IX.] GORONTALO. 207 



We left our bay — of which we made a sketch survey ^ — by the 

 same track, and proceeded for Gorontalo. The coast in the neigh- 

 bourhood is bare and rather lofty, and the Gorontalo Pdver has cut 

 its way through it so abruptly that from seawards the entrance 

 looks like a deep ditch. ISTearing it, this appearance becomes still 

 more marked, and the place reminds one strongly of Jamestown in 

 St, Helena, though the little river here usurps the place of the 

 valley thickly dotted with white houses. The anchorage, which is 

 just within the river's mouth and entirely unprotected to the 

 south, is, as usual, a bad one, and the soundings drop suddenly 

 from twenty or thirty fathoms to as many inches. A small Dutch 

 brigantine that we found loading with copra had fourteen fathoms 

 of water at her bow, and thirteen feet over the taffrail, and we had 

 to anchor with the usual hawsers made fast astern. 



The Dutch have had a settlement in Gorontalo for nearly as 

 long a period as they have held Menado, but it has been left pretty 

 much to itself, and, excepting copra, little besides natural products 

 — gum copal, tripang, wax, and tortoiseshell — are shipped. The 

 town lies a mile and a half above the anchoraae, and though 

 possessing the ever fresh beauty common to all Dutch Malayan 

 settlements, — its houses buried amid luxuriant fruit-trees, its path- 

 ways neatly bordered with bamboo hedges, — it has little else to 

 show, with the exception of some ruinous and moss-grown walls, 

 which are said to have been built in bygone days by the Portuguese. 

 There are a bare half dozen of Europeans in this far away sleepy 

 hollow, and among them, as a matter of course, is the inevitable 

 German. He is to be found wherever "dark continents" have 

 been penetrated by the white man, and is as invariable a sign of 

 advancing civilisation as an empty sardine tin, a missionary, or a 

 broken Bass bottle. Most of us know that he bids fair to take the 



^ Admiralty chart. No. 930. The Dutch charts— as also the English, which are 

 copied from them — are quite unreliable for the coast line in this neighbourhood. 

 Kalapa Island, marked in the chart as off Cape Flesko, does not exist, and the 

 islands and coast beyond appear to have been laid down at haphazard. Bv our 

 sights we also made Gorontalo eight miles east of its assigned position. 



