Although There Were
Numerous Plantations Of Maize And Plantains, There Were No New
Clearings; And As Without These It Is
Almost impossible to find
many of the best kinds of insects, I determined to make one
myself, and with much
Difficulty engaged two men to clear a patch
of forest, from which I hoped to obtain many fine beetles before
I left.
During the whole of my stay, however, insects never became
plentiful. My clearing produced me a few fine, longicorns and
Buprestidae, different from any I had before seen, together with
several of the Amboyna species, but by no means so numerous or,
so beautiful as I had found in that small island. For example, I
collected only 210 different kinds of beetles during my two
months' stay at Bourn, while in three weeks at Amboyna, in 1857,
I found more than 300 species: One of the finest insects found at
Bouru was a large Cerambyx, of a deep shining chestnut colour,
and with very long antennae. It varied greatly in size, the
largest specimens being three inches long, while the smallest
were only an inch, the antenna varying from one and a half to
five inches.
One day my boy Ali came home with a story of a big snake. He was
walking through some high grass, and stepped on something which
he took for a small fallen tree, but it felt cold and yielding to
his feet, and far to the right and left there was a waving and
rustling of the herbage. He jumped back in affright and prepared
to shoot, but could not get a good vies of the creature, and it
passed away, he said, like a tree being dragged along through the
grass. As he lead several times already shot large snakes, which
he declared were all as nothing compared with this, I am inclined
to believe it must really have been a monster. Such creatures are
rather plentiful here, for a man living close by showed me on his
thigh the marks where he bad been seized by one close to his
house. It was big enough to take the man's thigh in its mouth,
and he would probably have been killed and devoured by it had not
his cries brought out his neighbours, who destroyed it with their
choppers. As far as I could make out it was about twenty feet
long, but Ali's was probably much larger.
It sometimes amuses me to observe how, a few days after I have
taken possession of it, a native hut seems quite a comfortable
home. My house at Waypoti was a bare shed, with a large bamboo
platform at one side. At one end of this platform, which was
elevated about three feet, I fixed up my mosquito curtain, and
partly enclosed it with a large Scotch plaid, making a
comfortable little sleeping apartment. I put up a rude table on
legs buried in the earthen floor, and had my comfortable rattan-
chair for a seat.
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