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Valhalla RYS was a steam yacht, much admired in her day for her beauty and unusual rigging. She was famous for her participation in the Kaiser's Trans-Atlantic Race of 1905, and the sighting of a Sea-serpent in the Atlantic that same year. She had several owners, most notably Joe Laycock a trans-Atlantic racing yachtsman and Olympian, and Lord Crawford, who employed her as a research vessel on three major voyages from 1902 to 1908, which resulted in the book Three Voyages of a Naturalist : Being an Account of Many Little-Known Islands in Three Oceans Visited by the 'Valhalla' R.Y.S., by M.J. Nicoll, published in 1908. During the Great War she served with the Royal Navy as a part of the Eastern Mediterranean fleet's Aegean Squadron during the Gallipoli campaign. After the War she became a French-owned fruit carrier, before being wrecked off Cape St. Vincent in 1922. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhalla_(steam_yacht,_1892)

Pearling has been carried out in Indonesian waters from very early times, with local divers collecting the shell. Some of the Indonesian divers went a con-siderable distance in search of shell. As Europeans extended their presence in the north of Australia, they saw Indonesians collecting pearls in Australian waters. The Aru Islands have been, and still are, one of the principal pearl-shell grounds in Indonesia. Al-though quite off the track of all European trade, these islands had by the early 19th century become the eastern terminus for the annual fleet of Bugis prahus from Ma-kassar (The Buginese are traders and seaborne colonists from south Sulawesi; see map, Fig. 2.) They were a source not only of pearls and mother-of-pearl, hut of such exotics as birds of paradise, tortoiseshell, trepang or sea slug, and edible birds’ nests. The British naturalist Alfred Wallace did the 1000-mile journey to the remote islands in a Bugis prahu in the 1850s (Fig. 4) and considered it quite an achieve-ment. “Even by the Makassar people themselves the voyage to the Aru Islands is looked upon as a rather wild and romantic expedi-tion, full of novel sights and strange adventures. He who has made it is looked up to as an authority, and it remains with many the unachieved ambition of their lives. I myself had hoped rather than expected ever to reach this “Ultima Thule” of the East…” (Wallace 1869:309). Source: www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/sampans-belangs-and-junkos/

BSA 500cc sv sloper from c. 1930 [www.bsa1930s.nl/1930/1930_s30-9.jpg]