She answered, "In their hold they have a great quantity of silks and materials for making gowns for women. This jacket," said she, meaning that which she was wearing, "is one article out of several chests of clothes Captain Vanderdecken was carrying home for his wife and daughters and friends. Do you notice the style, Mr. Fenton?" she added, turning about her full and graceful figure that I might see the jacket, "it is certainly of the last century. In the captain's cabin is the portrait of one of his daughters dressed in much the same way."
"You, at all events," said I, "are not likely to run short of clothes."
"Oh!" she answered, with a toss of her head, half of weariness, half of scorn as it seemed to me, "there is a chest in my cabin full of clothes fit for the grandest Duchess in England. I use such as come most readily to my hands. What need have I," she exclaimed, pushing her hair from her forehead, "to care whether the colours I take match, or whether the gown is too full. This jacket fits me as do all the clothes that were intended for Geertruida Vanderdecken." Then, noticing my eyes resting on the pearls, she said, taking the beautiful and costly rope in her hands, "There is a great stock of finery of this kind in the ship. About a fortnight or three weeks after I had been rescued, the captain ordered Prins to bring a large case into the cabin; it was put upon the table and the captain opened it. 'Twas like a jeweller's shop in miniature, containing several divisions, one full of pearl ornaments, another of rings, of which he bid me choose one to wear, and I took this," holding up her forefinger whereon the jewel blazed, "a third of earrings and many other trinkets; some, as I should fancy, more ancient than this ship, others of a later time. How he got much of this treasure I know."
"Well," said she, letting fall the pearls around her neck to toy with the ring, "a fair proportion he had purchased for a merchant of Amsterdam; chiefly eastern jewellery that had made its way from Indian cities to Java; other parcels he was taking home on his own account; but much of it, too, along with a store of further treasure--some of which I have seen, and which consists of virgin silver, bars of gold, coated with pewter to deceive the pirates and buccaneers, candlesticks and crucifixes of precious metal--he found in the wreck of a great Spanish ship which lay abandoned and going to pieces on a shoal off the coast of Natal. This happened during his progress from Batavia to the Cape, before he was cursed, and therefore it falls within his memory. What other treasure there is, his men have no doubt brought away from the wrecked vessels they have examined for food, powder and the like, during the years they have been sailing about this ocean."