They are fond of staying in the water to keep cool. To get them on board the boat the men first made them swim out to the steamer. Then a rope was put around the horns of each buffalo, and a little engine hoisted him up, scared and kicking, on to the boat.
Emilio sold his copra to one of the Chinese storekeepers. The boys spent a pleasant afternoon watching the work around the steamer. In the evening they took home with them a hundred-pound sack of rice. Then they all had a feast, for they had had no rice for three weeks. They never eat bread, but use rice, sweet potatoes, and bananas instead.
Each day for three days more they took down a boatload of copra. All together they sold fifty dollars worth, and no one in that family had to work any more for two months.
246. Trading with all the the fifty dollars, Emilio bought some rice from French Indo-China (See Fig. 444); a red cotton dress from England for Maria; two pretty combs from France; some glass beads from Venice, Italy (Fig. 315); a new coconut knife and a hatchet from Connecticut; a cheap clock from Massachusetts; some white cotton cloth from South Carolina; some canned meat from Chicago; and some canned peaches from California. Of course, all these things came from the Chinese store in the town beside the bay. The Chinaman got them from the American wholesale store in Manila, and the wholesale store in Manila got them from export stores in San Fran cisco, Seattle, New York, and London. Can you show the routes that the steamers took as they carried these goods to Manila? One of Emilio's packages was wrapped up in tough, brown paper, called manila paper. This paper was made from an old
manila hemp rope that had been worn out on a Gloucester fishing schooner. It had then been made into strong paper at Hol yoke, Massachusetts, beside the waterfalls of the Connecticut River.
247. Our uses of of Emilio's copra was crushed by heavy machines at a Manila oil mill, to get out all the oil in which the meat of the coco nut is so rich. Coconut oil is good to eat, and twenty pounds of copra make a gallon of it. Some of the Philippine copra finds its way into oil mills in Marseille, France, some to New Orleans, and some to Amsterdam in Holland. Some even goes to Hamburg, Germany, and on up the river to Prague (Fig. 315), the capital of the new country called Czechoslovakia. From the oil mills coconut oil goes in barrels to factories in Milwaukee, Chicago, London, Paris, Berlin (Can you find them on the maps?), and to many other cities in Europe and America where cooking-fat is prepared for kitchen use.
A few years ago a chemist learned how to mix coco nut oil with milk and other things, so that the mixture tastes like butter made from cows' milk. It is so much cheaper than real butter that the people in England, Germany, and other countries of Europe eat as much of it as they do of cows' butter. We are also using much of this palm-tree butter in the United States, and therefore the price of coconuts has risen as the price of meat has risen.