Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/125

Rh "Let me give you an illustration of this," continued the Doctor. "Some years ago I heard a retired sea-captain in New York denouncing the missionaries, and declaring that they had ruined the trade of the South Pacific. It was at a dinner-party, and before the end of the evening the old captain became quite communicative about the ways of commerce with Polynesia and the Malay Archipelago. Among other things he told how they traded with the natives in his younger days. 'We used,' said he, 'to take our old-fashioned balance scales on shore with our fifty-six pound and smaller weights with handles to them. We set up the scales, and then the natives brought forward some bags whose exact weight they knew. These bags were used for testing our weights, to see that they were correct. Of course they were all right; the testing and setting up the scales took the best part of the afternoon, and then we knocked off for the day.

"'We left the scales on shore where they had been set up, but took the weights back to the ship "for safety." They were hollow, and the handles were screwed in; during the night we unscrewed the handles, filled the hollow space with lead, and then screwed the handles back again so neatly that nobody would ever discover anything. In this way we managed to get the cargo to average 160 to 170 pounds a picul