I put it in every possible way to them, but it was a subject quite beyond their speculations; they had evidently never thought of anything of the kind, and were unable to conceive a thing so remote and so unnecessary to be thought about, as their own origin.

Finding this hopeless, I asked if they knew when the trade with Aru first began, when the Bugis and Chinese and Macassar men first came in their praus to buy tripang and tortoise-shell, and birds' nests, and Paradise birds?
This they comprehended, but replied that there had always been the same trade as long as they or their fathers recollected, but that this was the first time a real white man had come among them, and, said they, "You see how the people come every day from all the villages round to look at you." This was very flattering, and accounted for the great concourse of visitors which I had at first imagined was accidental.

A few years before I had been one of the gazers at the Zoolus, and the Aztecs in London.

Now the tables were turned upon me, for I was to these people a new and strange variety of man, and had the honour of affording to them, in my own person, an attractive exhibition, gratis.
All the men and boys of Aru are expert archers, never stirring without their bows and arrows.

They shoot all sorts of birds, as well as pigs and kangaroos occasionally, and thus have a tolerably good supply of meat to eat with their vegetables.