4. BEACH-LA-MAR. 
after and faraway. While this sketch of the Beach-la-mar was taking 
shape the jargon phraseology was reproduced on the witness stand 
in the New York Supreme Court. The witness had solemnly averred 
that King Johnson of a Solomon island “has been going to col- 
lege for forty years and he can read and write as well as any one 
aboard ship.” The statement lacks verisimilitude, but no such 
default attaches to the further testimony of the witness that this 
savage monarch addressed him in the following terms: ‘‘ Long fellow 
man he come ashore, he tell me plenty yarn.”’ 
The name of this jargon gives us some clew to its place and time 
and manner of origin. Beach-la-mar is the common sailor mispro- 
nunciation of béche-de-mer, a name applied to the edible trepang, 
which, as a delicacy to palates sufficiently acute to enjoy the niceties 
of its faint flavor, fetches a high price in the Chinese markets. At 
the time of the beginning of the commercial exploitation of the 
islands of the South Pacific the reefs and lagoon shallows in these 
archipelagoes, more particularly from Fiji along the chains of islands 
of the Western Pacific, abounded in these holothurians. Now, 
although the demand remains as great as ever, these reefs are unpro- 
ductive; they have been fished bare in the absence of a reasonable 
system of protection of this sluggish game. It is only in Fiji, with 
its recent British government, that any attempt has been made to 
restore the depleted waters and under proper supervision to provide 
a source of revenue for the islanders. 
The manner of the first commercial exploitation of the islands we 
shall find germane to the consideration of the genesis of the mixed 
speech which grew out therefrom. The great voyages of European 
explorers, bent upon the discovery of the secrets of the Pacific, 
reached their period of greatest activity in the middle and in the 
latter half of the eighteenth century. Voyages there had been before 
that. Gaetano found the eight islands of the Hawaiian group and 
left no record save a few names dotted on his chart of the way of the 
Manila galleon upon the sea. Quiros and Mendajia sailed for the 
gold of Ophir in the Solomon Islands; they even colonized in the 
northern bay of Espiritu Santo the half-mythical city of a New 
Jerusalem at the mouth of a River Jordan; but their work lacked 
permanence in itself and made no appeal to other adventurers. In 
like manner the exploration of the Pacific did not cease with Cook 
and Vancouver. In the early years of the nineteenth century no less 
lustre was shed by the voyages of the unfortunate La Pérouse and of 
Dumont d’Urville. That century was more than a generation old 
when Wilkes cleared up the secrets which had escaped the zeal of the 
long line of his glorious predecessors. 
Upon the track of these many voyages of scientific geography 
flocked fleets of commercial geographers, merchant seamen intent 
