Maluku Islands

He was so dependable.

His last words were Kito, which means divine island in the language of the primitive savages who live in the Maluku Islands of Southeast Asia.

Well, actually, it is clarified for us that most of the people of Southeast Asia, this is a very common word in all of their languages.

You know how words are very vague and widely

So Laurie asked him to stop on a picture of another guy with that tattoo.

He has a bullet in his head.

He too came from the Maluku Islands.

And Laurie points out that the tattoo is the same one as that the other guy had, the one whose arm popped off when he fell out the window.

His rigging was frozen, his crew were half paralyzed.

still he struggled on firing his men with his own hot courage in two days more he reached the latitude of vancouver and there he gave up the struggle the land still trended westward the weather grew more and more severe and he made up his mind that if the passage existed it was impracticable so the great resolve was taken and running south to find a port to prepare the golden hind for her tremendous effort he put into a natural harbour near san francisco where the cliffs were white like those at home and the soil was teeming with gold as fort and dockyard rose by their lonely shores the indians gathered in wonder and would have worshipped the strangers as beings from a better land the horrified puritans protested as kindly as they might and when persuaded drake was human the simple savages crowned him in his mistress's name king of new albion so at least the old navigators understood the strange ceremonies with which the month of their stay was occupied and the loud lamentations of their friends when they departed filled their imaginations with visions of an empire of englishmen hardly less grand than the great reality It was on July 25th that, with a boldness we can hardly realize, the course was laid direct for the Moluccas.

Their instruments for finding latitude were far from perfect, longitude it was practically impossible for them to determine at all.

Their logs were so distrusted that as a rule they preferred to guess the runs, and the variation of the compass was ascertained with childish crudeness.

Australia.

As I look to the northeast, I am facing Celebes and the Moluccas,

where Magellan sailors stop to load their vessels with spices on the first trip ever made around the globe.

And west of me is Sumatra, whose coffee and tobacco have long surpassed those of Java in our American markets.

End of chapter 23 Chapter 24 of Java and the East Indies by Frank G. Carpenter.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Celebus and the Moluccas.

A New Zealand mining engineer in the employ of the Dutch, whom I met on my way through the archipelago, gives much interesting information about the little-known Moluccas and the island of Celebus, which he has explored.

The surrounding waters are dotted with beautifully formed conical mountains that surge majestically out of the waves, some of them rising to heights of over a thousand meters or more.

The very name of the region, Maluku, which gave birth to the English toponym Moluccas, is said to derive from Moloku, a word that means mountain or mountain island.

The mountain islands of Maluku often erupt with devastating force.

Yet there is also something magical about these convulsions, something akin to the pain of childbirth.

For the eruptions of Maluku's volcanoes bring to the surface alchemical mixtures of materials which interact with the winds and the weather of the region in such a way as to create forests that teem with wonders and rarities.

In the case of the Banda Islands, the gift of gunungapi was a botanical species that has flourished on this tiny archipelago like nowhere else, the tree that produces both nutmeg and mace.

Before the 18th century, every nutmeg and every shred of mace came from the Banda Islands.