COLOMBO TO ALBANY.
Prosperity of Colombo—Native Extortioners—Buddhist Temple—Life in the
Streets—On the Indian Ocean—Stormy Seas guard Australia—English
Coolness—Western Australia.
A SCENE of Oriental loveliness opens on my dazzled eyes this morning. On
my right is a fine breakwater, with a lighthouse at the end, which
altogether cost £650,000, and the building of which occupied ten years.
In front of me is the port of Colombo, filled with shipping from every
quarter of the world. On my left is a long row of cocoa-palms, looking
refreshing and green after the weary waste of waters we have travelled
over. As I write the catamarans of Ceylon begin to crowd around. They
are long, narrow boats—a stout Englishman would find it hard to sit in
one of them—rowed by dusky sailors, with long oars, many of which seem to
terminate in a sort of spade. The men are naked, with the exception of a
cloth round the loins, and are apparently strong and sinewy. A few feet
off is the outrigger, so formed that the boat never upsets. They may be
useful, these boats, but have an awkward appearance to an English eye.
They bring on board the men who have come to fetch the washing for the
passengers, which will all be finished and on board before we leave.
Then come the tailors, who will measure you for a suit of white, which
will also be finished ere we depart. Then come the barges with the coal,
and I get into a tug and go on shore. We all do it, for the _Orizaba_ is
unbearable while the coal is being put on board.
It is strange to remember that at one time Colombo was so far off, that
the news of her Majesty’s accession to the crown, which occurred on June
20, 1833, did not reach Colombo till some immense time after. Ceylon was
between ninety and a hundred days from England, now it is only eighteen.
Long after Lieutenant Waghorn had opened up the overland route, her
Majesty’s Government with characteristic stupidity still continued to
send the mails by the Cape of Good Hope. It was left to the opening of
the Suez Canal to render Ceylon easy of access, and to render it possible
for English men and women to live there with comfort and luxury, in my
humble opinion, far superior to anything we have at home, and Ceylon is
redolent of prosperity, whether we regard its population, its revenue, or
its trade. Directly the traveller lands at Colombo he feels as if in an
enchanted isle.
As soon as you land in Colombo you are in India, and in, perhaps, its
most attractive part. There are some 130,000 people in the city, all
mild and gentle, and well-behaved. At once you are attracted by the
grand Oriental Hotel, which faces the port; you pass on a few steps, and
come to lofty shops, filled with all the dazzling products of the East,
with gardens in the rear, and it is hard to avoid being taken in, for the
swarthy shopkeepers are clamorous, and, in the matter of cheating, quite
the equal of the Heathen Chinee. A friend of mine purchases a white
sapphire, as it is called, for eighteenpence, for which the owner asked
four pounds, and I much fear my friend has been victimized after all. An
unfortunate gentleman shows me a gold ring for which more than three
pounds was paid, and which turns out not to be worth a halfpenny. But it
is too hot to walk and I hire a carriage, and, with a companion, take a
ride of a couple of hours for the small charge of three shillings. We
start for the Buddhist temple, a whitewashed building about a couple of
miles off. Externally there is little to see. It stands in a green
court, surrounded by white walls, and the schoolmaster, after we have
dropped a shilling into the box, and given him a trifle for himself,
takes us round. The place consists of three courts, but the light is
bad, and the schoolmaster’s English very defective, and I came back
little wiser than when I entered. The things that principally impressed
me were a recumbent gigantic image of Buddha, a court in which there were
seventy-five painted images of Buddha, and a smaller one in alabaster,
and a long wall covered with representations of Buddhist legends which
the schoolmaster, alas! did not condescend to explain. The Buddhist
temple is small, and the only sign of its being used are the flowers
scattered before the images, the offerings of his followers. The
Christians, at any rate, make a good show as far as buildings are
concerned, the Church of England heading the list with Christ Church
Cathedral and nine other churches. The Presbyterians have two, the
Wesleyans six, the Baptists one, the handsomest place of worship in the
town, to say nothing of the Salvation Army, which has also a station
here. Some people argue that Buddhism is such an exalted form of worship
that we ought not to interfere with the faith of the people. That,
however, is not the feeling of the whites in Ceylon, who know Buddhism
best. To myself, with all my sympathy for Buddhism, the Buddhist temple
seemed a very poor affair. I should have said there are also many
Mohammedans, and their mosques are numerous.
The streets are an endless delight, as you pass ladies riding in little
hooded chairs on wheels, drawn by men; or swells, native or English, in
broughams with latticed sides, so as to admit the breeze; and cars,
rather rickety, drawn by native ponies and driven by native drivers, whom
you may trust to take you to all the objects of interest to be seen, such
as the hotels, the gardens, the museum, etc. Then there are native
waggons, thatched with dried leaves, and drawn by little dun-coloured
bulls with humps on their backs—active animals, which trot along with a
swiftness of which a Sussex farmer, who still ploughs with oxen as his
fathers before him, can have no idea. Under the trees you see the
natives sitting over their dirty rice, which they still eat with unwashed
hands. Where the natives live the population is almost as dense as in
the East-end of London; and as to the pickaninnies, they are everywhere,
with their little curly heads, sparkling eyes, and half-naked bodies,
their mothers, in coloured dresses, leaving them pretty much to take care
of themselves. Boys and girls run after us all the way with flowers, or
bright beetles, or packets of cinnamon and other woods. All is strange,
and all is attractive—the gorgeous butterflies that flit in the sun, the
crowded streets, the native dwellings, with a screen of lath, which
apparently does duty for a door; the tempting bungalows, standing in the
midst of gardens with Oriental flowers, or under the shade of palm-trees,
of which we in England can only dream; the grand promenades, where the
residents walk of an evening to catch the refreshing sea-breeze; and the
handsome parks, where English bands play English airs to the delighted
crowds. The town is prosperous, undoubtedly. There are fine English
barracks, and England’s martial sons are to be met with everywhere. The
whole island prospers under English rule. Ceylon’s staple products—tea,
coffee, and cinchona—employ hundreds of men, women, and children of
different classes, and now an attempt is being made to introduce
fish-curing. I could almost envy Arabi his place of banishment. I felt
inclined to say with the poet, if there be an Elysium on earth, it is
this; but then I was there in the cool time of year, when life is
enjoyable, and when even the white man has a little of his native colour
left. Yet even enchanting Colombo (I did not realize Heber’s Ceylon’s
spicy breezes, quite the reverse, but perhaps that was my misfortune
rather than my fault) has its drawbacks. As I am standing opposite the
hotel, a native approaches with a small basket. He puts the basket on
the ground and begins to pipe. To my horror, as he does so, a hooded
cobra, lying _perdu_, with its black eyes and silver hood, erects itself
on its tail as if ready to dart on its prey. Now, as above all things I
hate snakes, and cobras most of all, I fled the spot and at once made for
the tug, leaving the native juggler, I doubt not, not a little astonished
at my want of taste.
Life on the ocean wave is really to be enjoyed on the Indian Ocean—an
immense water, pleasanter to look at and sail on than the Atlantic, of
which no one is sure, and which is variable as woman herself. It is
impossible to overrate the beauty of the azure waves and skies which
greet us every day. Nevertheless, we may have too much of a good thing,
and no one regrets that we are approaching the end of our journey. At
church on Sunday it seemed to me that we are much given to the use of
misleading language. It was announced that the bishop would hold divine
service, and perhaps he did so; at any rate, the assembly was numerous,
and in appearance devout; but I missed the firemen who kept up the steam,
the men on the outlook, the steersman on the bridge, and the inmates of
the room set apart for the due study of charts. Were they not engaged in
a service equally divine?
How, one by one, vanish the illusions of youth! Yesterday I would have
sworn mangoes were delicious eating, for I have read so a thousand times;
but to-day I have discovered the much-talked-of mango to be an impostor,
in shape like a potato, with a great stone inside, only to be thrown
away. Then what raptures we hear about the Southern Cross! I have seen
it and it charms no longer, and the beauty of it is that the Australians
who most rejoice in it seem utterly unable to tell you in what part of
the heavens it shines. Then take the tropics. What descriptions one
reads of tropical heats: heats fraught with deadly fever—heats so intense
that an old man may well shrink from the danger of encountering them! I
have been now nearly a week in the tropics, and they are really
delightful. It is true you are warm; it is true that when the ports are
closed by night the atmosphere in the cabin is apt to be unpleasant—but
then that is of rare occurrence—and the tropics, I hold, so far from
deserving to be run down, are favourably to be compared with London fogs
and cold. We have now crossed the line, and have sailed for days along
the Indian Ocean. Not a drop of rain has fallen on the deck, not a touch
of bronchitis is to be met with in anyone aboard, not a ripple is to be
seen on the great blue plain of the sea save that made by the _Orizaba_
as she ploughs her majestic way at the rate of 320 miles a day. I should
say, as far as my experience goes, any elderly man or woman, who in
London suffers from its uncertain climate, would find the atmosphere of
the Indian Ocean an immense change for the better. If any such require a
real sanatorium, I would conscientiously recommend them a trip to
Australia and back, if they can stand the sea, and if they have the good
luck to secure a berth in such a ship as the _Orizaba_. By all means let
them have a chair; I did not take one, as I thought it would not be worth
the trouble, and even at Naples, when an ex-M.P. who went ashore there
kindly offered me his chair as a parting gift, I had not sense enough to
avail myself of the offer; but I have regretted it ever since. People
who have chairs put them in the best places, where the breeze is most
grateful, and thus enjoy a great advantage over those who can do nothing
of the kind. By all means also let the tourist have a white dress; it is
the only kind of dress to be tolerated on the Indian Ocean, and, of
course, he must have canvas shoes, which he will find the more useful if
they are soled with indiarubber rather than leather. You are bound to
take as much exercise as you can, and it is not pleasant to fall on a
slippery deck.
Let the intending traveller choose, if he can, his time. Between
November and March the ocean is delightful. If, however, it is entered
between May and September, when the thick weather and fierce winds of the
south-west monsoon prevail, it is very much the reverse. It is a run of
more than 3,000 miles from Colombo to Cape Leeuwin, the south-west point
of Australia, and this is the most monotonous part of the journey, as
there is nothing to be seen on the sea. We only met two ships after
leaving Colombo, and people grow sleepy and dull, and the conversation,
at no time brilliant, rather flags. One can scarcely imagine what the
horror of the passage was in not very remote times. When the bishop
first went, he tells me, it was in a sailing vessel, and they were three
months on the voyage, revelling on salt pork and beef all the while. Our
modern bishops don’t care much for that sort of diet, nor, if I may judge
by the way we live, their flocks either, and this, by the way, is the
real difficulty and danger on ship-board. As a rule, people are ill
because they eat and drink too much. I have been a teetotaler all the
while and have tried to eat as little as I could, and hence I am at any
rate as well as anyone aboard. Again, let me caution the traveller to
avoid a ship that rolls. In this respect we are wonderfully fortunate.
The _Orizaba_ never rolls, and in the worst weather we dine in comfort,
no crockery is smashed, and no steward spills a drop of soup. In the
dark watches of the night it is the rolling that keeps passengers wide
awake, and if ships can be built like ours it is a shame to send people
on such long voyages in any others. In the tropics the clouds that come
up as the fiery sun sinks into the blue sea are awful, darker and more
threatening than any I have seen elsewhere. Then they disappear, and
then again reappear, to fly with the early dawn. It is a long time
before one can be reconciled to their grandeur. I am not surprised that
people feel timid. There is a good deal to make people nervous at sea.
A lady passenger tells me that when she goes to bed in rough weather,
every night she expects to go to the bottom. I gave her what comfort I
could; but then, as Festus grandly tells us, we live by heart-throbs not
by years, and so the poor woman is to be pitied after all.
Not in summer calm, not when the gentleness of heaven is on the sea, do
we approach the Australian coast. The garden of the Hesperides was
guarded by dragons; and approach the Australian continent, for such it
really is, which way you will, you find her defended by winds that are
ever howling and seas that never are at rest. They did their best to
frighten us as we made for the point where first we greet the granite
rocks of the Land of the Golden Fleece; of course, there is no danger,
and everyone pretends to enjoy it. As to myself, I frankly own—in spite
of Byron and dear old Captain Basil Hall, whose pictures of sea-life,
when I was in jackets, made everyone long to be a sailor—that I prefer
calm to storm, and that never do I love the ocean so much as when it has
ceased to roar. There are people who feel otherwise, just as there are
people who enjoy the bagpipes, but they are the exception rather than the
rule. It may be that the danger is little, but the motion of any ship on
a stormy sea is unpleasant. It is to be questioned, however, whether
there is any other sea-voyage so long, and at the same time attended with
so little inconvenience, as this Australian trip, and I can quite
understand how ready the Australians are to run ‘home,’ as they call it.
They love Old England to the very bottom of their hearts. Some of them
are quite ready to return and leave their bones amongst us. But we drive
them away. One of my companions, for instance, has been spending a few
weeks in London. He is a lawyer, and has made a lot of money, gotten
chiefly at Ballarat in the good old times, when, instead of the ordinary
six-and-eight, he always pocketed a fiver. It was his intention to have
bought an estate and settled in England; but then it occurred to him that
if he did no one would ever come to see him—at any rate, such was the
universal testimony of those of his friends who had settled down in the
old country, one of them a gentleman who had done the State some service
and who had been presented at Court; and so my friend returns to
Australia—swearing he will never go to London again—where he seems to
have spent his money like a Nabob. Another complaint which I hear in
many quarters is that Englishmen are ungrateful. One gentleman tells me
how he had exerted himself on behalf of a young lad who had come out to
Melbourne friendless, did all he could for him, treated him, in fact, as
his own son, even had a gushing letter of thanks and gratitude from the
mother, and yet when he called upon her in London she did not take the
slightest notice of him; and in another case, where he introduced himself
to the father of two young men to whom he had been the means of rendering
much assistance, and to whom he had extended the utmost hospitality, all
he received was a formal invitation to call when that way, and that only
after he had met the grateful parent twice in the streets of the county
town near which he lived. Colonials who have been hospitable to English
visitors naturally expect a return of hospitality when they find
themselves strangers in a strange land; and Englishmen should remember
that it is at all times a duty to perpetuate the traditions of old
English hospitality, and to take in the stranger in the Scriptural rather
than in the modern way.
At length I have seen an albatross, and that may be taken as an
indication that we are getting near our journey’s end. It is a large
bird, as big almost as a turkey, with white body and dark wings, but not
often to be seen at this season of the year. For awhile we skirted the
Australian coast, and dropped some thirty passengers for Western
Australia at Albany, its chief port. They were sent ashore in a tug in
rather a primitive fashion, and we had plenty of time to admire the
magnificent harbour surrounded by granite rocks, enclosing a wide expanse
of water, which we enter between two rocks, on one of which is a
lighthouse. Of human habitations we saw nothing save one or two on the
brow of a hill, at the bottom of which has been built a long railway
pier, which railway, as it is not complete, is only used once a week,
when the steamers arrive, for the purpose of conveying mails and
passengers to Perth. ‘I suppose the first port you touched at was
Perth?’ said an English M.P. and distinguished educationalist to me.
Alas! it would have been hard work to have taken the _Orizaba_ to Perth.
Perth is the capital of a country eight times as large as the United
Kingdom, which is at present a Crown colony, but which is to be made
directly the home of a self-governing community. We dropped at Albany a
young man who has been sheep-farming there for fifteen years, and is
quite satisfied with the result. You could hardly credit how many
thousand acres he has hired of the Government at a rental of 10s. a
thousand acres. He has no white neighbours, and his labourers are
chiefly native blacks, with whom, he tells me, he gets on very well. The
country, he says, is well fitted for agricultural purposes, and there is
plenty of good land to be bought at 10s. an acre. Hitherto the
difficulty has been how to dispose of the produce, but that will shortly
cease, as the district is now being opened up by railways, and from all
that I can hear it is just the country for the British farmer who feels
inclined to clear off before he has lost his last farthing in the vain
attempt to compete with the foreign producer. In Western Australia, with
a little capital, he may certainly do well. Everyone says Western
Australia is the country of the future. As to Albany itself, it is
growing rapidly, and has a population now of about 2,000. It seems to me
prettily situated, and already people who have made a little money have
fixed upon it as their residence. There are Church of England, Wesleyan,
and Presbyterian churches there, and it boasts a paper—published weekly
for threepence, and dear at the money—which found a large sale on board,
for the sake mainly of its meagre telegraphic intelligence relating to
English and European affairs. After the dreary monotony of the sea it
was pleasant to look on the hills which hid Albany and its surrounding
district from the vulgar gaze. On one hill there was a long trail of
smoke, which indicated that somewhere there was a large bush fire; and
climbing up the sides of all was a scanty undergrowth, which if good for
neither man nor beast, had an appearance of verdure, which, to the eye,
seemed a living green, now and then varied by stretches of yellow or
white sand; and behind, though not visible to us from the deck of the
steamer, stretched a forest, full of a black wood which makes the finest
railway-sleepers in the world. On the whole, it may be said Western
Australia is bound to go ahead.