Besides the trade with Sooloo, a ship is absent nearly every year to Ternate, and other places of the Moluccas, where they usually manage to get their goods ashore, without paying the heavy duties which the Dutch have imposed upon them. The months of December or January being the usual time for starting for the Moluccas, these traders generally begin the busy season at Manilla by the purchase of grey shirtings and domestics, by adding which to goods very similar to those suited for Sooloo, they are enabled to have two strings to their bow, should the prices in the Moluccas be low; as they can, in that case, stand over to Sooloo in June, when they are usually able to dispose of their investments. CHAPTER XXX. The insolence of the Sooloo men has at various times drawn down on them the wrath of the Spanish authorities, who, in 1848, and also shortly after I left Manilla, towards the end of 1850, were making arrangements for punishing them, as they afterwards did, with some severity, about the beginning of this year. The Datos, and their families, are like the old Danes, or Norsemen, born to be seamen; and the barbarous state of their native country preventing the establishment of a mercantile marine, their energies have marked out a scheme of warlike adventure on the sea, to succeed in which their natural quickness and duplicity of character eminently qualify them. A young Sooloo chief, whose ambitious or restless temper will not permit him to remain an idle man at home, where his passions for cruelty and voluptuous excess could scarcely fail to ruin him in a few years--surrounded as he is there by slavish dependents, and fearless of any higher power, whose authority might act as a check on his temper, or force him to control his passions--finds that the activity of his mind and body demand more scope for excitement than exists at home; and having a bias for the sea, he becomes a pirate chief, and scours the neighbouring waters in search of honour as well as gain. Under proper influences these men might be taught to divert their roving propensities into more peaceful channels. Fitting out large and fast-sailing proas, manned by their slaves, and officered by kinsmen, their warlike excursions take a wide range, and on some occasions their audacity has led them up even to the Bay of Manilla, landing on the shores of which, they have plundered the people, and carried off some of them to increase the number of their slaves, who constitute their principal wealth and power--daring to do this when so near as to be almost under the very walls of the capital, on which waves the banner of Castile.