23 is carried out by Chinese. April 17th. Since leaving Ambon we are going the way of a real island ship—doing short runs and loading at all hours copra at every stop. This morning, having left Ternate at 10.30 last night, I was awakened by the rattle of winches at daylight and the thumping overhead to find we were lying off a small plantation on an island on the inner side of Batjan. From there we moved to another little place on Batjan itself and from there crossed to --- near the south end of Halmahera. Everywhere the appearance of the forests, unbroken except for small patches and strips along the coast, denotes a heavy rain-fall. From the aspect of the vege- tation and general topography of the land there is from the ship nothing to dis- tinguish these islands from New Guinea, the Solomon Islands or for that matter, any part of the Malaysian-Pacific rain forest area. Here at the southxxk end of Halmahera the people are of broad-faced Malay type and many of the houses of --- are just like those of Hanuabada and Hula on the south coast of British New Guinea. April 18th. Soon after daylight we entered the narrow and picturesque strait of Sagewin between Batanta and Salawati; islands of the end of the Vogelkop. Steaming to 11.30 in narrow island-studded waters, we anchored off Yef Kassim, an oil- prospecting base camp, situated just about the extreme point of the Vogelkop. This is a very imposing establishment built on high ground pn a deep a nd narrow passage. The land ridges of yellow clay rising to 50-60 feet. Most of the small islands seem to be formed by such ridges, drowned and isolated as Islands covered with wet-looking rain forest within a fringe of mangroves. Similar ridges, appar- ently rising out of swamp, form the mainland. The Netherland New Guinea petroleum Coy., to anglicize the name, is operating here. They have installed an oil tank of about fifty thousand gallons capacity at Yef Kassim and are laying a three inch