Our sailors are Malays. My first impression of them was that they were
languid and ladylike seamen. No doubt the captain had been unable to
get white men for the voyage. He was forced to do what was possible
with mariners whose headdress is neat and pleasing millinery, and who
sometimes wear attractive lace bodices. One man I saw hauling on a rope,
whose jowl itself was as threatening as a bare knife, wore a blouse
with an elegant design in birds and flowers. His trousers, which were
more or less white, had lavender stripes. But make no mistake about it.
There would be fewer lives lost when a ship comes to trouble if white
seamen knew how to lower boats and get them away as expeditiously as our
Malays. When we see a grove of cocoanuts we stand in. I hear no orders.
Our men appear to be loafing. The master is on the bridge. The chief mate
is on the forecastle head. The leadsman is in the chains. The leadsman
chants, and the bright apple-green water of a reef with its fringe of
snow insensibly approaches. And I am still listening to the echoes from
the hills of our roaring cable when, as if our boats were sentient and
behaved like retriever dogs, they are already away and making for the
beach. For our men get plenty of practice. In the Gulf of Tomino alone we
called at about fifteen little places in one day, anchored, and got the
boats out.
It would be useless to name these beaches. They are known only to the
Dutchmen of the K.P.M. (It is easier to write those letters than to say
Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatshappij.) These steamers serve all the Malay
Islands. They touch at places where there is nothing to mark land but
a tree or two upright on universal glass, lost under vast and radiant
clouds. What is the use of naming such spots? One sunrise our siren
blared when we were idling along Celebes. Another anchorage! I was going
to the upper deck and overtook the captain. Where were we? At Paleleh!
But what and where is Paleleh? I had never heard of it. On the map before
me now it is not even marked. Yet surely it should be there; I am certain
that once I saw it. Why does the map so casually doubt me? I must have
been there, and it ought to be fairly easy to recognize the place again.
There was a narrow gulf going deeply into the land, and in the pallor
of dawn the moon’s ghost had stopped rolling when on the verge of a
declivity. As it was, it was hanging only just above the water. An islet
was at the entrance of the bay, on a floor of silver. Every tree on it
was plain, but as though seen in a dream. The sun came up over a tumbled
sea of acute hills, and to them we headed. His rays struck down profound
chasms toward us. Over the starboard bow was an immense dark wall, with
a threshold of chrysolite athwart the mirror of the bay. That vague band
of greenish light at the foot of the wall began to crystallize, and the
crystals became the fronds of cocoanut palms. Set within the groves of
that beach were the huts of Paleleh.
There cannot be any doubt about it. My map is at fault. I landed at
Paleleh, and I remember a shop kept by a Chinaman—on consideration,
however, that is not evidence. The shops in all these places are kept
by Chinamen. Nor can I pretend that the fact that nothing was happening
at Paleleh proves anything. Nothing has got its work cut out to prove
Anything. Yet I must insist that the arrival of our steamer caused
little interest, even among the children. I thought the folk of Paleleh
had passed out of time, and so knew all. They had been through every
experience. Their sun announced itself every day to them in just that
way above mountain forests; its light fell in great rays from upper
embrasures. Their sea was always of the same colors. Men sometimes
came to them from the other world and then went again. An astonishing
butterfly was hovering over the scarlet blossoms of a shrub by the
foreshore; a group of children by the shrub, no less surprising with
their colors, were as indifferent to the creature as though they knew all
the wonders of Paradise. Our own Malays were wading up to their middles
from beach to boats and back again, carrying bags of copra, till the hot
air was loaded with the oily smell of it.
I sat on a beam at the end of a jetty, waiting for the steamer to warn
me to board her again. Near me a canoe was anchored by a large stone and
a cable of rattan. I could see her thin cable oblique in a transparency
to where her anchor rested in three fathoms; and it was then I noticed
that the water in the shadow of the canoe was a wavering and translucent
sapphire. Is it likely that I could have invented such a color as that?
The sea might not have been below my feet; only occasional ripples
betrayed the division between air and water. A shoal of little fish
glanced in electric flashes amid the branches of a bush of coral, and a
larger fish, black and gold like a tiger, hovered over them. Pipe fishes
ran their long snouts along the surface. A sea snake, banded yellow and
black, threaded the submarine garden and serpentined into a hole in some
rocks. A score of Paleleh people were sprawled on the old timbers of the
wharf. They had nothing to talk about and nothing to do. They could have
taken no less notice of me if I had been invisible. I certainly got the
feeling myself that there was no reason in such a place why a steamer
should ever sound a warning, or that, if it did, one should ever heed it.