_July 12._—We are at Amurang, a village on the northwest coast of
Celebes. It is only a line of palms and huts under the hills, but it
serves to remind us that the world is inhabited. Our siren blared, and we
waited for Amurang to bring to us its wealth. There is a huddle of dugout
canoes with double outriggers by our side, most of them peddlers with
fish and fruit for our native passengers. We idle and watch this invasion
of spacious emptiness by a little happy life.
There were added some interesting figures to our saloon company at
Macassar, and my position at table has again changed. Now I am sentenced
to the bottom; but I have been at the top, and the last change assures me
that the Dutch officers have accepted me as one of the ship’s company.
Opposite to me now is a fragile young lady in white muslin with a
pink sash. She is, I am told, a native of Minahasa, with no European
admixture. Her crown of black hair dwindles her pale face, which is
flattened, like the Malay, though it has no more color than would be
cast by a soft, transparent shadow. Her lips are full and purplish, her
nose broad, and her large eyes, widely separated, are as apprehensive
and limpid as a deer’s. The chief officer tells me that a century ago
her people were cannibals. She compares in graciousness and refinement
most favorably with the best Europeans, and her occasional embarrassment
during dinner when yet another hearty Dutch mess of pottage appears at
her elbow is very funny, and a pleasant comment on our civilized habits.
I like the way she recoils from a dish of oily meat. One would as soon
offer it to a butterfly. She speaks French, as well as Malay and Dutch;
but I do not intend to expose my Parisian accent to the regard of a
daughter of cannibals, for I know what it would look like. I have not
spoken to her; and to-day she left us. The farewells here are no concern
of mine, so I do not stand at the gangway. To my agreeable surprise,
the Minahasa nymph, who had never looked at me, floated across the deck
to bid God-speed to the torpid and solitary Englishman, offering me a
tiny hand in a way that would have honored a king. We need not stand
in awe, perhaps, of the gap in time between a savage and the daughter
of a hundred earls. And there is with us now another native lady, not
quite the same, but I hear she is most deplorably rich. This must be so
because her ears are weighted with diamonds as large as bottle stoppers;
and she wears more rings than I should have thought the fingers of two
hands could accommodate. She is middle-aged, haughty, and coffee-colored,
and her elaborate European dress of silk gives her massive figure the
shapeless bulk of a costumed elephant. Her bare brown arms with their
freckles, like indelible stains, are heavier still with gold bangles. She
was announced as Miss Evans, but she does not speak Cymry. What would
not one give to learn her family history? What Welsh pirate—they were so
often and so successfully Welsh—who retired to Java long ago for reasons
that were sufficient, enriched her people by linking them to the men of
Harlech?
[Illustration: _He Sits in Front of His Shop in Macassar_
(_See p. 127_)]
_July 13._—This virgin coast of Celebes, which again since Amurang has
appeared to be a ghostly conjuration near us, yet not to be verified, has
suddenly become solid, humane, and close, and is called Menado. This is
the chief port of Minahasa, the northeastern limb of Celebes, and Menado
lightly sustains the beautiful name of its province. There is nothing so
good on the coast of Java. Mountains surround Menado’s noble bay; and
beyond the business quarters of the town, which of course are no better
than commerce usually makes of its quarters, the broad roads, shaded by
kanary and cassia trees, are bordered by shrubberies in which villas,
mostly of timber in the native style, float hull deep in a tumble of
leaves and flowers.
It is politic to get lost when you are ashore at a place for the first
time, and it was not long before I had to disentangle myself from a
native village in which I fancied I was invading screened affairs. Then
I found myself lonely on a steep bank of black sand, where in places
trees overshadowed the sea. Along the foreshore was a tide line of sea
litter, husks of cocoanuts, carapaces of crabs, dried sea-urchins,
strayed timbers, and a fragment of a ship’s board on which were the
last two letters of her name. A drove of lean and grizzled swine were
nosing there. A few catamarans were made fast above the tide to volcanic
bowlders. Only the smell of decaying sea wrack was familiar on that
beach. While I was sitting on the gunwale of a dugout canoe, over which
was a dark canopy of leaves, assured that I could hear nothing of
Charing Cross, and wondering why I had not remembered earlier that such
beaches may be found if one is both willful and lucky, a voice asked me
whether Celebes pleased me. That figure in white had come down behind me
unannounced by sand that was as dark and noiseless as midnight. He was a
Dutch official, and he had seen London in my hat. (That hat!) Did I know
Lake Tondano? No, but I had heard of it. Then would I honor him by going
thither in his car? The Dutch are friendly souls, though not often so
informal and enterprising as that. I assured him that I would convey my
warm approval of Holland to Whitehall.
The rest of Celebes may be waiting for its explorers, yet soon it was
clear that Minahasa is not only comely even in Indonesia, but that it
would be remarkable among earth’s showiest attractions. Our car mounted,
was besieged by flamboyant foliage, was released to vast prospects
where a misty lower brightness that was the sea invaded a far vague
plain inclosed by mountains; there were dark islands in the sea. We
passed through forests to the shrilling of cicadas. When we rose to the
coolness of the plateau of Tondano the villages suggested that they had
been designed to excite the wonder of strangers. The houses were in the
style of the Malay hut, but were larger and were built of solid timber
on stone foundations. There was evidence everywhere that the folk here
were refined and gentle. Along the ledge of every veranda were porcelain
flower pots—not vile petrol tins, as everywhere else in the East, which
make even orchids look like molting birds of paradise in cheap cages.
Roses, dahlias, sunflowers, and crotons with colored and variegated
foliage were neatly displayed under plantations of areca and sugar
palms, and the plantains. The cattle resembled the deer-like creatures of
the Channel Islands at home. The plain about the great lake was planted
with rice and maize. In one hamlet, where the Protestant church was a
surprise with its air of placid content and irrevocable decision, the
brown nippers were just coming out of school. No procession of young
virgins taking the Hampstead air under the eye of a mistress who would
stand no nonsense could have improved on the sedate superiority of
those girls of Minahasa, bareheaded, barefooted, in white muslin, with
prodigious plaited tails of black hair tied with black bows. They carried
books in their hands, and they seemed well aware that they were of the
best people and must walk home in just that way. They did not look at us,
but talked to one another discreetly, and my own feeling certainly was
that I belonged to a cheaper suburb.
My Dutch companion noticed my astonishment and chuckled. I learned that
no more than a century ago this part of Celebes was inhabited by savages
who lived in village communities placed higher on stilts than usual,
for they desired to have a chance, if surprised by head-hunters. And
all of them were collectors of heads. It was a local pastime, for as
they did no work, they had to amuse themselves somehow. Each village had
its own dialect, and cannibalism was then a righteous act, conferring
virtue and turning men into heroes, as warfare does to-day. The Dutch,
who followed the Portuguese into northern Celebes, woke after a hundred
years of sleep to the fact that the natives of this part of Celebes were
rather different from the other islanders; that they were more active,
more intelligent, more comely, and that they were not, by comparison,
uncleanly in their ways. So encouraged, the Dutch presented these savages
with a few coffee beans and some instruction. To grow coffee it was
necessary for the head-hunters to descend from their stilted homes; and
to sell the crop in Tondano meant the making of roads. With their homes
on the ground, and easy paths between the hostile villages, the hunting
of heads became much too serious for a pastime, and it was given up. The
present village of Tondano would be an ornament in a petted baronial
estate in Sussex, but originally it was built on piles in the great lake.
The Dutch officials, however, preferred to meet these people where you
were not likely to drop through the floor into deep water just when you
were getting the better of an argument with some fine fellows dressed in
a few shells. They persuaded the villagers of the propriety of rebuilding
Tondano some miles away from the unhealthy lake. And that was where I
found it, with its children leaving their schoolhouse and carrying their
books with such conscious grace. Why is it we are told with even furious
emphasis that it is impossible to alter human nature? Is that emphasis
really a symptom of fear? Do our brigadiers really worry because they
dread that they may be cured of head-hunting? Do our social parasites
secretly fear that they may be cured of greed?
_July 14._—At sunset we passed through the Sangi Islands, eyries for the
pirates of Sulu a few years ago. Our course is east; we have entered the
Molucca Passage. I remained on deck, kept there by a mere name. After
Magellan died in the Philippines the survivors of that most remarkable
of voyages came south to the Moluccas, the “Islands of the Kings,” and
sheltered at Ternate. Ternate is a word, as Milton knew, like Samarkand
and Cathay. To the Elizabethan it meant the splendor at the world’s end
and the most a sailor could do. At midnight I had the deck to myself,
and there I stayed till daylight. The bo’sun-birds, which are said to be
the restless souls of dead mariners, mourned around us in the dark. Now
and then one of them would pass like a wraith through the beam of light
in our foretop. The unseen surge chanted quietly of what men had done
and of what men had forgotten. Our ship, I began to feel, was at the end
of time, was at the verge of all the seas, and she herself was but the
shadow of a memory drifting under strange stars in a quest for what man
will never find again.