THE MALAY FLEET OF WAR
Dawn, leaping out of Motomolo Strait, flinging its gold-wrought,
crimson mantle over an oily sea that ached with crawling color, found
the clipper ship, whereon rested the curse of old Dengan Jouga, set
fast and fair on the sandspit of Ula Salama, eight miles off the mouth
of the Timbago River.
Fair and fast she lay there, on a tide very near low ebb, so that two
hours or such a matter would float her again; but in two hours much can
happen and much was destined to.
At the taffrail, looking landward where the sand-dunes of the river met
the sea, and where tamarisk and mangrove-thickets and pandan-clumps
lay dark against the amethyst-hazed horizon, Dr. Filhiol and Mr.
Wansley—now first mate of the _Silver Fleece_, with Prass installed as
second—were holding moody speech.
“As luck goes,” the doctor was growling, “this voyage outclasses
anything I’ve ever known. This puts the climax on—this Scurlock
matter, and the yellow girl, _and_ going aground.”
“We did the best we could, sir,” affirmed Wansley, hands deep in jacket
pockets. “With just tops’ls an’ fores’ls on her—”
“Oh, I’m not criticising your navigation, Mr. Wansley,” the doctor
interrupted. “The old man, of course, is the only one who knows the
bars, and we didn’t dare wait for him to wake up. Yes, you did very
well indeed. If you’d been carrying full canvas, you’d have sprung her
butts, when she struck, and maybe lost a stick or two. Perhaps there’s
no great harm done, after all, if we can hold this damned crew.”
Thus hopefully the doctor spoke, under the long, level shafts of day
breaking along the gold and purple waters that further off to sea
blended into pale greens and lovely opalescences. But his eyes, turning
now and then towards the ship’s waist, and his ear, keen to pick up a
more than usual chatter down there under the weather-yellowed awnings,
belied his words.
Now, things were making that the doctor knew not of; things that, had
he known them, would have very swiftly translated his dull anxieties
into active fears. For down the mud-laden river, whose turbid flood
tinged Motomolo Strait with coffee five miles at sea, a fleet of motley
craft was even now very purposefully making way.
This fleet was sailing with platted bamboo-mats bellying on the morning
breeze, with loose-stepped masts and curiously tangled rattan cordage;
or, in part, was pulling down-stream with carven oars and paddles
backed by the strength of well-oiled brown and yellow arms.
A fleet it was, laden to the topmost carving of its gunwales with
deadly hate of the white men. A fleet hastily swept together by the
threats, promises and curses of old Dengan Jouga, the witch-woman. A
rescue fleet, for the salvation of the yellow girl—a fleet grim either
to take her back to Batu Kawan, or else to leave the charred ribs of
the _Silver Fleece_ smoldering on Ulu Salama bar as a funeral pyre over
the bones of every hated _orang puti_, white man, that trod her cursèd
decks.
Nineteen boats in all there were; seven sail-driven, twelve thrust
along with oars and paddles cunningly fashioned from teak and _tiu_
wood. These nineteen boats carried close on three hundred fighting men,
many of them head-hunters lured by the prospect of a white man’s head
to give their sweethearts.
A sinister and motley crew, indeed; some of chief’s rank, clad in rare
feather cloaks, but for the most part boasting no garment save the
_de rigueur_ breech-clout. Among them rowed no less than eight or ten
Mohammedan _amok_ fanatics, who had sworn on the beard of the Prophet
to take a Frank dog’s life or else to die—in either event surely
destined for paradise and the houris’ arms. And one of these fanatics
was the turtle-egg seller, with special hopes in mind which for the
present cannot be divulged.
Under the leadership of Dengan Jouga and a lean, painted _pawang_, or
medicine-man, the war fleet crawled downstream. Spears, axes, stone
and iron maces with ornate hafts bristled in all the long war-canoes,
high-prowed and gaudy with flaring colors. Blow-guns, too, were there,
carrying venomed darts, and krises by the score—wavy-edged blades,
heavy and long, that, driven by a sinewed arm, would slice through a
man’s neck as if it had been _ghee_, or melted butter; would open a
man’s body broad to the light of day; or, slashing downward, split him
from crown to collar bone.
The morning shafts of sun glinted, too, on gun-barrels—old flintlock
muzzle-loaders, with a few antique East India Company’s rifles that in
some obscure channels of trade had worked their way up the east coast
of the Malay Peninsula to Batu Kawan. Some bowmen had long arrows
wrapped in oil-soaked cotton pledgets. Such fire-balls, shot into the
sun-dried canvas of the clipper, might go far towards leaving her bones
ableach on Ulu Salama.
Nor was this all. More formidable still was a small, brass cannon,
securely lashed in the bows of a seagoing proa, its lateen sail all
patched with brown and blue; a proa manned by fifty chosen warriors,
and carrying the medicine man and Dengan Jouga herself. True, the
Malays had only a scant dozen charges for their ordnance, but if they
could catch the hull of the _Silver Fleece_ between wind and water, as
she careened on the bar, they might so riddle her that the up-coming
tide would pour her full of brine.
Down the fever-smelling river, steaming with heat and purple haze under
the mounting sun, the war-fleet drove, between lush banks now crowded
with sandal and angsana-trees all clustered with their lolling, yellow
blooms, now mere thickets where apes and screaming parrots rioted amid
snarled labyrinths of lianas, now sinking into swamps choked with
bamboo and lalang grass.
In some occasional pool, pink lotus-blossoms contrasted with fragrant
charm against the vivid, unhealthy green of marsh and forest. And,
louder than the crooning war-songs that unevenly drifted on the
shimmering air, the loomlike whir of myriad trumpeter-beetles blurred
the waiting day whose open eye shrank not from what must be.
Here, there, a fisherman’s hut extended its crazy platform out over
the sullen waters. From such platforms, yellow-brown folk with braided
top-knots shouted words of good augury to the on-toiling warriors.
Naked, pot-bellied children stood and stared in awe. Flea-tormented
curs barked dolefully. And from such fisher-boats, as lay anchored
in the stream, rose shouts of joy. For, in the mysterious way of the
Orient, the news of the great, black deed done by the devil-captain,
Briggs Sahib, had already run all down the Timbago.
Thus the war-fleet labored downward to the sea, coming [towards the
hour that a landsman would call eight o’clock,] to salt water. Withered
Dengan Jouga, crouching snake-eyed in the proa, caught sight of the
long, turquoise line that marked the freedom of the open.
She pointed a skinny arm, flung a word at Akan Mawar, the medicine
man, and clutched more tightly the thin-bladed knife which—so all had
sworn to her—she, and only she, should plunge into the heart of the
black-bearded devil. Silently she waited, as the seascape broadened.
The sunlight, sparkling on that watery plain, dazzled her eyes like
the shimmer of powdered glass, but still she peered, eager to catch a
glimpse of the _Silver Fleece_. Her betel-reddened lips moved again.
She whispered:
“My daughter I shall have. His blood, his blood I shall have, even
though he flee from me _diatas angin_, beyond the back of the wind!
King Surana, who reigns in the watery depths, will give him to me.
Even though he flee through the Silken Sea, at the end of the world, I
shall have his blood! _Tuan Allah poonia krajah!_ It is the work of the
Almighty.”
“_Tuan Allah poonia krajah!_” echoed old Akan Mawar; and other voices
raised the supplication. Back drifted the words from boat to boat; the
whole river murmured with confused echoes: “_Tuan Allah poonia krajah!_”
Now silence fell again, but for the lipping of cleft waters at
many prows, the dip of oars, the little whispering swirl of eddies
where paddles lifted. Bright-yellow sands, here and there gleaming
pearl-white with millions of turtle-eggs, extended seaward from the
river-mouth, pointing like a dagger of menace at Ulu Salama bar eight
miles to sea; the bar that Alpheus Briggs so easily could have left to
starboard, had he not been sleeping off the fumes of samshu in the
cabin with Kuala Pahang.
Cries from the proa and the war-canoes echoed across the waters. No
longer could savagery repress its rage. Already, far and dim through
the set of haze that brooded over Motomolo Strait, dimming the liquid
light of morning, eyes of eager hate had seen a distant speck. A tiny
blot it was, against the golden welter on the eastern horizon; a blot
whence rose fine-pricked masts and useless sails.
And spontaneously there rose an antiphonal _pantun_, or song of war. Up
from the fleet it broke, under the shrill lead of the hag, now standing
with clenched, skinny fists raised high. She wailed:
_Adapoun pipit itou sama pipit djouga!_
Others answered. A drum of bamboo, headed with snake-skin, began to
throb.
_Dan yang enggang itou sama enggang djouga!_
As the echoes died, again rose the witch-woman’s voice, piercing,
resonant:
_Bourga sedap dispakey!_
The others then:
_Layou—dibouang!_[1]
The song continued, intoned by the witch-woman with choral responses
from the fighting men. From lament it passed to savage threats of death
by torture and by nameless mutilations. Maces began to clatter on
shields, krises to glint in sunlight, severed heads of enemies to wave
aloft on spears.
And out over the liquid rainbow surface of the strait rolled a
long echo, blent of war-cries, shouts of vengeance, the booming of
snake-skin drums—defiance of the human wolf-pack now giving wild
tongue.
Dr. Filhiol and Mr. Wansley stopped in their speech and raised peering
eyes landward, as some faint verberation of the war-shout drifted down
upon them. The doctor’s brows drew to a frown; he narrowed his keen
eyes toward the line of hot, damp hills. Mr. Wansley pushed back his
cap and scratched his head. Together they stood at the rail, not yet
glimpsing the war-fleet which still moved in partial concealment along
the wooded shore.
Into their silence, a harsh, liquor-roughened voice broke suddenly:
“Empty staring for empty brains! Nothin’ better to do than look your
eyes out at the worst coast, so help me, God ever made?”
Neither answered. Mr. Wansley surveyed in silence the hulking,
disordered figure now coming forward from the after companion. The
doctor drew a cigar from his waistcoat pocket and lighted it. Complete
silence greeted Briggs—silence through which the vague turmoil
trembling across the mother-of-pearl iridescence of the strait still
reached the _Silver Fleece_.