_Expedition leaves Java—The “Nias”—Escort—Macassar—Raja
of Goa—Amboina—Corals and Fishes—Ambonese
Christians—Dutch Clubs—Dobo._
On December 21st we left Batavia, and on Christmas Day, 1909, we sailed
from Soerabaja in the Government steamer _Nias_, Capt. Hondius van
Herwerden. The _Nias_, a ship of about six hundred tons, formerly a
gun-boat in the Netherlands Indies Marine, is now stripped of her
two small guns and is used by the Government as a special service
vessel. Her last commission before embarking us has been to transport
Mr. Lorentz on his expedition to the Noord River in New Guinea three
months earlier. Now she was full to the brim of stores and gear of all
sorts and her decks were crowded with men. There were five of us and
ten Gurkhas. The Dutch escort consisted of Lieutenant H. A. Cramer
in command, two Dutch sergeants and one Dutch medical orderly, forty
native Javanese soldiers and sixty convicts, most of them Javanese. The
convicts were nearly all of them men with more or less long sentences
of imprisonment and some of them were murderers in chains, which were
knocked off them to their great relief the day after we left Soerabaja.
One of the best of the convicts, a native of Bali, was a murderer (see
illustration, page 12), who did admirable service to the expedition,
and was subsequently promoted to be _mandoer_.[1]
At Macassar we stopped a few hours only to add to our already
excessive deck cargo, and to hear a little of the gossip of Celebes.
I was interested to learn that the power of the Raja of Goa, whom
I had visited a few years before, had come to an end. That monarch
was an interesting survivor of the old native princes of the island.
His kingdom extended to within three miles of Macassar, and he was
apparently not answerable to any law or authority but his own. The
place became a refuge for criminals fleeing from justice, and it was a
disagreeable thorn in the side of the Dutch authorities, who were at
last compelled to send a small expedition to annex the country. The
Raja himself, it was said, came to a very unpleasant end in a ditch.
There had also been a small war on the east side of the island, which
resulted in the pacification of the large and prosperous district
of Boni. Now the Island of Celebes, which only a few years ago was
dominated by savage tribes and where it was unsafe for an European
to travel, has been almost completely brought within the Dutch
administration, and it seems likely that its enormous mineral and
agricultural wealth will soon make it one of the most prosperous
islands of the Archipelago.
[Sidenote: AMBOINA]
On December 30th we anchored in the harbour of Amboina, where we were
joined by the last member of the expedition, Mr. W. Stalker, who had
been for some months collecting birds in Ceram, and recently had been
engaged in Amboina in recruiting coolies for the expedition. It had
been expected that he would go to engage coolies in the Ké Islands,
a group of islands about three hundred miles to the south-east of
Amboina, where the natives are more sturdy and less sophisticated than
the people of Amboina; but circumstances had prevented him from going
there, and we had to put up with the very inferior Ambonese, a fact
which at the outset seriously handicapped the expedition. We stayed for
two days at Amboina, or, as the Dutch always call it, Ambon, buying
necessary stores and making arrangements with the Dutch authorities,
who agreed to send a steamer every two months, if the weather were
favourable, to bring men and further supplies to us in New Guinea.
Amboina is an exceedingly pretty place, and a very favourite station
of the Dutch on account of its climate, which is remarkably equable,
and its freedom from strong winds or excessive rain. There is a volcano
at the north end of the island which has slumbered since 1824, and the
place is very subject to earthquakes. A very serious one occurred as
recently as 1902, which destroyed hundreds of lives and houses, whose
walls may still be seen lying flat in the gardens, but as in other
volcanic places the inhabitants have conveniently short memories, and
the place has been re-built ready for another visitation.
Like most of the other Dutch settlements in the East, Amboina has been
laid out on a rectangular plan, but the uniformity of the arrangement
is saved from being monotonous by the tree-planting habits of the
Dutch. The roads and open spaces are shaded by Kanari trees, which
also produce a most delicious nut, and the gardens are hedged with
flowering Hibiscus and Oleander and gaudy-leafed Crotons. Roses, as
well as many other temperate plants, in addition to “hothouse” plants,
flourish in the gardens, and the verandahs of the houses themselves are
often decorated with orchids from Ceram and the Tenimber Islands. Birds
are not common in the town itself except in captivity, and you see,
especially in the gardens of the natives’ houses, parrots and lories,
and pigeons from the Moluccas and New Guinea, and you may even hear the
call of the Greater bird of paradise. Attracted by the many flowering
plants are swarms of butterflies, some of them of great beauty. One of
the most gorgeous of these is the large blue _Papilio ulysses_, which
floats from flower to flower like a piece of living blue sky.
[Sidenote: THE AMBONESE]
The harbour of Amboina is a wide deep channel, which nearly divides
the island into two, and in it are the wonderful sea-gardens, which
aroused the enthusiasm of Mr. Wallace.[2] They are not perhaps so
wonderful as the sea-gardens at Banda and elsewhere, but to those who
have never seen such things before the many coloured sea-weeds and
corals and shells and shoals of fantastic fishes seen through crystal
water are a source of unfailing interest. The sea is crowded with fish
of every size and form and colour. Nearly eight hundred species have
been described from Ambonese waters, and it is worth while to visit
the market in the early morning, when the night’s haul is brought in,
and before the very evanescent colours of the fish have faded. Nearly
every man in the place is a fisherman during some part of the day or
night, and nobody need starve who has the energy to throw a baited
hook into the sea. Most of the fish are caught either in nets very
similar to our seine-net or in more elaborate traps which are mostly
constructed by Chinamen.
The market is also worth visiting to see the variety of fruit and
spices that grow in the island. Amboina has a peculiar form of banana,
the _Pisang Ambon_, with white flesh, dark green skin, and a very
peculiar flavour. Besides this there are many other kinds of bananas,
mangoes, mangostines, guavas, sour-manilla, soursop, pineapples,
kanari nut, nutmeg, cloves, and a small but very delicious fruit, the
garnderia.
The native inhabitants of Amboina are a curious mixture of the
aboriginal native with Portuguese, Dutch, and Malay blood. There is
a strong predominance of the Portuguese type, which shows itself in
the faces of many of the people, who still use words of Portuguese
origin, and preserve many Portuguese names. A large number of them
are Christians, and they rejoice in such names as Josef, Esau, Jacob,
Petrus and Domingos.
New Year’s Eve was celebrated by a confusion of fireworks and
gun-firing, which lasted from sunset until the small hours of 1910,
and by an afternoon service in the Church attended by many hundreds
of people. The women, who are usually in Amboina dressed entirely
in black, wore for the occasion long white coats, black _sarongs_
and white stockings. The men went more variously clad in straw hats,
dinner jackets, low waistcoats, white or coloured starched shirts,
coloured ties, black trousers, and brown boots. We were interested to
find that the great bulk of the stuff from which clothes are made in
Amboina is imported from England, and we were assured by a merchant who
was interested in the trade that a man can dress himself in so-called
European fashion as cheaply in Amboina as he can in this country.
An agreeable feature of life at Amboina, as at other places in the
Netherlands Indies, is the hospitality of the Dutch people. A stranger
of at all respectable social position is expected to introduce himself
to the club, and the residents in the place feel genuinely hurt if he
fails to do so. The Societat, or “Soce,” as it is everywhere called, is
more of a café than a club according to English ideas, and it exists
for conviviality and gossiping rather than for newspaper reading and
card playing. It is not even a restaurant in the sense that many
English clubs are; the members meet there in the evening but they
invariably dine, as they lunch, at home. On the verandah in front of
the club is a round table, at which sit after dark large men in white
clothes smoking cigars and drinking various drinks. The foreigner
approaches with what courage he may and introduces himself by name
to the party severally. They make a place for him in the circle and
thereafter, with a courtesy which a group of Englishmen would find
difficulty in imitating, they continue the conversation in the language
of the foreigner. An Englishman is at first a little staggered by
the number of _pait_ (_i.e._ bitter, the name for gin and bitters)
and other drinks that his hosts consume, and which he is expected
to consume also, but, as I remember noticing in the case of their
neighbours the Belgians in the Congo, it appears to do them little if
any harm.
[Sidenote: THE ARAFURA SEA]
In the larger places there is a concert at the club once or twice a
week—at Bandoeng in Java I heard a remarkably good string quartette—and
in almost every place there is a ladies’ night at the club once a week,
when the children come to dance to the music of a piano or gramophone,
as the case may be. It is a pretty sight and one to make one ponder on
the possible harmony of nations—“Harmonie” is commonly a name for the
clubs in the Netherlands Indies—to see small Dutch children dancing
with little half-castes and, as I have more than once seen, with little
Celestials and Japanese.
We left Amboina on New Year’s Day in a deluge of rain, and all that day
we were in sight of the forest-covered heights of Ceram to the North.
On January 2nd we passed Banda at dawn, and at sunset we got a view
of the most South-west point of New Guinea, Cape Van de Bosch. On the
morning of January 3rd we dropped anchor in the harbour of Dobo in the
Aru Islands. For several miles before we arrived there we had noticed a
marked difference in the appearance of the sea. Since we left Batavia
we had been sailing over a deep sea of great oceanic depths, sometimes
of two or three thousand fathoms, which was always clear and blue or
black as deep seas are. Approaching the Aru Islands we came into the
shoal waters of the Arafura Sea, which is yellowish and opaque and
never exceeds one hundred fathoms in depth. We were, in fact, sailing
over that scarcely submerged land, which joins the Aru Islands and New
Guinea with the Continent of Australia.
Dobo has doubtless changed a good deal in appearance since Mr. Wallace
visited it in 1857, the majority of the houses are now built of
corrugated iron in place of the palm leaves of fifty years ago; but
it cannot have increased greatly in size, for it is built on a small
spit of coral sand beyond which are mangrove swamps where building is
impossible. The reason of its existence has also changed since the time
when it was the great market of all the neighbouring islands, for now
it exists solely as the centre of a pearl-fishing industry controlled
by an Australian Company, the Celebes Trading Company. Messrs. Clarke
& Ross Smith, the heads of this business, rendered us assistance in
very many ways, and the sincerest thanks of the expedition are due to
them. The primary object of pearl-fishing is of course the collection
of pearl-shell which is used for knife handles, buttons, and a hundred
other things. Shell of a good quality is worth more than £200 a ton.
The pearls, which are occasionally found, are merely accidentals
and profitable extras of the trade. Some idea of the extent of this
business may be learnt from the fact that more than one hundred boats
employing about five thousand men are occupied in the various fleets.
We left Dobo, the last place of civilisation that many of us were to
see for a year and more, on January 3rd; and here, as we are almost
within sight as it were of our destination, it may be opportune to
state briefly the geographical position of New Guinea, and to give a
short account of its exploration.
[Illustration: DOBO. ARU ISLANDS.]