Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/300

236 waiting here some time, but the Stettin had become such a home to me that I did not like the thought of leaving her.

We had a tremendous thunderstorm and downpour of rain at night, as here the rainy season sets in early in December.

The most interesting part of Celebes, for various reasons, is at Menado in the Minahasa district. It is a beautiful little town full of gardens, with good roads from it to the country. The people not so long ago were savages and head-hunters. They are short, well-made, and fair, and are said to bear traces of a supposed Japanese origin. They are now very quiet, peaceable, and gentle—most attractive in every way; and are the best clothed, best housed, fed, and educated, most industrious, peaceable, and civilised people in the whole of the islands. And all this was done by the missionaries and the Dutch in a very short time! In 1822 coffee was introduced and roads and plantations made. The system of government by the Dutch is good and suits the people. Each district has a European controlleur. The villages are very neat and clean, with pretty houses, and all the well-kept hedges are entirely of roses. The chiefs—sons of savage head-hunters—are now quite European in their ways, and entertain in proper fashion. All is most interesting and reflects the very greatest credit on the Dutch and on the people themselves. Amocrang is also a pretty place.

At or near Soemalata are gold mines, as also at Kivandang—but Celebes is a land of the future, full of undeveloped wealth of every descrip- tion. On the eastern coast is Todak, with gold mines and ebony plantations, and Gorontalo, near which is the green, weedy Lake Linnbotto, through the water-channels of which only the native