IN THE EAST INDIES. 137 
and told us to go away. We called out, ‘‘matai fanai,’’ 
which is Numoor for ‘‘do not be afraid.’’ They were 
obviously not in the least afraid, but the bluff worked 
and we rowed up and gave each man a bit of tobacco 
and a box of matches. Then we went into the house 
whereupon the women at once jumped overboard from 
the back door and hid in the woods on shore. We sat 
there for a short time, eating lunch in fact, and look- 
ing about spied a basket of heads smoking over the 
fire very near us. We asked them where they had ob- 
tained them and one man, who knew some Malay, 
said, ‘‘Oh, the Assistant Resident at Monokwari told 
us to go to Wiak and kill those men —they were very 
bad.’’ This was rather an ingenious and rapidly 
though out lie, for none of these men had ever seen 
the resident at Monokwari, which is several hundred 
miles away. 
Meosboendi, in the Schouten islands, has only 
been visited by steamers a few times and the people 
are very fierce. We had our Javanese soldiers at the 
gangway to keep them from going on board armed. 
Once they tried to take the ship here. They were 
curiously half bold and half afraid, and when the 
whistle blew many jumped overboard and swam to the 
shore as if for their life. We did not go on shore 
much, excepting to get a few pictures of houses, ete. 
The captain of another ship was murdered while 
walking along the beach a few years ago, but the 
natives are better behaved now after a visit from a 
little Dutch gunboat. 
The Dutch are very suspicious here, for they 
know that they hold their colonies only by the courtesy 
of other nations and now somehow or other they have 
