136 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [August i, 1887. 
rival at §43 j per picul. "With a view of pointing a moral, 
it may as well be said that the sellers could never 
forgive themselves for not having bought up the en- 
tire crop. Since then, Amboina cloves have again 
dropped to $17, and are now quoted at $42. From 
which it would appear that the fragrant clove offers a 
wide scope for a series of plunging speculations. 
The market price of tin is a matter of political im- 
portance to our Government, and until agriculture has 
a firmer hold in the Native States, it is essential, for the 
prosperity of the peninsula, that rates should rule high. 
The price we quoted yesterday was S38'25, and when it 
is considered that within the last ten years it has been 
sold as low as $18, it is evident that present rates 
must be extremely satisfactory, and that tin-mining, 
conducted with ordinary good management, cannot fail 
to be very remunerative. 
We have now taken up the various staples of our trade 
of which we quoted the current rates in our article of 
yesterday, with the exception of sago flour, which, in 
vivid contrast to all other descriptions of produce, has 
fallen to the extraordinary low price of $l'97j for 
" Sarawak." It is characteristic of the good fortune of 
this colony that the very marked decline in prices of 
sago flour has in no way affected the volume of its pro- 
duction. There is as much sago flour made at $1'97| 
as when Singapore washings, said to b6 equal to 
Sarawak, fetched $4, Here we have a fall of 50 per 
cent without diminishing the supplies of the product, 
which are as abundant as ever. In 1880 prices of this 
staple were forced up to between £16 and £17 per ton 
whereas Powell's latest telegram quotes it at £7 9/. 
Sago is well worthy of the study of an economist ; 
Nature has stored up such vast and well nigh illimit- 
able stores of food in the shape of sago forests, as to 
excite the wonder of all who have studied the subject 
and the sago palm is a reproductive plant, so that no 
amount of felling and cutting can subdue its wonderful 
fertility. The world at present draws its supplies of 
sago from Borneo and Sumatra, but the true home of 
the flour giving palm is to be found in the Moluccas and 
New Guinea. The voyager in these regions may steam 
past miles and miles of apparently never-ending sago 
forest, the trees of which will yield about double the 
quantity of Bornean and Sumatran palms, and the 
produce of which will work up into a much liner descrip- 
tion of flour, owing to the fact that they are grown in very 
rich soil) and that with such inexhaustible supplies to go 
upon, there is never any need to cut down young 
and immature trees, which necessarily yield but very 
poor stuff. These superb territories, however, are 
under Dutch rule, and although there is much in the 
Dutch system of Government which is admirable, 
yet it is an undeniable fact that from a commercial 
point of view it is a distinct failure, and that our 
friends from Holland cannot develop their territories 
in the same way as we open up our new coun- 
tries. An effort has been made by Englishmen 
to tap the sago forests of the Moluccas 
and New Guinea. The enterprise was overwhelmed 
in ruin and disaster, but there were some features 
connected with it which are worth recording, and which 
may possibly be of some value to such of our readers 
as are interested in such matters. We shall therefore 
devote a considerable portion of our next article to 
a brief sketch of the working of this product. 
III. 
(S. T., July 15th.) 
We have now to deal with the effort made by 
English enterprise to develop the sago trade of the 
Dutch possessions in the Moluccas and New Guinea. 
The manufacture of sago Hour presents but one diffic- 
ulty, and that is the peculiar manner in which the 
weight of the mass of pith constituting the value of 
the tree is supported. The bark of the tree is a mere 
shell, and just serves as a sort of wrapper enclosing 
the sago pith, the weight of this pith being carried 
by closely interwoven fibres of extraordinary rigidity 
whose tough and wire-like properties are the despair 
of the manufacturer. The gentle natives who 
have to deal with this difficulty, solve a problem 
which baa puzzled many a wiser bead, iu their own 
aboriginal way. These children of the sun simply 
drive a few nails into a board, and with this primit- 
ive implement they manage to rasp thousands upon 
thousands of tons of merchantable sago flour out of 
their forests. It is marvellous how the trade of the 
world is built up by th« spasmodic efforts of myriads 
of naked savages. It is precisely in the same manner 
that our gum copal trade is kept going. The trader 
in New Guinea who finally succeeds fn shipping gum 
by thousands of piculs, has to commence his career 
by confronting the leisurely Papuan, who with all 
imaginable solemnity will bring along, say, two 
catties of milky copal into which he has poppied a 
few stones and a liberal percentage of common or 
garden sand, in order to guard against any undue 
loss in weight. For this commodity the New Guinea 
seller will ask a choice assortment of plates, knives, 
cloth, and powder. He is finally dismissed with a 
couple of beads or a yard of cloth which he will never 
wear. It is simply incomprehensible what the natives 
of Netherlands New Guinea do with the square miles 
of Klin pagua which are manufactured for their es- 
pecial benefit. They certainly do not wear it, for 
they eschew clothing in any shape or form, and no- 
thing in the world will induce their ladies to wear 
acy thing warmer than a string of beads or a brass 
wire bracelet. It is said that the bales of cloth which 
they buy in exchange for their produce are buried in 
the ground as a propitiatory offeiing to their gods, 
and this appears to be as reasonable an ex- 
planation as any other. It is precisely in this 
peddling way that quantities of, New Guinea 
gum representing large sums of money are »;>llected, 
and, to revert once more to sago flour, we find that 
thousands of tons of this staple are turned out by 
natives who work up the raw material with a rasp 
made of a board with a few nails driven through it. 
The cost of production would be greatly reduced, 
however, if machinery could be brought to bear on 
the rebellious fibre which could deal with it suc- 
cessfully. A trial was made at Messrs. Riley Har- 
greaves' works some years ago with a disinte- 
grator, a piece of machinery originally intended, wo 
believe, for a sugar mill. The principle of this ma- 
chine is that a number of hammers are fixed 
on a circular plate which is made to revolve at a 
high speed in an iron box. These hammers simply 
smash up and disintegrate everything which gets in 
the way, and there is scarcely any material which 
can resist the action of such a machine. When an 
experimental trial of the disintegrator was made in Singa- 
pore, it was found that the sago pith which had run 
through it came out like saw dust, or if a stream of 
water was kept going at the same time the sago 
came out in the form of a pulpy paste which only 
wanted washing and drying to convert it into first class 
sago flour. It was evident that some modifications which 
only experience could suggest would be required to make 
the machiue a perfect success, but it answered expect- 
ations so well that the plant was bought and shipped 
at Amboina where a large factory was built for the 
purpose of turning out sago flour in great quantities. 
The machinery in Amboina was used for washing 
purposes, which could have been done as well if 
not better by hand, but through some inconceivable, 
mismanagement, the disintegrator, which was to be 
the feature of the entire factory as a labour saving 
machine, was never put into motion, although, there 
were line big sago palms growing at the very doors 
of the building. The Singapore experiment seems 
to show, however, that a disintegrator is the machine 
required for the treatment of sago fibres and which 
will permit of the flour being turned out an an ex- 
traordinarily low price. The Amboina factory finally 
collapsed, the buildings and machinary were sold for 
a price which hardly covered the freight on the 
materials sent down for their construction, and a 
small steamer which had been bought for the pur- 
pose of feeding the mill with raw sago from the 
surrounding islands and New Guinea, was found to 
be half full of water while lying at anchor in a 
Dutch port, put up for salo by auction in that con- 
dition, and thus disposed of for the sum of 700 
guilders. We have no doubt that Singapore ventures 
