n of a flourishing
state on the ideas of pity and justice. He recognized chivalrously the
claims of the conquered; he was a disinterested adventurer, and the
reward of his noble instincts is in the veneration with which a strange
and faithful race cherish his memory.

Misunderstood and traduced in life, the glory of his achievement has
vindicated the purity of his motives. He belongs to history. But there
were others--obscure adventurers who had not his advantages of birth,
position, and intelligence; who had only his sympathy with the people of
forests and sea he understood and loved so well. They can not be said
to be forgotten since they have not been known at all. They were lost
in the common crowd of seamen-traders of the Archipelago, and if
they emerged from their obscurity it was only to be condemned as
law-breakers. Their lives were thrown away for a cause that had no right
to exist in the face of an irresistible and orderly progress--their
thoughtless lives guided by a simple feeling.

But the wasted lives, for the few who know, have tinged with romance the
region of shallow waters and forest-clad islands, that lies far east,
and still mysterious between the deep waters of two oceans.

I

Out of the level blue of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty
barrenness of grey and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid
heights. Separated by a narrow strip of water, Suroeton, to the west,
shows a curved and ridged outline resembling the backbone of a stooping
giant. And to the eastward a troop of insignificant islets stand
effaced, indistinct, with vague features that seem to melt into the
gathering shadows. The night following from the eastward the retreat of
the setting sun advanced slowly, swallowing the land and the sea; the
land broken, tormented and abrupt; the sea smooth and inviting with its
easy polish of continuous surface to wanderings facile and endless.

There was no wind, and a small brig that had lain all the afternoon a
few miles to the northward and westward of Carimata had hardly altered
its position half a mile during all these hours. The calm was absolute,
a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead atmosphere.
As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but an impressive
immobility. Nothing moved on earth, on the waters, and above them in the
unbroken lustre of the sky. On the unruffled surface of the straits the
brig floated tranquil and upright as if bolted solidly