THE JUNGLES OF SIAM
The route to Bangkok, such as it was, lay on the eastern bank of the
Menam. This time we crossed the stream by the official ferry, a dug-out
canoe fully thirty feet long, which held, besides ourselves and four
paddlers, twenty-two natives, chiefly of the gentle sex. All day we
tramped through jungle as wild as that to the westward, following the
course of the river. Bamboo villages were numerous and for every hut at
least a half-dozen, mangy, yellow curs added their yelping to the uproar
that heralded our approach. We cooked our food where we chose and paid
for it when we had eaten. The inhabitants were indolent “wild men” like
those of the mountains, content to live and die in their nests of jungle
rubbish, with a dirty rag about their loins. Occasionally a family ran
away into the forest when we took possession of their abode. More often
they remained where we found them, squatting on the floor, and watched
our culinary dexterity with lack-luster eyes. Except for their breasts,
there was nothing to distinguish the women from the men. Both sexes wore
their dull, black hair some two inches long and dressed it in a
bristling pompadour that gave them a resemblance to startled porcupines.
Both had jet-black teeth. The younger children were robust little
animals; the older, ungainly creatures with overgrown bellies.
Chief of the obstacles to our progress were the tributaries of the Menam
Chow Pya. Sometimes they were swift and deep. Then we had only to strip
and swim them, our bundles slung around our heads. What we dreaded more
were the sluggish streams, through which we must wade waist deep in
black, foul-smelling slush or half-acres of nauseating green slime,
cesspools that seemed designed to harbor poisonous snakes. Once we
despaired for a time of continuing our way. We had been halted by a
stagnant rivulet more than a furlong wide, too deep to be waded, too
thickly covered with stewing slime to be swum. We wandered back along it
for some distance. No stream could have been less fitting a scene for
romance. Yet what was our surprise to find, where the green scum was
thickest, an old dug-out scow, half roofed with attap leaves, anchored
to a snag equi-distant from either shore; and in it that same youthful
priest of our mountain tramp, engrossed in the entertainment of as
comely a female as one could have run to earth in the length and breadth
of these Siamese wilds. We half suspected that he would resent being
disturbed. At sight of the scowling face that he raised when we hallooed
to him we were sure of it.
Still we could not halt where we were merely out of respect for romance.
We beckoned to him to paddle ashore and set us across. He refused and
snarled back at us. We picked up the stoutest clubs at hand and shook
them at him. He laughed scornfully. I threw my weapon at the craft. It
struck the roof and went through it. The priest sprang up with a whine,
slipped his mooring, and, twisting his face into an ugly grin of feigned
amiability, paddled slowly towards us. We sprang into the scow and five
minutes later were plunging through the jungle beyond.
The sun was still well above the horizon when we reached Kung Chow. The
Dane had told us it was twenty-two miles from Rehang. Kung Chow was no
ordinary jungle village. It consisted of a bungalow of unusual
magnificence, set in the center of a clearing on the bank of the Menam,
with a half-circle of smaller dwellings round about and at a respectful
distance from it. The main building was the residence of the “jungle
king”; the smaller housed his servants and retainers.
Of this royal person we had heard much at breakfast that morning. To the
commander of Rehang he was “almost a fellow countryman,” as he hailed
from Sweden. For many years he had been stationed at Kung Chow as
manager of a company that is exploiting the teak forests, and the style
in which he lived in spite of his isolation had won him his sobriquet.
We found him sitting in state on the veranda of his palace, gazing
serenely out across the clearing. The servants that hovered about him
looked like ludicrous little manikins in his presence, for he would have
tipped the scales at perilously near a quarter-ton. The unruffled mien
with which he noted our arrival bespoke a truly regal poise. We halted
at the foot of the throne and craved the boon of a drink of water.
Judging from the calm wave of the hand with which the “king” ordered a
vassal to fetch it, one would have supposed that white men passed his
palace every hour. He watched us silently as we quenched our thirst.
There was no tremor of excitement in the voice in which he asked our
nationality and destination, and he inquired no further.
“I can put a bungalow at your disposal,” he said, “if you had planned on
stopping here.”
We were of half a mind to push on. It lacked an hour of sunset, and, to
tell the truth, we had grown so accustomed to being received with open
arms by Europeans that we were a bit disgruntled at his impassionate
demeanor. In the end we swallowed our pride and thanked him for the
offer. That decision turned out to be the most fortunate of all the days
of our partnership.
The “king” waved a hand once more and a henchman in scarlet livery
stepped forth and led us to one of the half-circle of bungalows. It was
a goodly dwelling, as dwellings go, up along the Menam. Five servants
were detailed to attend us. They prepared two English tub-baths and
stood ready with crash towels to rub us down. The condition of our skins
forced us to dispense with that service. When we had changed our
garments a laundryman took charge of those we had worn. By this time, a
servant had brought a phonograph from the palace and set it in action.
The phonograph is not a perfected instrument; but even its tunes are
soothing when one has heard nothing approaching music for weeks except
the ballads sung by a crack-voiced Australian or the no less symphonic
croaking of lizards.
Then came our evening banquet. For days afterwards James could not speak
of that without a tremor in his voice. The supper of the night before
was a free lunch in a Clark street “slop’s house” in comparison. Least
of the wonders that arrived from the storehouse of his jungle majesty
was a box of fifty fat Habana cigars and a dozen bottles of imported
beer; ice cold in these sweltering tropics.
We had just settled down for an evening chat when a sudden violent
hubbub burst forth. I dashed out upon the veranda. Around the palace
fluttered half the population of Kung Chow, squawking like excited hens;
and the others were tumbling out of their bungalows in their haste to
add to the uproar.
The royal residence was afire. From the back of the building a shaft of
black smoke wavered upward in the evening breeze. When we pushed through
the panic-stricken throng, a slim blaze was licking at a corner of the
back veranda. Its origin was not hard to guess. At the foot of the
supporting bamboo pillar lay a sputtering kettle over a heap of charred
fagots. Around it the natives were screaming, pushing, tumbling over
each other; doing everything, in fact, but what the emergency called
for. A dozen of them carried buckets. Twenty yards away was a stream.
But they were as helpless as stampeded sheep.
James snatched a bucket and ran for the creek. I caught up the tilting
kettle and dumped its contents of half-boiled rice on the blaze. With
the Australian’s first bucketful we had the conflagration under control
and it was but the work of a moment to put it out entirely. When the
last ember had ceased to glow, the first native arrived with water from
the stream. Behind him stretched a long line of servants with
overflowing buckets. They fought with each other in their eagerness to
deluge the charred corner of the veranda. Those who could not reach it
dashed their water on the surrounding multitude, and the real firemen;
then ran for more. We were forced to resort to violence to save
ourselves from drowning.
As the last native was fleeing across the clearing, I looked up to see
“his majesty” gazing down upon us. There was not a sign of excitement in
the entire rotundity of his figure.
“These wild men are a useless lot of animals,” he said. “I’m glad you
turned out.” Then he waddled back into his palace.
We returned to our bungalow and started the phonograph anew. Fully an
hour afterward the “king” walked in upon us. He carried what looked like
a great sausage, wrapped in thick, brown paper.
“I’m always glad to help a white man,” he panted, “especially when he
has done me a service.”
I took the parcel in one hand and nearly lost my balance as he let it
go. It weighed several pounds. By the time I had recovered my
equilibrium “his majesty” was gone. I sat down and unrolled the package.
It contained fifty silver tecals.
Our second day down the Menam was enlivened by one adventure. About
noonday, we had cooked our food in one of the huts of a good-sized
village and paid for it by no means illiberally. Outside the shack we
were suddenly surrounded by six “wild men” of unusually angry and
determined appearance. Five of them carried dahs, the sixth, a long,
clumsy musket. While the others danced about us, waving their knives,
the latter stopped three paces away, raised his gun, and took deliberate
aim at my chest. The gleam in his eye suggested that he was not
“bluffing.” I sprang to one side and threw the cocoanut I was carrying
in one hand hard at him. It struck him on the jaw below the ear. His
scream sounded like a factory whistle in the wilderness and he put off
into the jungle as fast as his thin legs could carry him, his companions
shrieking at his heels.
“When you are attacked by an Oriental mob,” the Dane had said, “hurt one
of them, and hurt him quick. That’s all that’s needed.”
Miles beyond, as we reposed in a tangled thicket, a crashing of
underbrush brought us anxiously to our feet. We peered out through the
interwoven branches. An elephant, with a mahout dozing on his head, was
advancing towards us. Behind him came another and another of the bulky
animals, fifteen in all, some with armed men on their backs, others
bearing a small carload of baggage. We stepped out of our hiding place
in time to meet the chief of the caravan, who rode between the seventh
and eighth elephants on a stout-limbed pony. He was an Englishman, agent
of the Bombay-Burma Lumber Company, and had spent fifteen years in
wandering through the teak forests of Siam. Never before, he asserted,
had he known a white man to cross the peninsula unarmed and unescorted.
For a time he was convinced that we were playing a practical joke on him
and had hidden our porters and guns away in the jungle. Disabused of
that idea, he warned us to beware the territory beyond, asserting that
he had killed two tigers and a murderous outlaw within the past week.
“I shall pitch my camp a few miles from here,” he concluded. “You had
better turn back and spend the night with me. It’s all of thirty miles
from Kung Chow to here, more than enough for one day.”
We declined the offer, having no desire to cover the same territory
thrice. The Englishman wrote us a letter of introduction to his subagent
in the next village, and, as that hamlet was some distance off, we took
our leave at once.
For miles we struggled on through the tangle of vegetation without
encountering a sign of the hand of man. The shadows lengthened eastward,
twilight fell and thickened to darkness. To travel by night in this
jungle country is utterly impossible. We paid for our attempt to do so
by losing our way and sinking to our knees in a slimy swamp. When we had
dragged ourselves to more solid ground, all sense of direction was gone.
With raging thirst and gnawing hunger we threw ourselves down in the
depths of the wilderness. The ground was soft and wet. In ten minutes we
had sunk half out of sight. I pulled my “swag” loose and rolled over to
another spot. It was softer and wetter than the one I had left.
“Hark!” murmured James suddenly. “Is that a dog barking? Perhaps there’s
a village near.”
[Illustration: “An elephant, with a mahout dozing on his head, was
advancing toward us”]
[Illustration: Myself after four days in the jungle, and with the
Siamese soldiers with whom we fell in now and then between Myáwadi and
Rehang. I had sold my helmet]
We listened intently, breathlessly. A far-off howl sounded above the
droning of the jungle. Possibly some dog was baying the faint face of
the moon. There was an equal possibility that we had heard the roar of
some beast abroad in quest of prey. “Tigers abound,” the Englishman had
said. So must snakes in this reptile-breeding undergrowth. A crackling
of twigs close beside me sent an electric shock along my spine. I opened
my mouth to call to James. He forstalled me.
“Hello!” he whispered. “Say, I’ll get a fever if I sleep in this mud.
Let’s try that big tree there.”
It was a gigantic growth for the tropics. The lowest of its
wide-spreading branches the Australian could reach from my shoulders. He
pulled me up after him and we climbed higher. I sat down astride a great
limb, tied my bundle above me, and, leaning against the trunk, sank into
a doze.
I was aroused by a blow in the ribs.
“Quit it!” cried James angrily, thumping me again, “What the deuce are
you tearing my clothes off for?”
I opened my mouth to protest, but was interrupted by a violent
chattering in the branches above, as a band of monkeys scampered away at
sound of our voices. They soon returned. For half the night those
jabbering, clawing little brutes kept us awake and ended by driving us
from the tree entirely. We spent the hours of darkness left, on the
ground at its foot, indifferent alike to snakes and tigers.
When daylight came we found the river again within a few hundred yards
of our resting place. A good hour afterward we stumbled, more asleep
than awake, into a village on the northern bank of a large tributary of
the Menam. It was Klong Sua Mak, the home of the lumberman’s subagent;
but our letter of introduction served us no purpose, for we could not
find the addressee. It did not matter much. The place had so far
advanced in civilization as to possess a shop where food was sold. In it
we made up for our fast of the night before.
The meal was barely over when we were again in the midst of a village
riot. It was all the fault of the natives. We offered them money to row
us across the tributary, but they turned scornfully away. When we
stepped into one of the dug-outs drawn up on the bank, they charged down
upon us, waving their dahs. It was no such burlesque of a fight as that
of the day before. But for a pike pole in the boat we might not have
continued our wanderings beyond Klong Sua Mak. At the crisis of the
conflict a howling fellow, swinging a great knife, bounded suddenly into
the craft. James caught him by an arm and a leg. A glistening brown body
flashed high in the air; there sounded one long-drawn shriek; and the
bold patriot sank in the murky water some distance behind us. When he
came again to the surface, unarmed, we had pushed off from the shore.
“Damn niggers!” growled the Australian, catching up a paddle. “Serve ’em
right if we kept their bloody old hollow log and went down to Bangkok in
her. What say we do?” he cried, “My feet are nothing but two blisters.”
For answer I swung the craft half round and we glided out into the
Menam. A boat load of natives put out behind us, but instead of
following in our wake they paddled across the river and down the
opposite bank. We stretched out in the bottom of the dug-out and,
drifting with the current, let them outstrip us. Far down the stream
they turned in at a grove above which rose a white building. I dozed a
moment and then sat up suddenly with a shout. The boat load had pushed
off again, and behind them came a second canoe bearing six khaki-clad
soldiers, armed with muskets. The white building was a military post,
and a part of the redoubtable Siamese army was on our trail.
“Swing her ashore,” cried James, grasping his paddle. “No naval battles
in mine.”
The dug-out grounded on the sloping bank. Between the jungle and the
water’s edge was a narrow open space. Adjusting our “swag,” we set off
down the bank at any easy pace. The “wild men” beached their boats near
the abandoned dug-out and dashed after us, shouting angrily. A few paces
away the soldiers drew up a line and leveled five muskets at us. The
sergeant shouted an order commandingly. An icy chill ran up and down my
spinal column, but we marched on with even stride. Knowing what we did
of the Siamese soldier, we were convinced that the little brown fellows
would not dare shoot down a white man in cold blood. Nor was our
judgment at fault. When we had advanced a few yards the squad ran after
us and drew up once more in firing line. The sergeant bellowed in
stentorian tones; but the guns hung fire.
Seven times this manœuvre was repeated. We were already a half-mile from
the landing place. Suddenly, a villager snatched a musket from a soldier
and, running close up on our heels, took deliberate aim. His appearance
stamped him as the bold, bad man of that region. My flesh crawled in
anticipation of the sting of a bullet. I caught myself wondering in what
part of my body it would be lodged. But the fellow vented his anger in
shrieking and aiming; he dared not pull the trigger.
[Illustration: Bangkok is a city of many canals]
Finding us indifferent to all threats, the sergeant changed his tactics.
The scene became ludicrous. One by one the barefooted troopers slipped
up behind us and snatched at our packs and jackets. When we turned on
them they fell back wild eyed. Their persistence grew annoying.
“Tip me off when the next one tries it,” said James.
Out of a corner of an eye I watched a soldier steal up on my companion
and reach for his depleted “swag.”
“Now!” I shouted.
The Australian whirled and caught the trooper’s musket in both hands.
The fellow let go of it with a scream, and the whole following band,
sergeant, soldiers, villagers, and bold, bad man turned tail and fled.
Miles beyond we met two lone soldiers perambulating northward, and,
knowing that they were sure to stop at the post of our recent
adversaries, we forced the musket upon them and plodded on clear of
conscience.
Once more we were benighted in the jungle and again the ground was soggy
and the trees alive with monkeys. On the following day, for all our
sleepiness and blistered feet, we tramped a full thirty miles and spent
that night in an odoriferous bamboo hut, much against the owner’s
will—and our own.
Forty-eight hours after our escape from the soldiers we reached
Pakhampo, an important village numbering several Europeans among its
inhabitants. With one of these we took dinner. His house floated on a
bamboo raft in a tributary of the Menam, his servants were “wild men” of
his own training, and his wife a native. Unfeminine as is the female of
Siam, with her black teeth and her bristling pompadour, half the white
residents of the kingdom, many of them men of education and personality,
are thus mated.
A German syndicate has undertaken the construction of the first railway
of Siam. We struck out along the top of the unfinished grade in the
early afternoon, and, no longer hampered by entangling undergrowth, set
such a pace as we had not before in weeks. Long after dark we reached
the residence of a German superintendent of construction, who gave us
leave to sleep in an adjoining hut, in which were stored several tons of
dynamite. An hour’s tramp next morning brought us to “rail head” and the
work train. Hundreds of Chinese coolies, in mud-bespattered trousers and
leaf hats three feet in diameter, swarmed upon the flat cars as they
were unloaded. With them we jolted away through the sun-scorched jungle.
Ten miles south the train took a siding and stopped before a stone
quarry around which had sprung up a helter-skelter Chinese village. A
deluge drove us into a shop where _samshoo_, food, and coolie clothing
were sold, and we whiled away a gloomy morning in discussing the
characters of the proprietors, whose chief pastime, when they were not
quarreling over their cards, was to toss back and forth about the room a
dozen boxes of dynamite. At noon they set out on these same boxes a
generous dinner of spitted pork, jerked duck, and rice wine; and invited
us to join them. We did so, being hungry, yet anticipating a sad
depletion of our funds when the quarter-hour of Gargantua came. All
through the meal the Chinamen were most attentive. When it was ended
they rolled us cigarettes in wooden wrappers, such as they smoked
incessantly even while eating.
“Suppose they’ll want the whole bloody fortune now,” sighed James, as I
drew out money to pay them. To our unbounded surprise, however, they
refused to accept a copper.
“What the devil do you suppose their game is?” gasped the Australian.
“Something foxy, or I’m a dingo. Never saw a pig-tail look a bob in the
face before without grabbing for it.”
The dean of the shopkeepers, a shifty-eyed old fellow with a straggly
grey cue, swung suddenly round upon us.
“Belly fine duck,” he grinned.
Our faces froze with astonishment.
“Dinner all light?” he went on, “Belly good man, me. No takee dollies
for chow. Many Chinyman takee plenty. You fink allee same me. No damn
fear. One time me live Flisco by white man allee same you, six year.
Givee plenty dollies for joss stick. Me no takee for chow.”
The Celestials had grouped themselves about us, laughing gleefully at
the surprise which the old man had sprung on us. Of the eight Chinamen
in the hut, six spoke “pidgin” English fluently and had understood our
every word.
We spent the afternoon in acquiring a Chinese vocabulary for the days to
come. Nor were these jungle merchants poor tutors. At dusk they prepared
a second feast, after which two of them shouldered our packs and led the
way through the wilderness to a point on the main line, where the
locomotive of the work train was to halt on its way south. If we had not
progressed many miles during the day, we had at least discovered an
entirely new side to the Chinese character.
Freed of its burden of flat cars, the engine raced like a thing of life
through the cool, silent night, taking the curves at breathless angles.
We sat high up on the tender chatting with the Eurasian driver, who,
having a clear right of way, left his throttle wide open until the
station lights of Choung Kae flashed up out of the darkness. There was
no hotel in the village; but the railway agent sent his coolies to
arrange a first-class coach for our accommodation. The lamps lighted,
the leather cushions dusted, a chettie set within reach, and our chamber
was ready. A servant brought a bundle of Bangkok newspapers, and we sat
late into the night, listening, for the first time in weeks, to the
voice of the outside world.
At noon next day a passenger train left Choung Kae, and for hours we
rumbled across inundated paddy fields, with frequent halts at excited
bamboo villages. Then towering pagodas rose slowly above the southern
horizon, the jungle died away, and at five o’clock the daily train of
Siam pulled in at the Bangkok station. It is doubtful if Rice, meeting
us face to face, would have recognized the men of whom he had taken
leave in the streets of Rangoon just three weeks before. Until we had
shaved and washed in a barber’s booth we had not the audacity to
introduce ourselves as white men to an innkeeper of the Siamese capital.
Somewhat to our disappointment, Bangkok was in no sense the barbaric
metropolis of heartless infanticides we had so often pictured to
ourselves in fighting eastward through the jungle. Spread out in the
low, flat basin of the Menam, there was something of monotony in her
rambling rows of weather-beaten cottages. Her ill-paved streets were
intersected by many canals, alive with shipping in the morning hours,
but stagnant during the rest of the day with low-roofed boats yawning at
their moorings. Pagodas and rambling temples and monasteries were
everywhere, occupying a large proportion of the city’s area, yet unusual
neither in architecture nor in Oriental ugliness. To the traveler who
has seen the Far-East elsewhere, there was little novelty in the capital
except her floating houses, set on bamboo rafts in the Menam and rising
and falling with the tide.
The inhabitants, lacking the politeness of the Burmese, were dull and
docile, stirring abroad, often, as briefly clothed as their brethren of
the trackless bush. Chinamen were numerous, the European community by no
means small. Not all her white residents dwell in Bangkok by choice. A
majority of them, if popular tradition is to be credited, came thither
hastily and show no longing to depart. For Siam has few treaties of
extradition with the outside world. A few of these exiles have prospered
and are commercial powers in the capital. Others seem content to live
out their declining years in a simple bungalow of the suburbs, with a
native wife and naught to disturb their tropical day-dreams save the
dread of that hour in which France or England may absorb the little
buffer state and drive them forth to seek new refuge. Of these latter we
met a half-dozen, among them two of my own countrymen, who made no
secret of their wayward conduct in other climes.
There were neither beachcombers nor shipping-offices in Bangkok. Deck
passage to Hong Kong, however, cost next to nothing, and four days after
our arrival we made application for tickets at the steamship offices. To
our surprise the company refused to sell them. Deck passage was for
natives only; white men, insisted the agent, must travel first or second
class.
We hurried back to our respective consulates and met again a half-hour
later, each armed with a letter to the obdurate agent. What the
representatives of our outspoken governments had written we had no means
of knowing; but the notes were evidently brief and to the point, for the
clerk, muttering angrily to himself, made out deck tickets with unusual
celerity. The next afternoon an unclad female paddled us lazily across
the Menam in a raging downpour and set us aboard the _Paklat_, a
miniature North German Lloyd steamer that cast off her shore lines three
hours later, and, slipping down over the sand bar at the mouth of the
river, dropped anchor next morning in the cove outside to finish
loading.
The _Paklat_ was officered by five Germans and manned by a hundred
Chinese seamen, stokers and stewards, between which two nationalities
conversation was carried on entirely in English. In the first cabin were
several wealthy Oriental merchants; “on deck,” a half-hundred Chinese
coolies. Discipline was there none aboard the craft. The sailors obeyed
orders when they chose and heaped abuse on the officers when they
preferred to loaf. For the latter, in constant dread of being betrayed
to the pirates that abound in these waters, stood in abject fear of the
crew.
Never before had the _Paklat_ carried white men as deck passengers. The
Chinese seamen, therefore, considering our presence on board an
encroachment on the special privileges of their race, had greeted our
first appearance with scowls and snarls, and vied with each other in so
arranging their work as to cause us as much annoyance as possible. We
laughed at their enmity and, choosing a space abaft the wheelhouse,
stripped to trousers and undershirt and settled down for a monotonous
voyage.
Two sweltering days the steamer rode at anchor in the outer bay. On the
afternoon of the second the entire force of stewards, some thirty
strong, marched aft with their bowls of rice and squatted in a
semicircle near us. Not satisfied with merely encroaching on our chosen
precincts, one of the band sat down on the bundle containing my kodak.
When I voiced an objection the fellow leered at me and refused to move.
I threw down the book I was reading and, putting a bare foot against his
naked shoulder, pushed him aside and took possession of my pack. In his
fall he dropped and broke his rice bowl. The entire band, accustomed,
like most Orientals, to avoid angry white men, retreated several yards,
leaving their dishes of “chow” where they had been sitting. The chief
steward, a snaky-eyed Celestial with a good command of English, berated
us roundly in that tongue and then ran forward to summon the first mate.
“Vell! Vell! Und vat I can do?” demanded that pudgy-faced Teuton, when
he had heard both sides of the story. “Vy you come deck-passengers? You
must look out by yourselfs yet,” and, picking his way apologetically
among the screaming stewards, he hurried back to the bridge.
For a moment the Chinamen stood silent. I turned my back upon them and,
sitting down on the bare deck beside the Australian, fell again to
reading.
“Kang kweitze!” (Kill the foreign devils!) screamed the chief of the
stewards suddenly. With a roar as of an overturned hive of gigantic
bees, the Chinamen surged forward. A ten-foot scantling, left on the
deck by the carpenter, struck me a stunning blow on the back of the
head, knocking my book overboard; and I landed face down among the
rudder-chains at the rail.
When I collected my wits a dozen Chinamen were belaboring me with bamboo
cudgels. I struggled to my feet. James was laying about him right
merrily. At every blow of his hard, brown fists a shrieking Celestial
went spinning across the deck. We stood back to back and struck out
desperately. Buckets, clubs, and rope-ends beat a continual tattoo on
our heads and shoulders. Of a dozen bamboo stools that had been
scattered about the deck no less than eight were smashed to bits over
our bare crowns. Inch by inch we fought our way around the deck house
and, escaping from our assailants, raced forward.
In the waist stood four of the German officers, huddled together like
frightened sheep.
“You bloody Dutchman!” cried the Australian, shaking his fist in the
face of the first mate. “You’d hang back and see a man killed. If there
was one Englishman on board we’d clean out that bunch.”
The Chinamen had retreated; but fearing that they would throw our
bundles overboard, we armed ourselves with two stout clubs and again
started aft.
“Keep avay!” shrieked the first mate, “You make riot and ve all get
kilt!”
“It’d be no loss,” growled James, over his shoulder. We marched around
the deck house, swinging our weapons, and rescued our “swag” without
mishap. In our haste, however, we forgot our shoes and the Australian’s
helmet. Once more we turned back towards the scene of conflict.
“Let dem alone,” pleaded the chief engineer, “vy you pick fight?”
Having no desire to flaunt our belligerency in the face of the crew, and
fancying their anger had cooled by this time, we tossed aside our clubs
and continued unarmed. Grouped abaft the deck house, the Chinamen
allowed us to pass unmolested. We stooped to pick up our footwear.
“Kang kweitze!” screeched the chief steward, and before we could
straighten up they were upon us. It was a more savage battle than the
first. The remaining bamboo stools were wrecked at the first onslaught.
We struggled forward and had all but freed ourselves again when James
stumbled over a bollard and fell prone on the deck. A score of
Celestials swarmed about his prostrate form; every man of them struck
him at least a dozen blows with some weapon. Whole constellations of
shooting stars danced before my eyes as I sprang to his assistance. A
Chinaman bounded forward with a scream and struck at me with a long,
thin knife. Instinctively I threw up my right hand, grasping the blade.
It cut one of my fingers to the bone, split open the palm, and slashed
my wrist. But the fellow let go of the weapon and, thus unexpectedly
armed, we were not long in fighting our way back to the waist.
When we had washed our wounds in salt water and bound them up as best we
could, we marched to the cabin to charge the captain with cowardice. He
denied our assertion and, to prove his valor, armed himself with two
revolvers and led the way aft. It was with considerable satisfaction
that we watched a dozen of our assailants show wounds they had received
in the encounter. The commander endeavored to make light of the affair,
but assigned us to an unfurnished cabin in the deck house and left us to
spend a feverish and painful night on the slats of the narrow bunks. In
the morning there was not a spot the size of a man’s hand on either of
our bodies that was not black and blue. The Australian, too, had
suffered an injury to the spine, and all through the voyage he was
confined to his comfortless couch, where he subsisted chiefly on black
pills doled out by the skipper, not only because his appetite had failed
him but because he lived in constant fear of being poisoned by the
Chinese “boy” who served us.
Eight weary days the decrepit old tramp wheezed like an asthmatic crone
along the indented coast of Cochin-China. On the morning following the
anniversary of my departure from Detroit two small islands of
mountainous formation rose from the sea on our port bow. Several junks,
manned by evil-faced, unshaven Monguls, bobbed up out of the dawn and,
hooking the rail of the _Paklat_ with grappling-irons, towed beside us,
shouting offers of assistance to the passengers possessed of baggage.
More verdant islands appeared and when we slipped into the horseshoe
harbor of Hong Kong it was still half shaded by the wooded amphitheater
that incloses it.
A sampan, floating residence of a numerous family, set us ashore. We
made our way to the Sailors’ Home. My hand had healed, but James had by
no means recovered. As the day waned we made application in his behalf
at the municipal hospital. It was the Australian’s misfortune that he
was a British subject. Had he been of any other nationality his consul
would soon have arranged for his admission. But as an Englishman he was
legally at home and must therefore shift for himself. For several days
he was turned away from the infirmary on threadbare pleas. Then at last
he was admitted, and I turned my attention to outgoing ships, eager to
be off, yet sorry to leave behind the best companion with whom I had
ever shared the joys and miseries of the open road.
The next morning I boarded the _Fausang_, an English cargo steamer about
to sail for Shanghaï, and explained my desires to the good-humored
British mate.
“Sure, lad!” he cried, booting across the hatchway a Chinaman who was
belaboring a female stevedore. “Come on board to-night and go to work.
We can’t sign you on, but the old man will be glad to give you a few bob
for the run.”
At midnight we sailed. Again I quickly fell into the routine of watch
and watch and life in the forecastle. Four days later we anchored in
quarantine at the mouth of the Woosung, then steamed slowly up the murky
stream between flat, verdureless banks adorned by immense godowns, and
docked close off the Sailors’ Home.
It is at Shanghaï that the American wanderer, circumnavigating the globe
from west to east, begins to feel that he is approaching his native
land. Not only is he technically at home in one section of the
international city, but it is here that he meets the vanguard of
penniless adventurers from “the States.” Tramps from the Pacific slope
venture now and then thus far afield, as those along the opposite
seaboard drift across to the British Isles. But the world that lies
between these outposts knows little of the “hobo.”
Rumor had it that “the graft” was good in the Chinese port. Before I had
been a day ashore I came across a dozen or more fellow-countrymen who
had picked up a living for weeks among the tender-hearted white
residents and tourists. That was no great difficulty, to be sure, for
samshoo, the Chinese fire-water, sold cheaply; and an abundant meal of
milk, bread, potatoes, and eggs was to be had for ten cents “Mex” in the
establishment of a native who enjoyed the distinction of having lived in
“Flisco.”
There were delightful spots, too, in the close-packed city. Along the
Bund in the English section was a pleasant little park to which white
men, Indians, or plain “niggers” might retreat; but to which no
Chinaman, be he coolie or mandarin, was admitted. When the sun was well
on its decline a stroll out Bubbling Well Road proved an agreeable
experience. Towards nightfall the European rendezvous was the broad,
grassy Maidan, where Englishmen, in spotless flannels, and
crumple-shirted Americans, perspired at their respective national
pastimes. So numerous were the residents of Shanghaï hailing from “the
States” that each evening two teams struggled against each other in a
series that was to decide the baseball championship of southern China.
European Shanghaï is the center of business activity. Round about it
lies many a square mile of two-story shanties that throttle each other
for leave to stand erect, fed by a maze of narrow footpaths aglow with
brilliant signboards and gay joss-houses, and surcharged with sour-faced
Celestials who scowl threateningly at the European pedestrian or mock
his movements in exaggerated gesture and grimace. Cackling vendors
zigzag through the throng; wealthy Chinamen in festive robes and
carefully oiled cues pick their way along the meandering lanes; burly
runners, bearing on one shoulder a lady of quality crippled since
infancy by dictate of an ancient custom, jog in and out among the
shoppers.
There is in Shanghaï an institution known officially as “Hanbury’s
Coffee House,” popularly, as the “bums’ retreat.” Of the two titles the
latter is more exactly descriptive. But its charges were lower than
those of the Sailors’ Home, and on my third day in the city I moved
thither. With my “swag” under one arm I strolled into the common room
and approached the proprietor behind the register. A dozen beachcombers
were sitting over cards and samshoo at the small tables. As I reached
for the pen a sudden shout sounded behind me:—
“By God! There’s the very bloke now! The bum that carries a camera.
Hello, Franck!”
The speaker dashed across the room with outstretched hand. It was
Haywood, that much-wanted youth, famous for his adventures in Sing Sing
and India.
“I was this minute spinnin’ your yarn to Bob here,” he cried, indicating
a grinning seaman at his heels, “when who should come in but yourself as
big as life. Gee! I thought for a minute this rice-water was beginning
to put me off my feet. So you’ve beat it to here, eh? Show Bob the
phizz-snapper or he’ll think I’m a liar.
“Say,” he continued, as Bob turned the apparatus over in his stubby
fingers with the nervousness of a bachelor handling a baby, “where in
Niggerland did you and Marten go that night you beat me out of the
chow-room at the Home in Cally? You sure faded fast.”
“Up country,” I answered, and gave him a brief account of my travels
since we had separated.
“Well, I’ve had a hell of a run, too,” he said, when I had finished,
“though there was no jungle in it. When I made that pier-head jump out
of Rangoon I thought I was signed on A. B. But the skipper thought
different and it was down in the sweat-box for mine. The lads had told
me she was bound for China, but before we was two days out the mate
passed the tip that she was off for the States. It near give me heart
failure, but I took a ramble through the bunkers and as they was half
empty I knew the old man’d have to put in somewhere for coal. So I tried
soldierin’, hopin’ to be kicked ashore. In three weeks we dropped into
Yoko, but when I hit the skipper for my discharge he give me the glassy
eye. So I packed my swag and went down the anchor-chain into a sampan at
midnight, and the next mornin’ give the consul a song and dance about
the tub bein’ the hungriest craft afloat and the mate the meanest. He
took it all in and when the old man come ashore he told him to pay me
off p. d. q.
“The month’s screw give me a good blow-out that ended in two days by me
gettin’ broke an’ pinched. When I got out I hit it off for Kobe on a
passenger and turned a little trick the night I got there that landed me
over seventy yen. It was a cinch I had to fade away, so I took a
pasteboard to Naggy. But the graft was no good there, so I picked up
with Bob an’ a deck passage an’ here we are. This is plenty near enough
the States for mine. But say,” he concluded, in a confidential whisper,
“I haven’t got a red. Happen to have the price of a flop that ain’t
workin’?”
In memory of old times I paid his lodging for the night and we wandered
out into the city.
When I awoke two mornings later a dismal downpour promised a day of
forced inactivity; and inactivity in a foreign land means ennui and a
stirring of the Wanderlust. I packed my “swag” hurriedly, therefore, and
an hour later was slipping down the Woosung on board the _Chenan_ of the
Nippon Yusen Kaisha. Among several hundred third-class passengers I was
the only European; but I have yet to be treated more considerately by
fellow-travelers. Our sleeping quarters consisted of two inclined
platforms running half the length of the ship, on which, in my
ignorance, I neglected to preempt a claim. But I lost nothing thereby,
for no sooner was it noised among the Japanese that an American was
unprovided for, than a dozen crowded round to offer me their places. I
joined a party of four students returning from Pekin, and, by packing
ourselves together like spoons, we found room without depriving any
other of his quarters.
Three times daily we filed by the galley and received each a small
wooden box divided into three compartments; the larger contained rice,
the smaller, oily vegetables and tiny baked fish. With each meal came a
new pair of chopsticks. Japanese food does not appeal greatly to the
white man’s appetite; but the food supplied on the _Chenan_ was far less
depressing to the spirits than the steerage rations on many a
transatlantic liner.
On the second morning out, the rolling green hills of Japan rose slowly
above the sun-flecked sea. My companions hailed each landmark with
patriotic fervor and strove to convince me that we had reached the most
beautiful spot on the globe. In reality they were not far wrong. The
verdure-framed harbor of Nagasaki was little less charming than that of
Hong Kong; from the water’s edge rose an undulating, drab-roofed town
that covered the low coast ranges like a wrinkled brown carpet, and
faded away in the blue wreaths of hillside forests.
The port was bustling with activity. Sampans, in which stood policemen
in snow-white uniforms, scurried towards us. Close at hand two dull grey
battle ships scowled out across the roadstead. Doctors, custom officers,
and gendarmes crowded on board. For the first time in months I was
sensible of being in a civilized country. In consequence there were
formalities without number to be gone through; but a sailor’s discharge
is a passport in any land. By blazing noonday I had stepped ashore.