Spice Islands and Moluccas in Scheerau.
The Brandenburg Pond at Bayreuth is an excavated lake of five hundred
days' labor, and some months ago I sat in it an hour, for they are
drying it up just now for the benefit of the pale dwellers on its
shores. The Scheerau pond, at which four Regents in succession kept men
digging, has one hundred and twenty-nine days' work more, and is of
great importance to Germany, for by its aerostatic vapors it will, as
effectually as the Mediterranean Sea, change the weather in Germany, so
soon as the wind passes over either. Ebb and flow must, strictly
considered, take place even upon a tear or in the drinking-cup of a
greenfinch; how much more in such a piece of water. The diocese of
islands, which so adorns and supplies this pond, _e. g_., Banda,
Sumatra, Ceylon, and the beautiful Amboyna, the great and little
Moluccas, has only under the present administration come out of--or
rather into--the water. Herr Buffon, were he still living, and other
natural philosophers, must needs be struck with the fact that the
islands in the Scheerau Ocean have arisen not by the up-piling of
corals, nor yet by earthquakes, that crooked up the dromedary backs of
the sea-bottom out the water, nor even by any neighboring volcano which
had sown these mountains in the sea; for Sumatra, the great and the
little Moluccas, were merely shoved along in small parts on innumerable
hand-carts and horse-carts to the coast, and as these cars contained
stones, sand, earth, and all the ingredients of a fine island, in this
way the feudal tenants, whether of the sovereign or the nobility, who
were, in fact, so many (tobacco)-smoking and island-forming volcanoes,
were able in a short time to complete the Moluccas, while the bridges
of the nobility over the royal waters are not yet begun. The intention
of the sovereign is to have the whole East Indian trade at Asia in
Scheerau as close at hand as a snuff-mill, and I think we have it, only
with the distinction that the spice islands of Scheerau are still
better than the Dutch. On the latter one has to wait and watch for the
pepper, the nutmegs, etc., to ripen; but on ours all is found ripe and
dry already, as one has only to rub it on his food; this comes from the
fact that we simply order all these fruits betimes from--Amsterdam. The
way is this:
"Either all or nothing is a Regale [or Royal prerogative]. The legal
expert cannot justify it that princes, although they lift the costliest
but rarest products to the rank of regalia, nevertheless leave the
common, but so much the more prolific ones, in the hands of their
subjects, and thereby impair the revenue. The jurist finds with the
princes of Southern Asia, despotic as they otherwise are, more
consistency, for they take not the game, or salt, or amber, or pearls,
but the whole land and the whole trade, and merely farm both yearly.
The German princes have greater advantages in this direction than any
others, for all European kingdoms have Indian possessions--have a New
England, New France, New Holland; but a New Germany old Germany has
not, and the only land which a prince has left him to take away is his
own, unless one could contrive to make out of Poland or Turkey a New
Austria, New Prussia, etc.
"But this no regent has hitherto discerned, except the Prince of
Scheerau, who laid these propositions before his privy council, but had
before the voting already formed his resolution: that now the people
should get all their spices of him. He himself now, like nature,
creates on his Moluccas the spices which his country consumes, in that
he causes the seeds of these spices--pepper, nutmegs, etc.--to be
imported, not, however, for planting, but for cooking, through the
commercial agent von Roeper, from Amsterdam. For this reason, as the
Moluccas have suffered by _special_ (or spice-) defraudation, a
pepper-and-cinnamon cordon of cadets and huzzars encircles the land; no
one could smuggle in a nutmeg, unless it were a Muscat pigeon in her
tough gut. All that my Scheerau readers get at the shops--the
establishment may belong to a great, house which keeps more ships and
bummers on their legs than I do compositors, or it may have been hired
by a poor hawker whose sign already moves my pity, whose waste-book is
a slate and his stock-book a greasy shop door, and whose goods are
brought in not by ship, but as land freight, under the arm and on the
shoulder, _i. e_., on a stick over the shoulder--in either case the
Scheerau reader chews products from Moluccas which are under his nose.
"Any one who can properly estimate such a state of things, will
heartily agree with the spice inspector, who writes in the Scheerau
Intelligencer, (1) that now the country might get pepper and ginger at
a lower price, simply because the government would be able to order it
in larger, consequently in cheaper, quantities; (2) that the Regent
would now be in a condition to wean the Scheerauers, first of all the
Germans, from these luxuries which empty our purse over India, by
merely raising the price considerably, and (3) that a new department of
public service would get a livelihood.
"I need not apologize for the fact that our Prince--as the Russian
Empress gives the city charter to villages--bestows insular rights upon
rubbish-hills, or that he gives them East-Indian names, since every
simpleton of a seaman can represent to the greatest island, and that
too when he has rather discovered than created it, the person of
god-father. Our Sumatra is one-fourth of a quarter-square league, and
grows mainly pepper--the island of Java is still larger, but not yet
completed--on Banda, which is three times as large as the concert-hall,
nature furnishes nutmegs, on Amboyna cloves--on Teidore stands the
pretty country-seat of a well-known Scheerauer (the resident Doctor
himself)--the little Moluccas which are dotted into the lake I can,
with their products, thrust into my waist-coat pocket, but they have
their merit. Whoso has never yet been in any seaport, in any haven, may
travel hither to that of Scheerau and be a witness himself, any
afternoon, what the commerce is in our days, which the united hands of
all nations maintain--here he can form an idea of merchant-fleets,
whereof he had so often but blindly read, and which he here actually
sees sail over our pond--he can see the so-called spice-fleet of the
commercial agent Herr von Roeper, which like a torrid clime distributes
the necessary spices which he has ordered, among all the islands--he
can also come upon poor devils who on little rafts fetch from the East
Indies the few goods, which they dispose of by the pennyworth--in
port and on shore, where he himself stands, he can observe what the
coast-trade is which the so-called huckster-women carry on in a small
way with ginger-nuts and walnuts."
_End of Number Sixteen_.
* * *
The second part of the Fenkian newspaper is a description of this very
commercial agent von Roeper without his name. When the reader has read
this digression, he will say it was none at all.