[The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russell Wallace]@TWC D-Link bookThe Malay Archipelago CHAPTER XXX 6/25
Every two or three days a fresh house was opened, and the necessary repairs made.
In every direction men were bringing in poles, bamboos, rattans, and the leaves of the nipa palm to construct or repair the walls, thatch, doors, and shutters of their houses, which they do with great celerity.
Some of the arrivals were Macassar men or Bugis, but more from the small island of Goram, at the east end of Ceram, whose inhabitants are the petty traders of the far East.
Then the natives of Aru come in from the other side of the islands (called here "blakang tana," or "back of the country") with the produce they have collected during the preceding six months, and which they now sell to the traders, to some of whom they are most likely in debt. Almost all, or I may safely say all, the new arrivals pay me a visit, to see with their own eyes the unheard-of phenomenon of a person come to stay at Dobbo who does not trade! They have their own ideas of the uses that may possibly be made of stuffed birds, beetles, and shells which are not the right shells--that is, "mother-of-pearl." They every day bring me dead and broken shells, such as I can pick up by hundreds on the beach, and seem quite puzzled and distressed when I decline them. If, however, there are any snail shells among a lot, I take them, and ask for more--a principle of selection so utterly unintelligible to them, that they give it up in despair, or solve the problem by imputing hidden medical virtue to those which they see me preserve so carefully. These traders are all of the Malay race, or a mixture of which Malay is the chef ingredient, with the exception of a few Chinese.
The natives of Aru, on the other hand, are, Papuans, with black or sooty brown skims, woolly or frizzly hair, thick-ridged prominent noses, and rather slender limbs.
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