In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnel-house together.

That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda--ay, he sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find still afloat unscuppered.

And he found head-hunting, tree-dwelling anthropophagi instead.
We landed on strange islands, sea-pounded on their shores and smoking at their summits, where kinky-haired little animal-men made monkey-wailings in the jungle, planted their forest run-ways with thorns and stake-pits, and blew poisoned splinters into us from out the twilight jungle bush.
And whatsoever man of us was wasp-stung by such a splinter died horribly and howling.

And we encountered other men, fiercer, bigger, who faced us on the beaches in open fight, showering us with spears and arrows, while the great tree drums and the little tom-toms rumbled and rattled war across the tree-filled hollows, and all the hills were pillared with signal-smokes.
Hendrik Hamel was supercargo and part owner of the _Sparwehr_ adventure, and what he did not own was the property of Captain Johannes Maartens.
The latter spoke little English, Hendrik Hamel but little more.

The sailors, with whom I gathered, spoke Dutch only.