The object of their expedition was a certain marine animal, called
_trepang_. Of this they gave me two dried specimens; and it proved to be
the _beche-de-mer_, or sea cucumber which we had first seen on the reefs
of the East Coast, and had afterwards hauled on shore so plentifully with
the seine, especially in Caledon Bay. They get the _trepang_ by diving,
in from 3 to 8 fathoms water; and where it is abundant, a man will bring
up eight or ten at a time. The mode of preserving it is this: the animal
is split down one side, boiled, and pressed with a weight of stones; then
stretched open by slips of bamboo, dried in the sun, and afterwards in
smoke, when it is fit to be put away in bags, but requires frequent
exposure to the sun. A thousand trepang make a _picol_, of about 125
Dutch pounds; and one hundred picols are a cargo for a prow. It is
carried to Timor, and sold to the Chinese, who meet them there; and when
all the prows are assembled, the fleet returns to Macassar. By Timor,
seemed to be meant Timor-laoet; for when I inquired concerning the
English, Dutch, and Portuguese there, Pobassoo knew nothing of them: he
had heard of Coepang, a Dutch settlement, but said it was upon another
island.

There are two kinds of trepang. The black, called _baatoo_, is sold to
the Chinese for forty dollars the picol; the white, or grey, called
_koro_, is worth no more than twenty. The _baatoo_ seems to be what we
found upon the coral reefs near the Northumberland Islands; and were a
colony established in Broad Sound or Shoalwater Bay, it might perhaps
derive considerable advantage from the trepang. In the Gulph of
Carpentaria, we did not observe any other than the _koro_, or grey slug.

Pobassoo had made six or seven voyages from Macassar to this coast,
within the preceding twenty years, and he was one of the first who came;
but had never seen any ship here before. This road was the first
rendezvous for his division, to take in water previously to going into
the Gulph. One of their prows had been lost the year before, and much
inquiry was made concerning the pieces of wreck we had seen; and a
canoe's rudder being produced, it was recognised as having belonged to
her. They sometimes had skirmishes with the native inhabitants of the
coast; Pobassoo himself had been formerly speared in the knee, and a man
had been slightly wounded since their arrival in this road: they
cautioned us much to beware of the natives.*

[* A question su