I've nothing to say about the fate of the poor fellows on the Namoa,
seeing the captain was killed at the first fire, but it looks to me
like a case of carelessness which was almost criminal. The idea of
allowing three hundred Chinese to come aboard as passengers without
searching them for arms. Why! it is an open bid to pirates. Goes to
show pretty plain that these seas are not cleared of pirates. Sailing
ships nowadays think they can go anywhere without a pound of powder
or an old cutlass aboard, just because there is an English or Dutch
man-of-war within a hundred miles. I don't know what we'd have done
when I first traded among these islands without a good brass swivel
and a stock of percussion-cap muskets.
Let me see; it was in '58, I was cabin boy on the ship Bangor. Captain
Howe, hale old fellow from Maine, had his two little boys aboard. They
are merchants now in Boston. I've been sailing for them on the Elmira
ever since. We were trading along the coast of Borneo. Those were
great days for trading in spite of the pirates. That was long before
iron steamers sent our good oaken ships to rot in the dockyards of
Maine. Why, in those days you could see a half-dozen of our snug
little crafts in any port of the world, and I've seen more American
flags in this very harbor of Singapore than of any other nation. We
had come into Singapore with a shipload of ice (no scientific ice
factories then), and had gone along the coast of Java and Borneo to
load with coffee, rubber, and spices, for a return voyage. We were
just off Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and about loaded, when the
captain heard that gold had been discovered somewhere up near the head
of the Rejang. The captain was an adventurous old salt, and decided
to test the truth of the story; so, taking the long-boat and ten men,
he pulled up the Sarawak River to Kuching and got permission of Rajah
Brooke to go up the Rejang on a hunting expedition. The Rajah was
courteous, but tried to dissuade us from the undertaking by relating
that several bands of Dyaks had been out on head-hunting expeditions
of late, and that the mouth of the Rejang was infested by Illanum
pirates. The captain only laughed, and jokingly told Sir James that
if the game proved scarce he might come back and claim the prize
money on a boat-load of pirate heads.
We started at once,--for the captain let me go; we rowed some sixty
miles along the coast to the mouth of the Rejang; then for four days
we pulled up its snakelike course. It was my first bit of adventure,
and everything was strange and new. The river's course was like a
great tunnel into the dense black jungle. On each side and above we
were completely walled in by an impenetrable growth of great tropical
trees and the iron-like vines of the rubber. The sun for a few hours
each day came in broken shafts down through the foliage, and exposed
the black back of a crocodile, or the green sides of an iguana. Troops
of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches above, and at intervals
a grove of cocoanut broke the monotony of the scenery. Among them we
would land and rest for the day or night, eat of their juicy fruit,
and go on short excursions for game. A roasted monkey, some baked yams,
and a delicious rice curry made up a royal bill of fare, and as the
odor of our tobacco mixed with the breathing perfume of the jungle,
I would fall asleep listening to sea-yarns that sometimes ran back
to the War of 1812.