?he is the greatest rascal you ever saw, and will cheat you if he can. As they have no native metallic currency, a variety of sea-shell, called cowrie, is their substitute for small coin. Its average comparative value is at the rate of about 1000 for a dollar. For a day or two our ship looked more like a menagerie and a fruit-market than anything else. The usual price for cocoa-nuts was a dollar a hundred; for pine-apples, twenty-five cents a dozen; for oranges ten cents a dozen; and for everything else in the same proportion. There were dates, too, and a kind of sugar in small cakes, something like maple-sugar. The natives called it joggery. We also took in fresh provisions for the remainder of our voyage. Pigs, ...