Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/261

Rh and rolled many tottery forms into a desirable seclusion. We passed through immense shoals of very fine large fish all springing out of the water, and saw a horn pike, a large fish which skimmed along the surface of the water like a fying-fish. Captain Dunbar said they used to shoot them, and no doubt they made good practice targets.

In the evening we entered Dampier Straits, passing many islands, and about 9 p.m. steamed through the narrow Pitt Straits between Batanta and Salwatti; but there are so many islands I confuse them. It was the first time the Stettin had passed through at night, and this “big white fellow war canoe” must have been an imposing sight to the natives, with all her electric lights gleaming from her portholes. The native fires sprang up at once on both sides of us, and were so close and numerous that they looked like the lights of towns.

It was on this night a Chinaman died, which annoyed the captain; and, of course, it was very disobliging of him to do an inconvenient thing like that, and at his age too! The Chinese are so fussy about taking their dead back to China that they would probably insist on taking him. It was out of the question under the circumstances, so the captain went to the dead man's wife, and though at first she howled and would hear no reason, he at last got her to consent to keep it quiet and to allow the body to be quietly buried in the sea at night. Having once agreed, she set to work composedly to dress the body first in white silk, then in black, then in green lined with violet, and the captain said she made him “quite beautiful.” When I came in to breakfast in the morning I was invited to go and see him; but a dead Chinaman before breakfast on a very hot morning was not to my taste, and I declined. He was quietly dropped