354 COCHINCHINA. 
may be comj>ared with the Jews of the West, wliat may we 
not suppose their treatment to have been by those Europeans 
who have little claim to such a character ? No wonder then 
that their ships of commerce have been chased, by the terror 
of such outrageous proceedings, from off the ocean. But 
though their trade may, from this and other causes, have 
been diverted from its usual channel, and probably much 
diminished, yet it has not wholly been annihilated. That 
part of it whose object was to seek, among the clusters of 
islands which skirt the coast of Cochinchina, an article of 
luxury in very high demand in China, the Trepan or Bichos 
da Mer of which I have already spoken, soon discovered a 
fertile source in another quarter of the East which for 
many years has been conducted wholly unknown to Eu- 
ropeans, notwithstanding their researches in almost every 
part of those seas. Captain Flinders, who was sent out in the 
Investigator on a voyage of discovery, in skirting the north- 
ern coast of New Holland with the view of exploring the 
gulph of Carpentaria, fell in with, very unexpectedlj^, at the 
bottom of this gulph, six Malay proas from Macassar, whose 
object it seemed was to procure cargoes of sea-slugs or, as 
Captain Flinders calls them, sea-cucumbers. He learned 
from the chief of the squadron that they were a part only of 
sixty sail, with which he had made an annual A'oyage for this 
sole purpose regularly for the last twenty 3^ears. These 
cargoes, it appeared, he carried to the island of Timor, 
Avhere he was met by Chinese traders who, after purchasing 
the cargoes, transhipped them into their own junks and carried 
them to the southern ports of China. The price paid for them 
by the Chinese to the Malays was twenty Spanish dollars the 
