many ways, and by natives is called white food; it is well tasted, wholesome and nutritious; the leaves are large, and indented in the manner of those of the West India papaw tree."

At what they called the Santa Cruz islands death overtook the commander, then in his 54th year. Mendana ranks high among discoverers, being the first to visit many of the islands of the South Pacific. The wife of the commander, Doña Isabel, who accompanied him in this voyage, duly mourned his death, carried the body for burial to Manila, married there, and sailing for Mexico lived there happily ever after.

Such was the alarm caused by the presence of Drake in the Pacific, that the viceroy of Peru sent against him Pedro Sarmiento, who in the pursuit entered and examined the strait of Magellan, and on his return recommended that it be fortified by Spain so as to prevent the passage of strangers. An expedition was accordingly sent thither by Philip II, and in 1582 the settlements of Jesus and San Felipe were .founded; but most of the colonists perished from famine, and the eminently Spanish idea of thus placing a guard at the eastern gate to keep all the world out of the Pacific ocean was abandoned.

Many are the romantic sea-adventures related in waters north and south, how Captain Kidd was sent by good Scotchmen to catch pirates, and himself turned pirate and was caught instead; how William Phips sought and found a wrecked Spanish treasure-ship, and took from it 32 tons of silver, and other things worth in all a million and a half of dollars. All round the world, in all ages and nations, pirates were the pioneers of progress. The tales of buccaneers might be retold. on the eastern coast of Asia with no loss of horrors. All the islands along shore were infested by pirates. Among others a favorite rendezvous was the Chusan archipelago, where upon the capture of a rice-junk or sugar fleet the captors gave the gods an entertainment as a thank-offering. The pirates plied their craft in fleets of swift boats, and snapped fingers of defiance at the war-junks, whose pilots would thereupon make a pretence of pursuit.

Brigandage on land and piracy and smuggling on the sea still obtain in eastern Asia. Even at the British commercial metropolis of Hongkong a police force is quite necessary in the harbor, where the thieves move hither and thither in

swift pinnaces, as in the streets of the city. Since the earliest times pirates have been protected by the mandarins of China, who shared in their plunder, and when foreigners appeared and refused to be robbed and murdered in this manner, government officials were by no means active in suppressing piracy. As late as 1885 the British steamer Greyhound was captured within sixty miles of Hongkong by pirates who had shipped as passengers. In 1887 there were three piratical attacks within a week, and in 1890 the steamer Namoa was captured by pirates.

Piracy, once so common in the world was later confined for the most part to the waters of southeastern Asia. Conspicuous here were the Sulus, daring and skilful and as merciless as other Mohammedans, or even as Spanish Christians. Their proas, of from ten to thirty tons in size, were rigged with both oars and sails, so that they might be propelled forward or backward with equal facility. They would not attack a protected cruiser, but to unarmed small craft laden with merchandise they showed no mercy. Of the booty, one-quarter went by law to the sultan and council of nobles, the latter furnishing the arms and ammunition, and receiving pay in captives, of whom they made slaves. Piracy was the chief occupation of the nation not long since, but the business has fallen off of late years.

As an occupation it suits the genius of Asiatic peoples, and beside the horrible deeds in the China sea, those of the Mediterranean were tame indeed. The true state of things here was not suspected until after the first opening of treaty ports in 1842, when merchant ships sailing from Singapore for Hongkong disappeared,-not from storm or earthquake, and were never heard of again. It was useless to appeal to the Chinese authorities, as their pirates were as hard on them as on others. Indeed, there is little patriotism in piracy. It was not altogether an unpleasant pastime for Englishmen, pirate hunting in Asia, and should be as good sport as tiger hunting in Africa. Their swarming ground in those days was 150 miles of coast north of Hongkong, between Swatau and Hainan, where they had fortified stations, and whence they could send out 50 or 100 junks under an admiral at a moment's notice. The junks were from 50 to 400 tons burden, and mounted from six to twenty guns, with six men to a gun.

The English government for a time paid a reward of £10 for a dead pirate and £1 for a live one, which proves that some men are more valuable dead than alive. When, however, in 1849 Admiral Hay with the Columbine, and assisted by some other ships, destroyed with great slaughter two pirate fleets, of 20 and 64 junks respectively, the head-money threatened to bankrupt the British nation; the regulation was discontinued, and after that pirates must be killed purely for pleas

ure.

Li Ma Hong was a famous Chinese pirate in the days of the second governor of the Philippines. Descending on the islands in 1594 with 70 large ships, he entered Manila bay, and seizing the city, incarcerated the leading men in the citadel. But rallying, the Spaniards bravely attacked and defeated the pirates, burning their fleet at the Pangasinam river. Li Ma Hong escaped in an open boat to a desert island, where he died. Another Chinese pirate chief was Koxinga, previously mentioned in this volume, who in 1662 threatened Manila with a large fleet. Fearing lest the invaders should find aid and sympathy among their countrymen on the islands, the Spaniards seized and slaughtered 40,000 Chinese, to prevent their doing wrong in case they should wish to do so.

But it was their own subjects of Sulu, whose sultans were pirates by profession, that caused the Spaniards the greatest annoyance, and that their power was broken about the middle of the nineteenth century was owing to the English. During the height of their maritime supremacy, it is said that the sultans of Sulu collected tribute from 1,000 boats, large and small, aside from the vessels of their own 200,000 subjects. Their sway extended over nearly the whole of Borneo and Mindanao, besides the islands of Palavan, Panguitarang, Tawi Tawi and the Basilans. Fast-sailing Sulu ships swarmed about the islands of the archipelago, entering their straits and rivers, making easy prey of the natives and their effects, but rejoicing specially over the advent of a rich foreign merchantman, particularly if somewhat disabled after a long voyage, which was not unfrequently the case.

Those, however, who sailed in Sulu ships were not all Sulus. Among the Balabac pirates who were beaten back from the walls of Manila in 1851 were some Spaniards and Portuguese. These renegades not only fought well but taught the Sulus

how to fight. They went forth in battle array, the sultan in his flagship carrying six-pounder guns, guns and ships for their navy being taken from the enemy as required. The Mindanao pirates controlled the gold mines of that island, which enabled them to bring from Canton all the munitions and material they required for their business.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE TERRESTRIAL PARADISE

IN the southern centre of this ocean sea, at a point antipodal to Mount Sion in Jerusalem, is the Terrestrial Paradise of Dante, with its high conical mountain of Purgatory, round which run seven terraces whereon are expiated the seven deadly sins, stairways being cut in the rugged mountain side which lead upward from terrace to terrace until the summit is reached, whereon stands the New Jerusalem, the celestial city, though still of earth. By this half heathen though wholly Dantean cosmogony, the Terrestrial Paradise finds place southwest from Pitcairn island, rising steep from the obtuse waters just south of Tahiti. And not poets alone, whether poets of hell or heaven, seek to mingle with South sea breezes a breath of the celestial. Even the prosy German Ritter must bring down from above a name for this broad belt of sparkling isles which constitutes the Polynesian archipelago, and which he calls the milky way of ocean.

On many of these islands, which are now known so well, we should be able to find a terrestrial paradise, when Dante found his in the dark, on the other side of the world, not even knowing that the world had another side. The island of Pitcairn, which seems to be the nearest land to this enchanted spot, and is as near to heaven as any other island of the South sea, even this sea of paradise, is mostly rock and mountain, with but little soil suitable for cultivation. The size of Eden in the Euphrates country is not known, never having been surveyed; but it is difficult to understand when so little land will make a paradise why it is that France and Germany want so much. It may be that the two nations have more than two hundred who expect heaven; and Pitcairn island has a capacity for only two hundred. What kept the natural increase of population down all these ages, unless it was the alligators, is