Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/234

188 are not properly charted, and there are no lighthouses or lightships.

These islands have native names as well as the various ones given by different explorers, on top of which the Germans have renamed them after their princes, ministers, and such people, so that it is confusing, and, looking at the map, one does not spot them easily. Some of the smaller ones are yet unnamed. As the natives know only the native names, they can give little information about them. Surely it would be wiser to stick to such native names as have some interest or meaning, or else to the names bestowed by the discoverers, whose right to the nomenclature of their discoveries should never be questioned. It is not fair of the Germans, who discovered none of them, to rename them in a somewhat unmeaning fashion.

We passed very close to two, one low-lying and full of natives, the other high and rugged. How I longed to stay in them and not pass on like this with merely a glimpse at them! Far out at sea, too, we saw a small native canoe with two occupants, probably blown away from land and drifting where they knew not—or perhaps they did know. We waved to them, but they took no notice.

At dinner that night Captains Niedermayer and Dunbar were very talkative, and became excited on the subject of German aims. They said they hoped the large island of Timor, which is partly Dutch and partly Portuguese, would soon become German; one reason being that it lay near the Australian continent. (To serve as a pin-prick; of course.) They are most desirous of getting by some means a footing in Borneo (again to be near their "dear cousins"), then acquiring the Dutch part of New Guinea, and they regard it as