Part 1
Java
The Garden of the East
[Illustration: MALAYS DIVING FOR MONEY.]
Java
The Garden of the East
By Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore Author of “Jinrikisha Days in Japan”
[Illustration]
New York The Century Co. 1898
Copyright, 1897, By THE CENTURY CO.
THE DEVINNE PRESS
PREFACE
In presenting this account of a visit to one of the most beautiful countries of the world, I shall hope that many will be induced to follow there, and that my record may assist them to avoid certain things and to take advantage of others that will add to their enjoyment of the island where nature has been so prodigal with beauties and wonders.
After the body of this work had gone to press, the first copies of a small, compact, and most admirable “Guide to the Dutch East Indies,” written by Dr. J. F. Van Bemmelen and Colonel J. B. Hoover, by invitation of the Royal Steam Packet Company, Amsterdam, and translated into English by the Rev. B. J. Berrington, reached this country, and to this work I hasten to extend my salutations, since my own pages contain so many plaints for some such guide. It treats of all the islands under Dutch rule, turning especial light upon the so little-known Sumatra, where many attractions and possible resorts will invite pleasure-travel; and, leading one from end to end of Java, it more than supplements what Captain Schulze’s little guide had done for Batavia and the west end of the island. Translating so much of local and special lore hitherto locked away from the alien visitor in Dutch texts, it at last fairly opens Java to the tourist world, and excites my keen regret that its earlier publication had not lighted my way.
In preparing these pages every effort has been made to avoid errors, and I invite other corrections, and acknowledge here with great appreciation those suggested by Dutch readers, and at once made in certain chapters that originally appeared in the “Century Magazine.” In the varied English, French, and Dutch spelling of many words, in drawing statistics from works in as many languages, and in accepting as facts things verbally communicated to me by seemingly responsible people, there were chances of error; but one can only beg to be set right. In this connection I hasten to state that under the liberal policy of recent years the Dutch government has withdrawn its prohibition of the pilgrimage to Mecca, and more than six thousand of its Mohammedan subjects have availed themselves of the privilege in one year. It should also be noted that the Ashantee prince has not availed himself of the privilege of living and dying under the British flag in South Africa, and the pathetic tale of that exile, as told by Britons, lacks that completing touch of fact. For these suggestions in particular, others concerning Sumatra, and still others which had been anticipated, I thank Mr. R. A. Van Sandick of Amsterdam, with appreciation of the spirit and the loyalty to his own people which prompted his making them. Myths and legends and fairy tales grow with tropic rankness in those far ends of earth even to-day, and gravitate inevitably to the stranger’s ear.
E. R. S.
WASHINGTON, D. C., October 1, 1897.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. SINGAPORE AND THE EQUATOR 1
II. IN “JAVA MAJOR” 17
III. BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST 25
IV. THE KAMPONGS 37
V. TO THE HILLS 49
VI. A DUTCH SANS SOUCI 62
VII. IN A TROPICAL GARDEN 79
VIII. THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” 94
IX. THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” (_Continued_) 109
X. SINAGAR 126
XI. PLANTATION LIFE 136
XII. ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES 147
XIII. “TO TISSAK MALAYA!” 156
XIV. PRISONERS OF STATE AT BORO BOEDOR 167
XV. BORO BOEDOR 182
XVI. BORO BOEDOR AND MENDOET 203
XVII. BRAMBANAM 216
XVIII. SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN 240
XIX. THE LAND OF KRIS AND SARONG 253
XX. DJOKJAKARTA 265
XXI. PAKOE ALAM: THE “AXIS OF THE UNIVERSE” 283
XXII. “TJILATJAP,” “CHALACHAP,” “CHELACHAP” 301
XXIII. GAROET AND PAPANDAYANG 312
XXIV. “SALAMAT!” 324
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MALAYS DIVING FOR MONEY _Frontispiece_
PAGE
A STREET IN SINGAPORE 5
MAP OF JAVA 16
A JAVANESE YOUNG WOMAN 27
PAINTING SARONGS 43
RICE-FIELDS 53
MOUNT SALAK, FROM THE RESIDENT’S GARDEN, BUITENZORG 63
FRANGIPANI AND SAUSAGE-TREE 73
TROPICAL FRUITS 81
TROPICAL FRUITS 89
A MARKET IN BUITENZORG 99
SCENES AROUND THE MARKET 105
A VIEW IN BUITENZORG 111
JAVANESE COOLIES GAMBLING 123
JAVANESE DANCING-GIRL 139
A MOHAMMEDAN MOSQUE 159
WAYSIDE PAVILION ON POST-ROAD 177
BORO BOEDOR, FROM THE PASSAGRAHAN 183
GROUND-PLAN OF BORO BOEDOR 187
FOUR BAS-RELIEFS FROM BORO BOEDOR 191
ON THE SECOND TERRACE 195
THE LATTICED DAGOBAS ON THE CIRCULAR TERRACES 199
THE RIGHT-HAND IMAGE AT MENDOET 207
TEMPLE OF LORO JONGGRAN AT BRAMBANAM 217
CLEARING AWAY RUBBISH AND VEGETATION AT BRAMBANAM TEMPLES 221
KRISHNA AND THE THREE GRACES 225
LORO JONGGRAN AND HER ATTENDANTS 229
PLAN OF CHANDI SEWOU (“THOUSAND TEMPLES”) 233
FRAGMENT FROM LORO JONGGRAN TEMPLE 235
GANESHA, THE ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD 238
THE SUSUNHAN 243
THE DODOK 249
JAVA, BALI, AND MADURA KRISES 255
THE BRAMBANAM BABY 267
TYING THE TURBAN 279
WAYANG-WAYANG 285
TOPENG TROUPE WITH MASKS 291
TRANSPLANTING RICE 315
JAVA
THE GARDEN OF THE EAST
I
SINGAPORE AND THE EQUATOR
Singapore (or S’pore, as the languid, perspiring, exhausted residents near the line most often write and pronounce the name of Sir Stamford Raffles’s colony in the Straits of Malacca) is a geographical and commercial center and cross-roads of the eastern hemisphere, like to no other port in the world. Singapore is an ethnological center, too, and that small island swinging off the tip of the Malay Peninsula holds a whole congress of nations, an exhibit of all the races and peoples and types of men in the world, compared to which the Midway Plaisance was a mere skeleton of a suggestion. The traveler, despite the overpowering, all-subduing influence of the heat, has some thrills of excitement at the tropical pictures of the shore, and the congregation of varicolored humanity grouped on the Singapore wharf; and there and in Java, where one least and last expects to find such modern conveniences, his ship swings up to solid wharves, and he walks down a gang-plank in civilized fashion—something to be appreciated after the excitements and discomforts of landing in small boats among the screaming heathen of all other Asiatic ports.
On the Singapore wharf is a market of models and a life-class for a hundred painters; and sculptors, too, may study there all the tones of living bronze and the beauties of human patina, and more of repose than of muscular action, perhaps. Japanese, Chinese, Siamese, Malays, Javanese, Burmese, Cingalese, Tamils, Sikhs, Parsees, Lascars, Malabars, Malagasy, and sailor folk of all coasts, Hindus and heathens of every caste and persuasion, are grouped in a brilliant confusion of red, white, brown, and patterned drapery, of black, brown, and yellow skins; and behind them, in ghostly clothes, stand the pallid Europeans, who have brought the law, order, and system, the customs, habits, comforts, and luxuries of civilization to the tropics and the jungle. All these alien heathens and picturesque unbelievers, these pagans and idolaters, Buddhists, Brahmans, Jews, Turks, sun- and fire-worshipers, devil-dancers, and what not, have come with the white man to toil for him under the equatorial sun, since the Malays are the great leisure class of the world, and will not work. The Malays will hardly live on the land, much less cultivate it or pay taxes, while they can float about in strange little hen-coops of house-boats that fill the river and shores by thousands. Hence the Tamils have come from India to work, and the Chinese to do the small trading; and the Malay rests, or at most goes a-fishing, or sits by the canoe-loads of coral and sponges, balloon-fish and strange sea treasures that are sold at the wharf.
A tribe of young Malays in dugout canoes meet every steamer and paddle in beside it, shrieking and gesticulating for the passengers to toss coins into the water. Their mops of black hair are bleached auburn by the action of sun and salt water, and the canoe and paddle fit as naturally to these amphibians as a turtle’s shell and flipper. They bail with an automatic sweep of the hollowed foot in regular time with the dip of the paddle; and when a coin drops, the Malay lets go the paddle and sheds his canoe without concern. There is a flash of brown heels, bubbles and commotion below, and the diver comes up, and chooses and rights his wooden shell and flipper as easily and naturally as a man picks out and assumes his coat and cane at a hall door. And in their hearts, the civilized folk on deck, hampered with their multiple garments and conventions, envy these happy-go-lucky, care-free amphibians in the land of the breadfruit, banana, and scant raiment, with dives into the cool, green water, teeming with fish and glittering with falling coins, as the only exertion required to earn a living. Cold and hunger are unknown; flannels and soup are no part of charity; and even that word, and the many organizations in its name, are hardly known in the lands low on the line.
S’pore is the great junction where travelers from the East or the West change ship for Java; a commercial cross-roads where all who travel must stop and see what a marvel of a place British energy has raised from the jungle in less than half a century. The Straits Settlements date from the time when Sir Stamford Raffles, after Great Britain’s five years’ temporary occupancy of Java, returned that possession to the Dutch in 1816, the fall of Napoleon removing the fear that this possession of Holland would become a French colony and menace to British interests in Asia. It had been intended to establish such a British commercial entrepôt at Achin Head, the north end of Sumatra; but Sir Stamford Raffles’s better idea prevailed, and the free port of Singapore in the Straits of Malacca has won the commercial supremacy of the East from Batavia, and has prospered beyond its founder’s dreams. It is a well-built and a beautifully ordered city, and the municipal housekeeping is an example to many cities of the temperate zone. Even the untidy Malay and the dirt-loving Chinese, who swarm to this profitable trading-center, and have absorbed all the small business and retail trade of the place, are held to outer cleanliness and strict sanitary laws in their allotted quarters. The stately business houses, the marble palace of a bank, the long iron pavilions shading the daily markets, the splendid Raffles Museum and Library, are all regular and satisfactory sights; but the street life is the fascination and distraction of the traveler before everything else. The array of turbans and sarongs gives color to every thoroughfare; but the striking and most unique pictures in Singapore streets are the Tamil bullock-drivers, who, sooty and statuesque, stand in splendid contrast between their humped white oxen and the mounds of white flour-bags they draw in primitive carts. Tiny Tamil children, shades blacker, if that could really be, than their ebon- and charcoal-skinned parents, are seen on suburban roads, clothed only in silver chains, bracelets, and medals; and these lithe, lean people from the south end of India are first in the picturesque elements of the great city of the Straits. The Botanical Garden, although so recently established, promises to become famous; and one arriving from the farther East meets there for the first time the beautiful red-stemmed Banka palm, and the symmetrical traveler’s palm of Madagascar, the latter all conventionalized ready for sculptors’ use. Scores of other splendid palms, giant creepers, gorgeous blossoms and fantastic orchids, known to us only by puny examples in great conservatories at home, equally delight one—all the wealth of jungle and swamp growing beside the smooth, hard roads of an English park, over which one may drive for hours in the suburbs of Singapore.
[Illustration: A STREET IN SINGAPORE.
After photograph by E. S. Platt.]
The Dutch mail-steamers to and from Batavia connect with the English mail-steamers at Singapore; a French line connects with the Messagerie’s ships running between Marseilles and Japan; an Australian line of steamers gives regular communication; and independent steamers, offering as much comfort, leave Singapore almost daily for Batavia. The five hundred miles’ distance is covered in forty-eight or sixty hours, for a uniform fare of fifty Mexican dollars or ninety Dutch gulden—an excessive and unusual charge for a voyage of such length in that or any other region. The traveler is usually warned long beforehand that living and travel in the Netherlands Indies is the most expensive in the world; and the change from the depreciated Mexican silver-dollar standard and the profitable exchange of the far East to the gold standard of Holland dismays one at the start. The completion of railways across and to all parts of the island of Java, however, has greatly reduced tourist expenses, so that they are not now two or three times the average of similar expenses in India, China, and Japan.
At Singapore, only two degrees above the equator, the sun pursues a monotony of rising and setting that ranges only from six minutes before to six minutes after six o’clock, morning and evening, the year round. Breakfasting by candle-light and leaving the hotel in darkness, there was all the beauty of the gray-and-rose dawn and the pale-yellow rays of the early sun to be seen from the wet deck when our ship let go from the wharf and sailed out over a sea of gold. For the two days and two nights of the voyage, with but six passengers on the large blue-funnel steamer, we had the deck and the cabins, and indeed the equator and the Java Sea, to ourselves. The deck was furnished with the long chairs and hammocks of tropical life, but more tropical yet were the bunches of bananas hanging from the awning-rail, that all might pick and eat at will; for this is the true region of plenty, where selected bananas cost one Mexican cent the dozen, and a whole bunch but five cents, and where actual living is far too cheap and simple to be called a science.
The ship slipped out from the harbor through the glassy river of the Straits of Malacca, and on past points and shores that to me had never been anything but geographic names. There was some little thrill of excitement in being “on the line” in the heart of the tropics, the half-way house of all the world, and one expected strange aspects and effects. There was a magic stillness of air and sea; the calm was as of enchantment, and one felt as if in some hypnotic trance, with all nature chained in the same spell. The pale, pearly sky was reflected in smooth stretches of liquid, pearly sea, with vaporous hills, soft green visions of land beyond. Everywhere in these regions the shallow water shows pale green above the sandy bottom, and the anchor can be dropped at will. All through the breathless day the ship coursed over this shimmering yellow and gray-green sea, with faint pictures of land, the very landscapes of mirage, drawn in vaporous tints on every side. We were threading a way through the thousand islands, the archipelago lying below the point of the Malay Peninsula, a region of unnamed, uncounted “summer isles of Eden,” chiefly known to history as the home of pirates.
The high mountain-ridges of Sumatra barred the west for all the first equatorial day, the land of this “Java Minor” sloping down and spreading out in great green plains and swamps on the fertile but unhealthy eastern coast. The large settlements and most attractive districts are on the west coast, where the hills rise steeply from the ocean, and coffee-trees thrive luxuriantly. Benkoelen, the old English town, and Padang, the great coffee-mart, are on that coast, and from the latter a railway leads to high mountain districts of great picturesqueness. There are few government plantations on Sumatra, where land-tenures and leases are the same as in Java. Immense areas have been devoted to tobacco-culture near Deli, on the north or Straits coast, planters employing there and on lower east-coast estates more than forty-three thousand Chinese coolies—the Chinese, the one Asiatic who toils with ardor and regularity, whom the tropics cannot debilitate, and to whom malaria and all germs, microbes, and bacilli seem but tonic agents.
When the British returned Java, after the Napoleon scare was over, they retained Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and sovereign rights over Sumatra, relinquishing this latter suzerainty in 1872, in exchange for Holland’s imaginary rights in Ashantee and the Gold Coast of Africa. The Dutch then attempted to reduce the native population of Sumatra to the same estate as the more pliant people of Java; but the wild mountaineers and bucaneers, of the north, or Achin, end of the island in particular, warned by the sad fate of the Javanese, had no intention of being conquered and enslaved, of giving their labor and the fruit of their lands to the strangers from Europe’s cold swamps. The Achin war has continued since 1872, with little result save a general loss of Dutch prestige in the East, an immense expenditure of Dutch gulden, causing a deficit in the colonial budget every year, a fearful mortality among Dutch troops, and the final abandonment, in this decade of trade depression, of the aggressive policy. Dutch commanders are well satisfied to hold their chain of forts along the western hills, and to punish the Achinese in a small way by blockading them from their supplies of opium, tobacco, and spirits. In one four years of active campaigning the Achin war cost seventy million gulden, and seventy out of every hundred Dutch soldiers succumbed to the climate before going into an encounter. The Achinese merely retired to their swamps and jungles and waited, and the climate did the rest, their confidence in themselves only shaken during the command of General Van der Heyden, who for a time actually crushed the rebellion. This picturesque fighter, a half-brother of Baron de Stuers, inherited Malay instincts from a native mother, and carried on such a warfare as the Achinese understood. He lost an eye in one encounter, and the natives, then remembering an old tradition that their country would be conquered by a one-eyed man, practically gave up the struggle—to resume it, however, as soon as General Van der Heyden retired and sailed for Holland, and military vigilance was relaxed in consequence of Dutch economy. The Achinese leader, Toekoe Oemar, has several times apparently yielded to the Dutch, only to perpetrate some greater injury; and his treachery and crimes have given him repute as the very prince of evil ones.
One’s sympathy goes naturally with the brave, liberty-loving Achinese; and in view of their indomitable spirit, Great Britain did not lose so much when she let go unconquerable Sumatra. British tourists are saddened, however, when they see what their ministers let slip with Java, for with that island and Sumatra, all Asia’s southern shore-line, and virtually the far East, would have been England’s own.
Geologically this whole Malay Archipelago was one with the Malay Peninsula, and although so recently made, is still subject to earthquake change, as shown in the terrible eruption of the island of Krakatau in the narrow Sunda Strait, west of Java, in August, 1883. Native traditions tell that anciently Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Sumbawa were one island, and “when three thousand rainy seasons shall have passed away they will be reunited”; but Alfred Russel Wallace denies it, and proves that Java was the first to drop away from the Asiatic mainland and become an island.
While the sun rode high in the cloudless white zenith above our ship the whole world seemed aswoon. Hills and islands swam and wavered in the heat and mists, and the glare and silence were terrible and oppressive. One could not shake off the sensation of mystery and unreality, of sailing into some unknown, eerie, other world. Every voice was subdued, the beat of the engines was scarcely felt in that glassy calm, and the stillness of the ship gave a strange sensation, as of a magic spell. It was not so very hot,—only 86° by the thermometer,—but the least exertion, to cross the deck, to lift a book, to pull a banana, left one limp and exhausted, with cheeks burning and the breath coming faster, that insidious, deceptive heat of the tropics declaring itself—that steaming, wilting quality in the sun of Asia that so soon makes jelly of the white man’s brain, and that in no way compares with the scorching, dry 96° in the shade of a North American, hot-wave summer day.
At five o’clock, while afternoon tea and bananas were being served on deck, we crossed the line—that imaginary parting of the world, the invisible thread of the universe, the beginning and the end of all latitude—latitude 0°, longitude 103° east, the sextant told. The position was geographically exciting. We were literally “down South,” and might now speak disrespectfully of the equator if we wished. A breeze sprang up as soon as we crossed the line, and all that evening and through the night the air of the southern hemisphere was appreciably cooler. The ship went slowly, and loitered along in order to enter the Banka Straits by daylight; and at sunrise we were in a smooth river of pearl, with the green Sumatra shores close on one hand, and the heights of Banka’s island of tin on the other. A ship in full sail swept out to meet us, and four more barks under swelling canvas passed by in that narrow strait, whose rocks and reefs are fully attested by the line of wrecks and sunken masts down its length. The harbor of Muntuk, whence there is a direct railway to the tin-mines, was busy with shipping, and the white walls and red roofs of the town showed prettily against the green.
The open Java Sea was as still and glassy as the straits had been, and for another breathless, cloudless day the ship’s engines beat almost inaudibly as we went southward through an enchanted silence. When the heat and glare of light from the midday sun so directly overhead drove us to the cabin, where swinging punkas gave air, we had additional suggestion of the tropics; for a passenger for Macassar, just down from Penang and Malacca, showed us fifty freshly cured specimens of birds, whose gorgeous plumage repeated the most brilliant and dazzling tints of the rainbow, the flower-garden, and the jewel-case, and left us bereft of adjectives and exclamations. Here we found another passenger, who spoke Dutch and looked the Hollander by every sign, but quickly claimed citizenship with us as a naturalized voter of the great republic. He asked if we lived in Java, and when we had answered that we were going to Java _en touriste_, “merely travelers,” he established comradeship by saying, “I am a traveling man myself—New York Life.” This naturalized American citizen said quite naturally, “We Dutchmen” and “our queen”—Americanisms with a loyal Holland ring.