_July 1._—The hotel omnibus which met me at Sourabaya station last night
was like a processional car. The horse’s harness was covered with bells,
and I jingled off like an Oriental bride. When I woke this morning and
moved, a lizard flicked from sight behind a wall mirror. It was just as
though the wall had cracked in a ghostly way. There was no crack when I
looked again. On the floor an army of ants was doing to death a large
caterpillar. The giant heaved and threw the mites, but he was doomed. The
unhurried resolution and certitude of his enemies shocked me. I felt like
God on his dais watching a victory, and was half inclined to abolish the
lot—drop a boot on the tragic drama like a comet. It was so obtuse and
loutish an affair. But what could I do? My comet would only have worsened
the distressing mess. I was glad I was not God; I felt no responsibility.
A hot day; and the streets of Sourabaya sprawl into infinity. As usual,
the most interesting quarter of this East Indian city is the Chinese. The
shops of the narrow streets by the canal, and the canal, the Kali Maas,
with its gaudy sampans, are pleasing with curious stratagems and devices.
I might have bought one porcelain bowl, of a blue which conquered me, but
a gramophone in that shop was revolving Flowery Land music, and I was
hypnotized. The bowl was remembered again only when I had wandered off.
It was too hot to go back. Besides, the bowl was probably fraudulent. I
met a Mohammedan funeral. Behind it was an Arab on a bicycle. He wore a
red fez, white linen jacket, zebraic shirt and tie, cerise pantaloons,
brown boots, and his purple socks were racked taut with suspenders.
I found a big store with many English books. Yet I noticed the usual
distinction made there between Dutch and English travelers. The Dutch, in
translation, get the best of everything of ours. There, amid the coffee
berries, rice, tennis shoes, tinned tripe, and white shirts, was a great
assortment of our literature; but it was unapproachable in its Dutch
guise. For me there was only tinned tripe. I will not mention titles and
names, but I went through hundreds of books in English, hoping for the
best, with the ready guilders in my willing hand. A bald-headed man might
as well have searched the rows of bottles and pots in a hairdresser’s
shop devoted to the ladies. But it was possible in that shop for a
connoisseur to find exactly what he wanted in a display of the choicest
brands of English tennis racquets.
_July 2._—There was something odd in the look of my Dutch steamer this
morning when I boarded her off Sourabaya. I had not noticed it before. It
was not her suggestion of indolence. Even a liner which carries important
people and the mails on long voyages to the great ports of the world may
appear to one who visits her as if she were thoroughly tired after her
exertions, and did not intend to move for a long time. It was not the
_Savoe’s_ languor which was remarkable. One might expect lassitude in a
torrid roadstead of Java. But her design suggests that she expects no
weather but halcyon; yet her boats are broad and shallow scows, with
diagonal strakes for greater strength, and are fended all around the
gunwales by stout rope. If the mother ship does not expect to meet even a
gale, it is certain her boats are meant for handy work on seas which in
shallow waters will break into a dangerous surf. Their davits and falls
are clearly designed to get the boats out and away quickly and often; and
that is certainly very unusual in the boats of a steamship.
Her sailors are working—if closely watched one could almost swear they
are working—at tasks which do not appear to be relevant. Their cotton
trousers have attractive floral patterns, and their neat muslin bodices
are very ladylike. Their millinery, as another sparkling Parisian outrage
in Oxford Street, would have all the attraction of originality. They are
Malays, of Java and Celebes. The _Savoe_ is bound for more beaches than
I have counted, and she may deviate and add as many more as pleases the
captain. They are scattered between the Java Sea and New Guinea, and
some of them are places which are not named on the common maps. For that
reason I had supposed I should be the only passenger. I was wrong. Some
_prahus_ approached us. Each had two triangular sails, set upside down
to my eyes, for the base of the triangle was uppermost. These open boats
flew with great wings, and their narrow bodies rocked in a startling way;
the men who handled them had little to learn. In fact, the chief officer
told me they were Madurese and the grandsons of pirates. They flew
alongside with our passengers. The first out was a perambulator. A Bugis
woman followed with her child. No athlete could board a lively motor-bus
with more grace than that Malay mother launched from her prancing craft
to our gangway. She was followed by a tangle of humanity, Malays, Arabs,
and Chinese, in costumes as noticeable as those of the actors in an
inexplicable allegory. Among them was a lady who was neither Bugis nor
Dutch, but something of each, who wore what might have been bed drapery
with a design of pomegranates and parrots, a turban, and a black gauze
mantelet. There was also an Englishman with a monocle. There was a Hadji
in his white cap, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, a maroon sarong or
skirt, and a khaki tunic.
We sailed; and the background for just such an extravagant and willful
romance as would accord with our company has been provided all day by
the mountainous coast of East Java, the sun, and the clouds. There was
plaintive music from the queer soliloquizing instruments enjoyed by our
native passengers, who are berthed on a lower deck, which has open sides,
and was light and even fresh till the passengers had occupied it for a
few hours. By then banana skins and the chewing of betel nut made that
deck a horror to our chief mate, who, being Dutch, is a sailor with a
noticeable strain of the housewife. But Malays are used to floors of
earth, or else to floors of bamboo with the earth a few feet below. Decks
to them are to recline upon and to spit upon.
I am bound to confess that the perambulator, and the swarm of brown
children whose voices reach my cabin on the boat deck, are contrary
to my idea of what is right in a voyage in strange seas. What have
perambulators to do with the Flores Sea and the Macassar Strait? What
has a bicycle—for a bicycle swings from an awning beam over a Chinese
peddler, who sprawls on a mat on the after hatch—what business has a
bicycle with pearl fishing or with _manuk dewata_, the “bird of the gods”?
There is something else, too. There is the incessant and valiant crowing
of many cocks. But when I reproached the mate because my voyage was being
made between a nursery and a farmyard he said: “But you do not know. We
are in a world by itself. You shall see.” And to begin with a trifle I
discovered that the poultry is all game-cocks, and that matches might be
arranged on the ship—but would not be allowed by the captain—at any time.
For the Dutch, having put down head-hunting among most of the islands,
and piracy altogether, considered it wise to leave some outlets to the
pugnacity of the islanders, and to their passion for gambling. Piracy,
of course, was merely gambling by speculators of temerity, skill, and
enterprise; and it was only the armed steam launch that eradicated it
from the complex reefs and shallows of these difficult seas; and that
means, of course, that it was ended but last week. Something, then, had
to be allowed to these leisured but mettlesome men, and so cock-fighting
and gambling were left for their indulgence, as compensations for the
loss of the more desperate pastimes.
There was something even worse than the perambulators and the chewing
of betel. I found the signs of another passenger in my cabin, though I
had been promised I should have it to myself. There was a sun helmet in
the other bunk, and very foreign baggage on the floor. I am sociable, I
hope; but never when I am alone. This was too much. With the sun helmet
was a book; Conrad’s _Rescue_, in English. I flung out, churlish because
there was not time to change into another ship and go elsewhere. Later
in the day I went to the cabin to get my binoculars, and found there my
cabin mate. He is a gentle Dutchman, and is genuinely sorry to intrude.
I assured him that I was desolated because my tenancy of the cabin must
annoy him. He sent for drinks and professed his love for all that is
English. This must be sincere, for he declared he had read _Paradise
Lost_ in both English and Dutch; and he mentioned Conrad with his hands
upraised because words completely failed him. He used to live at Bromley
in Kent, and his wife was at school at Bideford in Devon. I remained
there with him, and forgot why I wanted the binoculars.
_July 3._—At sunrise to-day my Chinese boy brought me coffee, and handed
me my pipe as though it were a scepter. I looked out of the cabin window
to see where we were. I put down the coffee at once, where nothing could
hold it, and it spread on the floor. This was excusable. Our ship was
approaching the narrow strait between the islands of Lombok and Baly. If
there had been no reward for overcoming the doldrums of a long voyage but
the first light of day caught and bewildered by the forests and clouds
of Agung and Ringani, the Peak of Baly and the Peak of Lombok, volcanoes
which regard each other, supernal and terrible, over remote celestial
kingdoms of cloud, then those small islands between the Java Sea and the
Indian Ocean would have been enough. It was the kind of reward which
comes to a traveler when the gods forget that he is often discontented
and unworthy.
We anchored off Ampenan, a village in a bay on Lombok’s west side. There
was a beach of black volcanic sand, a heavy surf, a line of palms so
still they might have been cast in metal, and behind them heights that
were merely blue shapes. In the clear green deeps alongside sharks were
lazily and patiently patrolling for anything that might happen. They had
nothing else to do, and so considered the _Savoe_ was as good as any
other waiting-place. Then—but how they came there I never saw—we were
besieged by canoes, which would have looked unsafe on a pool, weighted
with daring paddlers who were ready to face any wave while they had an
inch of freeboard and boys to bail out the wash with bent palm leaves. I
did not see what business the Savoe conducted at Ampenan. I was much too
dazzled by gyrating canoeists who balanced themselves on rocking bamboos
by their toes over leisurely sharks.
_July 4._—We have lost the Englishman with his monocle. Heaven knows
what he proposes to do in Lombok. We have added a Malay rajah and his
ladies to our company. He is a wizened old man, barefooted, in _sarong_
and jacket and a little turban. Even a voyager among these islands for
the first time would not mistake that old man for merely another native.
Once, at a mere hint from him, men had died. His mouth and eyes still are
those of a man whose whims, if fantastic, have not always been futile.
His wife is dressed like an old-fashioned suburban lady on the Sabbath,
but she has added a barbaric tiara in pearls and trinkets which suggests
that she will revert to a Dyak custom after divine service is over.
[Illustration: _The Road Was Empty, Except for a Bullock Cart_
(_See p. 68_)]
Our lower deck is a _campong_, or native village, with a population even
larger than the usual hamlet of huts. That deck is occupied from the stem
to the stern. There are Arab and Chinese quarters, from which women are
absent. But the Malays are one big family, unpartitioned. They are asleep
on their mats, or they sit in groups, men and women, gambling with cards.
There are messes of rice in great pots, strings of fish, melons, red
earthenware jars of water, and queer smells. Cabbages and maize hang from
the beams. The cocks crow, the parrots screech, and the children squat
and stare like infant Buddhas at the ship’s gear, and at myself when I
pass. I hear there is never any trouble here through the ladies. Each man
knows the other has a knife. Besides, as a ship’s officer put it to me,
“There is no trouble, because they have not the morality of Europeans.”
_July 5._—I have been trying to teach myself, with Mr. Potter’s East
Indian pilotage books and the charts to assist me, where I am going.
But I have given up the task. I shall take what comes. It is clear this
voyage will occupy two months, and yet we are not likely to be out of
sight of land on a single day. We shall go north and south, and east and
west, but with a general easterly bias. I abandoned my attempt to trace
the course of our voyage when it developed into a ravel which had the
equator entangled in it thrice in twenty-four hours. That was too much.
But I did get a vague idea, from the large-scale charts, of the extent of
Indonesia. It would want the Atlantic Ocean to give it elbow room. There
are 3,000 miles between Acheen Head, Sumatra, and New Guinea; and half
as many between the Philippines and Melville Island, North Australia.
Within those marks it is a pleasure to read the beautiful names of the
seas—the Java Sea, the Flores Sea, the Banda Sea, the Arafura Sea, the
Molucca Sea, and the Sea of Celebes. The islands dot the spaces like the
stars in a chart of the heavens. And here I am, among the constellations.
We passed the first item of the Spermode group two hours after lunch,
and the captain thereupon went to the bridge, in mauve pajamas and a
cigar; Dutch ships have their own customs. But all our officers are most
friendly souls, and one imagines they are speaking English excellently
until, among themselves, they show how much more familiar they are with
their own language. They are able and versatile seamen, for this ship
has to look after herself, in the way ships did in the past. She has her
own company of cargo coolies, and her own shipping office, because our
officers must buy and sell cargo, ship and stow, book passengers and
inspect them for trouble of every kind, appraise trade opportunities for
the use of headquarters in Batavia, and publish the news of the world on
distant coasts. Our chief mate is even a good ethnologist. One should
be that when one’s duties are among the subtle possibilities of Malay,
Papuan, Polynesian, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, and whites who are even more
difficult and dangerous to label. It is sunset, and we are approaching
Macassar.