He Now Spoke
Dutch, French, Malay, And Javanese, All Equally Well; English
With A Very Slight Accent, But With Perfect Fluency, Axed A Most
Complete Knowledge Of Idiom, In Which I Often Tried To Puzzle Him
In Vain.
German and Italian were also quite familiar to him, and
his acquaintance with European languages included Modern Greek,
Turkish, Russian, and colloquial Hebrew and Latin.
As a test of
his power, I may mention that he had made a voyage to the out-of-
the-way island of Salibaboo, and had stayed there trading a few
weeks. As I was collecting vocabularies, he told me he thought he
could remember some words, and dictated considerable number. Some
time after I met with a short list of words taken down in those
islands, and in every case they agreed with those he had given
me. He used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned
from some Jews with whom he had once travelled, and astonished by
joining in their conversation, and had a never-ending fund of
tale and anecdote about the people he had met and the places he
had visited.
In most of the villages of this part of Ceram are schools and
native schoolmasters, and the inhabitants have been long
converted to Christianity. In the larger villages there are
European missionaries; but there is little or no external
difference between the Christian and Alfuro villages, nor, as far
as I have seen, in their inhabitants. The people seem more
decidedly Papuan than those of Gilolo.
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