The Tapu Of Banderah, by Louis Becke

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Title: The Tapu Of Banderah 1901

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: April 5, 2008 [EBook #24996]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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Produced by David Widger

THE TAPU OF BANDERAH

By Louis Becke

C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.

1901

I ~ THE "STARLIGHT"

As the rising sun had just begun to pierce the misty tropic haze of early dawn, a small, white-painted schooner of ninety or a hundred tons burden was bearing down upon the low, densely-wooded island of Mayou, which lies between the coast of south-east New Guinea and the murderous Solomon Group--the grave of the white man in Melanesia.

The white population of Mayou was not large, for it consisted only of an English missionary and his wife--who was, of course, a white woman--a German trader named Peter Schwartzkoff and his native wife; an English trader named Charlie Blount, with his two half-caste sons and daughters; and an American trader and ex-whaler, named Nathaniel Burrowes, with his wives.

Although the island is of large extent, and of amazing fertility, the native population was at this time comparatively small, numbering only some three thousand souls. They nearly all lived at the south-west end of the i

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