Java
The Garden of the East
[Illustration: MALAYS DIVING FOR MONEY.]
Java
The Garden of the East
By
Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore
Author of “Jinrikisha Days in Japan”
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1898
Copyright, 1897,
By THE CENTURY CO.
THE DEVINNE PRESS
PREFACE
In presenting this account of a visit to one of the most beautiful
countries of the world, I shall hope that many will be induced to follow
there, and that my record may assist them to avoid certain things and to
take advantage of others that will add to their enjoyment of the island
where nature has been so prodigal with beauties and wonders.
After the body of this work had gone to press, the first copies of a
small, compact, and most admirable “Guide to the Dutch East Indies,”
written by Dr. J. F. Van Bemmelen and Colonel J. B. Hoover, by invitation
of the Royal Steam Packet Company, Amsterdam, and translated into English
by the Rev. B. J. Berrington, reached this country, and to this work
I hasten to extend my salutations, since my own pages contain so many
plaints for some such guide. It treats of all the islands under Dutch
rule, turning especial light upon the so little-known Sumatra, where
many attractions and possible resorts will invite pleasure-travel;
and, leading one from end to end of Java, it more than supplements what
Captain Schulze’s little guide had done for Batavia and the west end of
the island. Translating so much of local and special lore hitherto locked
away from the alien visitor in Dutch texts, it at last fairly opens
Java to the tourist world, and excites my keen regret that its earlier
publication had not lighted my way.
In preparing these pages every effort has been made to avoid errors,
and I invite other corrections, and acknowledge here with great
appreciation those suggested by Dutch readers, and at once made in
certain chapters that originally appeared in the “Century Magazine.”
In the varied English, French, and Dutch spelling of many words, in
drawing statistics from works in as many languages, and in accepting
as facts things verbally communicated to me by seemingly responsible
people, there were chances of error; but one can only beg to be set
right. In this connection I hasten to state that under the liberal policy
of recent years the Dutch government has withdrawn its prohibition of
the pilgrimage to Mecca, and more than six thousand of its Mohammedan
subjects have availed themselves of the privilege in one year. It should
also be noted that the Ashantee prince has not availed himself of the
privilege of living and dying under the British flag in South Africa,
and the pathetic tale of that exile, as told by Britons, lacks that
completing touch of fact. For these suggestions in particular, others
concerning Sumatra, and still others which had been anticipated, I thank
Mr. R. A. Van Sandick of Amsterdam, with appreciation of the spirit and
the loyalty to his own people which prompted his making them. Myths and
legends and fairy tales grow with tropic rankness in those far ends of
earth even to-day, and gravitate inevitably to the stranger’s ear.
E. R. S.
WASHINGTON, D. C., October 1, 1897.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. SINGAPORE AND THE EQUATOR 1
II. IN “JAVA MAJOR” 17
III. BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST 25
IV. THE KAMPONGS 37
V. TO THE HILLS 49
VI. A DUTCH SANS SOUCI 62
VII. IN A TROPICAL GARDEN 79
VIII. THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” 94
IX. THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” (_Continued_) 109
X. SINAGAR 126
XI. PLANTATION LIFE 136
XII. ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES 147
XIII. “TO TISSAK MALAYA!” 156
XIV. PRISONERS OF STATE AT BORO BOEDOR 167
XV. BORO BOEDOR 182
XVI. BORO BOEDOR AND MENDOET 203
XVII. BRAMBANAM 216
XVIII. SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN 240
XIX. THE LAND OF KRIS AND SARONG 253
XX. DJOKJAKARTA 265
XXI. PAKOE ALAM: THE “AXIS OF THE UNIVERSE” 283
XXII. “TJILATJAP,” “CHALACHAP,” “CHELACHAP” 301
XXIII. GAROET AND PAPANDAYANG 312
XXIV. “SALAMAT!” 324
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MALAYS DIVING FOR MONEY _Frontispiece_
PAGE
A STREET IN SINGAPORE 5
MAP OF JAVA 16
A JAVANESE YOUNG WOMAN 27
PAINTING SARONGS 43
RICE-FIELDS 53
MOUNT SALAK, FROM THE RESIDENT’S GARDEN, BUITENZORG 63
FRANGIPANI AND SAUSAGE-TREE 73
TROPICAL FRUITS 81
TROPICAL FRUITS 89
A MARKET IN BUITENZORG 99
SCENES AROUND THE MARKET 105
A VIEW IN BUITENZORG 111
JAVANESE COOLIES GAMBLING 123
JAVANESE DANCING-GIRL 139
A MOHAMMEDAN MOSQUE 159
WAYSIDE PAVILION ON POST-ROAD 177
BORO BOEDOR, FROM THE PASSAGRAHAN 183
GROUND-PLAN OF BORO BOEDOR 187
FOUR BAS-RELIEFS FROM BORO BOEDOR 191
ON THE SECOND TERRACE 195
THE LATTICED DAGOBAS ON THE CIRCULAR TERRACES 199
THE RIGHT-HAND IMAGE AT MENDOET 207
TEMPLE OF LORO JONGGRAN AT BRAMBANAM 217
CLEARING AWAY RUBBISH AND VEGETATION AT BRAMBANAM
TEMPLES 221
KRISHNA AND THE THREE GRACES 225
LORO JONGGRAN AND HER ATTENDANTS 229
PLAN OF CHANDI SEWOU (“THOUSAND TEMPLES”) 233
FRAGMENT FROM LORO JONGGRAN TEMPLE 235
GANESHA, THE ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD 238
THE SUSUNHAN 243
THE DODOK 249
JAVA, BALI, AND MADURA KRISES 255
THE BRAMBANAM BABY 267
TYING THE TURBAN 279
WAYANG-WAYANG 285
TOPENG TROUPE WITH MASKS 291
TRANSPLANTING RICE 315
JAVA
THE GARDEN OF THE EAST
I
SINGAPORE AND THE EQUATOR
Singapore (or S’pore, as the languid, perspiring, exhausted residents
near the line most often write and pronounce the name of Sir Stamford
Raffles’s colony in the Straits of Malacca) is a geographical and
commercial center and cross-roads of the eastern hemisphere, like to no
other port in the world. Singapore is an ethnological center, too, and
that small island swinging off the tip of the Malay Peninsula holds a
whole congress of nations, an exhibit of all the races and peoples and
types of men in the world, compared to which the Midway Plaisance was a
mere skeleton of a suggestion. The traveler, despite the overpowering,
all-subduing influence of the heat, has some thrills of excitement at
the tropical pictures of the shore, and the congregation of varicolored
humanity grouped on the Singapore wharf; and there and in Java, where
one least and last expects to find such modern conveniences, his ship
swings up to solid wharves, and he walks down a gang-plank in civilized
fashion—something to be appreciated after the excitements and discomforts
of landing in small boats among the screaming heathen of all other
Asiatic ports.
On the Singapore wharf is a market of models and a life-class for a
hundred painters; and sculptors, too, may study there all the tones
of living bronze and the beauties of human patina, and more of repose
than of muscular action, perhaps. Japanese, Chinese, Siamese, Malays,
Javanese, Burmese, Cingalese, Tamils, Sikhs, Parsees, Lascars, Malabars,
Malagasy, and sailor folk of all coasts, Hindus and heathens of every
caste and persuasion, are grouped in a brilliant confusion of red,
white, brown, and patterned drapery, of black, brown, and yellow skins;
and behind them, in ghostly clothes, stand the pallid Europeans,
who have brought the law, order, and system, the customs, habits,
comforts, and luxuries of civilization to the tropics and the jungle.
All these alien heathens and picturesque unbelievers, these pagans and
idolaters, Buddhists, Brahmans, Jews, Turks, sun- and fire-worshipers,
devil-dancers, and what not, have come with the white man to toil for
him under the equatorial sun, since the Malays are the great leisure
class of the world, and will not work. The Malays will hardly live on the
land, much less cultivate it or pay taxes, while they can float about in
strange little hen-coops of house-boats that fill the river and shores
by thousands. Hence the Tamils have come from India to work, and the
Chinese to do the small trading; and the Malay rests, or at most goes
a-fishing, or sits by the canoe-loads of coral and sponges, balloon-fish
and strange sea treasures that are sold at the wharf.
A tribe of young Malays in dugout canoes meet every steamer and paddle
in beside it, shrieking and gesticulating for the passengers to toss
coins into the water. Their mops of black hair are bleached auburn by the
action of sun and salt water, and the canoe and paddle fit as naturally
to these amphibians as a turtle’s shell and flipper. They bail with an
automatic sweep of the hollowed foot in regular time with the dip of the
paddle; and when a coin drops, the Malay lets go the paddle and sheds
his canoe without concern. There is a flash of brown heels, bubbles
and commotion below, and the diver comes up, and chooses and rights
his wooden shell and flipper as easily and naturally as a man picks
out and assumes his coat and cane at a hall door. And in their hearts,
the civilized folk on deck, hampered with their multiple garments and
conventions, envy these happy-go-lucky, care-free amphibians in the land
of the breadfruit, banana, and scant raiment, with dives into the cool,
green water, teeming with fish and glittering with falling coins, as the
only exertion required to earn a living. Cold and hunger are unknown;
flannels and soup are no part of charity; and even that word, and the
many organizations in its name, are hardly known in the lands low on the
line.
S’pore is the great junction where travelers from the East or the West
change ship for Java; a commercial cross-roads where all who travel
must stop and see what a marvel of a place British energy has raised
from the jungle in less than half a century. The Straits Settlements
date from the time when Sir Stamford Raffles, after Great Britain’s
five years’ temporary occupancy of Java, returned that possession to
the Dutch in 1816, the fall of Napoleon removing the fear that this
possession of Holland would become a French colony and menace to
British interests in Asia. It had been intended to establish such a
British commercial entrepôt at Achin Head, the north end of Sumatra;
but Sir Stamford Raffles’s better idea prevailed, and the free port of
Singapore in the Straits of Malacca has won the commercial supremacy of
the East from Batavia, and has prospered beyond its founder’s dreams.
It is a well-built and a beautifully ordered city, and the municipal
housekeeping is an example to many cities of the temperate zone. Even the
untidy Malay and the dirt-loving Chinese, who swarm to this profitable
trading-center, and have absorbed all the small business and retail
trade of the place, are held to outer cleanliness and strict sanitary
laws in their allotted quarters. The stately business houses, the marble
palace of a bank, the long iron pavilions shading the daily markets, the
splendid Raffles Museum and Library, are all regular and satisfactory
sights; but the street life is the fascination and distraction of the
traveler before everything else. The array of turbans and sarongs gives
color to every thoroughfare; but the striking and most unique pictures
in Singapore streets are the Tamil bullock-drivers, who, sooty and
statuesque, stand in splendid contrast between their humped white oxen
and the mounds of white flour-bags they draw in primitive carts. Tiny
Tamil children, shades blacker, if that could really be, than their ebon-
and charcoal-skinned parents, are seen on suburban roads, clothed only
in silver chains, bracelets, and medals; and these lithe, lean people
from the south end of India are first in the picturesque elements of the
great city of the Straits. The Botanical Garden, although so recently
established, promises to become famous; and one arriving from the farther
East meets there for the first time the beautiful red-stemmed Banka
palm, and the symmetrical traveler’s palm of Madagascar, the latter all
conventionalized ready for sculptors’ use. Scores of other splendid
palms, giant creepers, gorgeous blossoms and fantastic orchids, known
to us only by puny examples in great conservatories at home, equally
delight one—all the wealth of jungle and swamp growing beside the smooth,
hard roads of an English park, over which one may drive for hours in the
suburbs of Singapore.
[Illustration: A STREET IN SINGAPORE.
After photograph by E. S. Platt.]
The Dutch mail-steamers to and from Batavia connect with the English
mail-steamers at Singapore; a French line connects with the Messagerie’s
ships running between Marseilles and Japan; an Australian line of
steamers gives regular communication; and independent steamers, offering
as much comfort, leave Singapore almost daily for Batavia. The five
hundred miles’ distance is covered in forty-eight or sixty hours, for a
uniform fare of fifty Mexican dollars or ninety Dutch gulden—an excessive
and unusual charge for a voyage of such length in that or any other
region. The traveler is usually warned long beforehand that living and
travel in the Netherlands Indies is the most expensive in the world;
and the change from the depreciated Mexican silver-dollar standard and
the profitable exchange of the far East to the gold standard of Holland
dismays one at the start. The completion of railways across and to
all parts of the island of Java, however, has greatly reduced tourist
expenses, so that they are not now two or three times the average of
similar expenses in India, China, and Japan.
At Singapore, only two degrees above the equator, the sun pursues a
monotony of rising and setting that ranges only from six minutes before
to six minutes after six o’clock, morning and evening, the year round.
Breakfasting by candle-light and leaving the hotel in darkness, there
was all the beauty of the gray-and-rose dawn and the pale-yellow rays of
the early sun to be seen from the wet deck when our ship let go from the
wharf and sailed out over a sea of gold. For the two days and two nights
of the voyage, with but six passengers on the large blue-funnel steamer,
we had the deck and the cabins, and indeed the equator and the Java Sea,
to ourselves. The deck was furnished with the long chairs and hammocks of
tropical life, but more tropical yet were the bunches of bananas hanging
from the awning-rail, that all might pick and eat at will; for this is
the true region of plenty, where selected bananas cost one Mexican cent
the dozen, and a whole bunch but five cents, and where actual living is
far too cheap and simple to be called a science.
The ship slipped out from the harbor through the glassy river of the
Straits of Malacca, and on past points and shores that to me had never
been anything but geographic names. There was some little thrill of
excitement in being “on the line” in the heart of the tropics, the
half-way house of all the world, and one expected strange aspects and
effects. There was a magic stillness of air and sea; the calm was as of
enchantment, and one felt as if in some hypnotic trance, with all nature
chained in the same spell. The pale, pearly sky was reflected in smooth
stretches of liquid, pearly sea, with vaporous hills, soft green visions
of land beyond. Everywhere in these regions the shallow water shows pale
green above the sandy bottom, and the anchor can be dropped at will. All
through the breathless day the ship coursed over this shimmering yellow
and gray-green sea, with faint pictures of land, the very landscapes of
mirage, drawn in vaporous tints on every side. We were threading a way
through the thousand islands, the archipelago lying below the point of
the Malay Peninsula, a region of unnamed, uncounted “summer isles of
Eden,” chiefly known to history as the home of pirates.
The high mountain-ridges of Sumatra barred the west for all the first
equatorial day, the land of this “Java Minor” sloping down and spreading
out in great green plains and swamps on the fertile but unhealthy eastern
coast. The large settlements and most attractive districts are on the
west coast, where the hills rise steeply from the ocean, and coffee-trees
thrive luxuriantly. Benkoelen, the old English town, and Padang, the
great coffee-mart, are on that coast, and from the latter a railway
leads to high mountain districts of great picturesqueness. There are few
government plantations on Sumatra, where land-tenures and leases are
the same as in Java. Immense areas have been devoted to tobacco-culture
near Deli, on the north or Straits coast, planters employing there and
on lower east-coast estates more than forty-three thousand Chinese
coolies—the Chinese, the one Asiatic who toils with ardor and regularity,
whom the tropics cannot debilitate, and to whom malaria and all germs,
microbes, and bacilli seem but tonic agents.
When the British returned Java, after the Napoleon scare was over, they
retained Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and sovereign rights over
Sumatra, relinquishing this latter suzerainty in 1872, in exchange for
Holland’s imaginary rights in Ashantee and the Gold Coast of Africa.
The Dutch then attempted to reduce the native population of Sumatra
to the same estate as the more pliant people of Java; but the wild
mountaineers and bucaneers, of the north, or Achin, end of the island
in particular, warned by the sad fate of the Javanese, had no intention
of being conquered and enslaved, of giving their labor and the fruit
of their lands to the strangers from Europe’s cold swamps. The Achin
war has continued since 1872, with little result save a general loss
of Dutch prestige in the East, an immense expenditure of Dutch gulden,
causing a deficit in the colonial budget every year, a fearful mortality
among Dutch troops, and the final abandonment, in this decade of trade
depression, of the aggressive policy. Dutch commanders are well satisfied
to hold their chain of forts along the western hills, and to punish the
Achinese in a small way by blockading them from their supplies of opium,
tobacco, and spirits. In one four years of active campaigning the Achin
war cost seventy million gulden, and seventy out of every hundred Dutch
soldiers succumbed to the climate before going into an encounter. The
Achinese merely retired to their swamps and jungles and waited, and
the climate did the rest, their confidence in themselves only shaken
during the command of General Van der Heyden, who for a time actually
crushed the rebellion. This picturesque fighter, a half-brother of Baron
de Stuers, inherited Malay instincts from a native mother, and carried
on such a warfare as the Achinese understood. He lost an eye in one
encounter, and the natives, then remembering an old tradition that their
country would be conquered by a one-eyed man, practically gave up the
struggle—to resume it, however, as soon as General Van der Heyden retired
and sailed for Holland, and military vigilance was relaxed in consequence
of Dutch economy. The Achinese leader, Toekoe Oemar, has several times
apparently yielded to the Dutch, only to perpetrate some greater injury;
and his treachery and crimes have given him repute as the very prince of
evil ones.
One’s sympathy goes naturally with the brave, liberty-loving Achinese;
and in view of their indomitable spirit, Great Britain did not lose
so much when she let go unconquerable Sumatra. British tourists are
saddened, however, when they see what their ministers let slip with Java,
for with that island and Sumatra, all Asia’s southern shore-line, and
virtually the far East, would have been England’s own.
Geologically this whole Malay Archipelago was one with the Malay
Peninsula, and although so recently made, is still subject to earthquake
change, as shown in the terrible eruption of the island of Krakatau in
the narrow Sunda Strait, west of Java, in August, 1883. Native traditions
tell that anciently Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Sumbawa were one island, and
“when three thousand rainy seasons shall have passed away they will be
reunited”; but Alfred Russel Wallace denies it, and proves that Java was
the first to drop away from the Asiatic mainland and become an island.
While the sun rode high in the cloudless white zenith above our ship the
whole world seemed aswoon. Hills and islands swam and wavered in the heat
and mists, and the glare and silence were terrible and oppressive. One
could not shake off the sensation of mystery and unreality, of sailing
into some unknown, eerie, other world. Every voice was subdued, the beat
of the engines was scarcely felt in that glassy calm, and the stillness
of the ship gave a strange sensation, as of a magic spell. It was not so
very hot,—only 86° by the thermometer,—but the least exertion, to cross
the deck, to lift a book, to pull a banana, left one limp and exhausted,
with cheeks burning and the breath coming faster, that insidious,
deceptive heat of the tropics declaring itself—that steaming, wilting
quality in the sun of Asia that so soon makes jelly of the white man’s
brain, and that in no way compares with the scorching, dry 96° in the
shade of a North American, hot-wave summer day.
At five o’clock, while afternoon tea and bananas were being served on
deck, we crossed the line—that imaginary parting of the world, the
invisible thread of the universe, the beginning and the end of all
latitude—latitude 0°, longitude 103° east, the sextant told. The position
was geographically exciting. We were literally “down South,” and might
now speak disrespectfully of the equator if we wished. A breeze sprang
up as soon as we crossed the line, and all that evening and through the
night the air of the southern hemisphere was appreciably cooler. The ship
went slowly, and loitered along in order to enter the Banka Straits by
daylight; and at sunrise we were in a smooth river of pearl, with the
green Sumatra shores close on one hand, and the heights of Banka’s island
of tin on the other. A ship in full sail swept out to meet us, and four
more barks under swelling canvas passed by in that narrow strait, whose
rocks and reefs are fully attested by the line of wrecks and sunken masts
down its length. The harbor of Muntuk, whence there is a direct railway
to the tin-mines, was busy with shipping, and the white walls and red
roofs of the town showed prettily against the green.
The open Java Sea was as still and glassy as the straits had been, and
for another breathless, cloudless day the ship’s engines beat almost
inaudibly as we went southward through an enchanted silence. When the
heat and glare of light from the midday sun so directly overhead drove
us to the cabin, where swinging punkas gave air, we had additional
suggestion of the tropics; for a passenger for Macassar, just down
from Penang and Malacca, showed us fifty freshly cured specimens of
birds, whose gorgeous plumage repeated the most brilliant and dazzling
tints of the rainbow, the flower-garden, and the jewel-case, and
left us bereft of adjectives and exclamations. Here we found another
passenger, who spoke Dutch and looked the Hollander by every sign, but
quickly claimed citizenship with us as a naturalized voter of the great
republic. He asked if we lived in Java, and when we had answered that we
were going to Java _en touriste_, “merely travelers,” he established
comradeship by saying, “I am a traveling man myself—New York Life.” This
naturalized American citizen said quite naturally, “We Dutchmen” and “our
queen”—Americanisms with a loyal Holland ring.
After the gold, rose, gray, and purple sunset had shown us such a sky of
splendor and sea of glory as we had but dreamed of above the equator,
banks of dark vapor defined themselves in the south. A thin young moon
hung among the huge yellow stars, that glowed steadily, with no cold
twinkling, in that intense night sky; but before the Southern Cross could
rise, dense clouds rolled up, and flashes, chains, and forks of angry
lightning made a double spectacular play against the inky-black sky and
the mirror-black sea. The captain promised us a tropical thunder-storm
from those black clouds in the south, and went forward to give ship’s
orders, advising us to make all haste below when the first drop should
fall, as in an instant a sheet of blinding rain would surround the
decks, against which the double awnings would be no more protection than
so much gauze, and through which one could not see the ship’s length.
The clouds remained stationary, however, and we missed the promised
sensation, although we waited for hours on deck, the ship moving quietly
through the soft, velvety air of the tropic’s blackest midnight, and the
lightning-flashes becoming fainter and fainter.
[Illustration: MAP OF JAVA.]
II
IN “JAVA MAJOR”
In the earliest morning a clean white lighthouse on an islet was seen
ahead, and as the sun rose, bluish mountains came up from the sea, grew
in height, outlined themselves, and then stood out, detached volcanic
peaks of most lovely lines, against the purest, pale-blue sky; soft
clouds floated up and clung to the summits; the blue and green at the
water’s edge resolved itself into groves and lines of palms; and over
sea and sky and the wonderland before us was all the dewy freshness of
dawn in Eden. It looked very truly the “gem” and the “pearl of the East,”
this “Java Major” of the ancients, and the Djawa of the native people,
which has called forth more extravagant praise and had more adjectives
expended on it than any other one island in the world. Yet this little
continent is only 666 miles long and from 56 to 135 miles wide, and on
an area of 49,197 square miles (nearly the same as that of the State of
New York) supports a population of 24,000,000, greater than that of all
the other islands of the Indian Ocean put together. With 1600 miles of
coast-line, it has few harbors, the north shore being swampy and flat,
with shallows extending far out, while the southern coast is steep and
bold, and the one harbor of Tjilatjap breaks the long line of surf
where the Indian Ocean beats against the southern cliffs. Fortunately,
hurricanes and typhoons are unknown in the waters around this “summer
land of the world,” and the seasons have but an even, regular change from
wet to dry in Java. From April to October the dry monsoon blows from the
southeast, and brings the best weather of the year—dry, hot days and
the coolest nights. From October to April the southwest or wet monsoon
blows. Then every day has its afternoon shower, the air is heavy and
stifling, all the tropic world is asteam and astew and afloat, vegetation
is magnificent, insect life triumphant, and the mountains are hidden in
nearly perpetual mist. There are heavy thunderstorms at the turn of the
monsoon, and the one we had watched from the sea the Hallowe’en night
before our arrival had washed earth and air until the foliage glistened,
the air fairly sparkled, nature wore her most radiant smiles, and the
tropics were ideal.
It was more workaday and prosaic when the ship, steaming in between long
breakwaters, made fast to the stone quays of Tandjon Priok, facing a
long line of corrugated-iron warehouses, behind which was the railway
connecting the port with the city of Batavia. The gradual silting up of
Batavia harbor after an eruption of Mount Salak in 1699, which first
dammed and then sent torrents of mud and sand down the Tjiliwong River,
finally obliged commerce to remove to this deep bay six miles farther
east, where the colonials have made a model modern harbor, at a cost of
twenty-six and a half million gulden, all paid from current revenues,
without the island’s ceasing to pay its regular tribute to the crown
of Holland. The customs officers at Tandjon Priok were courteous and
lenient, passing our tourist luggage with the briefest formality, and
kindly explaining how our steamer-chairs could be stored in the railway
rooms until our return to port. It is but nine miles from the Tandjon
Priok wharf to the main station in the heart of the original city of
Batavia—a stretch of swampy ground dotted and lined with palm-groves
and banana-patches, with tiny woven baskets of houses perched on stilts
clustered at the foot of tall cocoa-trees that are the staff and source
of life and of every economical blessing of native existence. We leaped
excitedly from one side of the little car to the other, to see each more
and more tropical picture; groups of bare brown children frolicking in
the road, and mothers with babies astride of their hips, or swinging
comfortably in a scarf knotted across one shoulder, and every-day life
going on under the palms most naturally, although to our eyes it was so
strange and theatrical.
At the railway-station we met the _sadoe_ (dos-à-dos), a two-wheeled
cart, which is the common vehicle of hire of the country, and is drawn by
a tiny Timor or Sandalwood pony, with sometimes a second pony attached
outside of the shafts. The broad cushioned seat over the axles will
accommodate four persons, two sitting each way. The driver faces front
comfortably; but the passenger, with no back to lean against but the
driver’s, must hold to the canopy-frame while he is switched about town
backward in the footman’s place, for one gulden or forty cents the hour.
Whether one comes to Java from India or China, there is hasty change
from the depreciated silver currency of all Asia to the unaltered gold
standard of Holland, and the sudden expensiveness of the world is a
sad surprise. The Netherlands unit of value, the gulden (value, forty
cents United States gold), is as often called a florin, a rupee, or
a dollar—the “Mexican dollar” or the equivalent “British dollar” of
the Straits Settlements, a coin which trade necessities drove British
conservatism to minting, which act robs the Briton of the privilege of
making further remarks upon “the almighty dollar” of the United States,
with its unchanging value of one hundred cents gold. This confusion of
coins, with prices quoted indifferently in guldens, florins, rupees, and
dollars, is further increased by dividing the gulden into one hundred
cents, like the Ceylon rupee, so that, between these Dutch fractions, the
true cents of the United States dollar that one instinctively thinks of,
and the depreciated cents of the British or the battered Mexican dollar,
one’s brain begins to whirl when prices are quoted, or any evil day of
reckoning comes.
No Europeans live at Tandjon Priok, nor in the old city of Batavia,
which from the frightful mortality during two centuries was known as
“the graveyard of Europeans.” The banks and business houses, the Chinese
and Arab towns, are in the “old town”; but Europeans desert that quarter
before sundown, and betake themselves to the “new town” suburbs, where
every house is in a park of its own, and the avenues are broad and
straight, and all the distances are magnificent. The city of Batavia,
literally “fair meadows,” grandiloquently “the queen of the East,”
and without exaggeration “the gridiron of the East,” dates from 1621,
when the Dutch removed from Bantam, where quarrels between Portuguese,
Javanese, and the East India Company had been disturbing trade for
fifteen years, and built Fort Jacatra at the mouth of a river off which
a cluster of islands sheltered a fine harbor. Its position in the midst
of swamps was unhealthy, and the mortality was so appalling as to seem
incredible. Dutch records tell of 87,000 soldiers and sailors dying in
the government hospital between 1714 and 1776, and of 1,119,375 dying
at Batavia between 1730 and August, 1752—a period of twenty-two years
and eight months.[1] The deadly Java fever occasioning this seemingly
incredible mortality was worst between the years 1733 and 1738, during
which time 2000 of the Dutch East India Company’s servants and free
Christians died annually. Staunton, who visited Batavia with Lord
Macartney’s embassy in 1793, called it the “most unwholesome place in the
universe,” and “the pestilential climate” was considered a sufficient
defense against attack from any European power.
The people were long in learning that those who went to the higher
suburbs to sleep, and built houses of the most open construction to admit
of the fullest sweep of air, were free from the fever of the walled town,
surrounded by swamps, cut by stagnant canals, and facing a harbor whose
mud-banks were exposed at low tide. The city walls were destroyed at the
beginning of this century by the energetic Marshal Daendels, who began
building the new town. The quaint old air-tight Dutch buildings were
torn down, and streets were widened; and there is now a great outspread
town of red-roofed, whitewashed houses, with no special features or
picturesqueness to make its street-scenes either distinctively Dutch or
tropical. Modern Batavia had 111,763 inhabitants on December 31, 1894,
less than a tenth of whom are Europeans, with 26,776 Chinese and 72,934
natives. While the eighteenth-century Stadhuis might have been brought
from Holland entire, a steam tramway starts from its door and thence
shrieks its way to the farthest suburb, the telephone “hellos” from
center to suburb, and modern inventions make tropical living possible.
The Dutch do not welcome tourists, nor encourage one to visit their
paradise of the Indies. Too many travelers have come, seen, and gone away
to tell disagreeable truths about Dutch methods and rule; to expose the
source and means of the profitable returns of twenty million dollars and
more for each of so many years of the last and the preceding century—all
from islands whose whole area only equals that of the State of New York.
Although the tyrannic rule and the “culture system,” or forced labor,
are things of the dark past, the Dutch brain is slow and suspicious, and
the idea being fixed fast that no stranger comes to Java on kindly or
hospitable errands, the colonial authorities must know within twenty-four
hours why one visits the Indies. They demand one’s name, age, religion,
nationality, place of nativity, and occupation, the name of the ship
that brought the suspect to Java, and the name of its captain—a dim
threat lurking in this latter query of holding the unlucky mariner
responsible should his importation prove an expense or embarrassment to
the island. Still another permit—a _toelatings-kaart_, or “admission
ticket”—must be obtained if one wishes to travel farther than Buitenzorg,
the cooler capital, forty miles away in the hills. The tourist pure
and simple, the sight-seer and pleasure traveler, is not yet quite
comprehended, and his passports usually accredit him as traveling in the
interior for “scientific purposes.” Guides or efficient couriers in the
real sense do not exist yet. The English-speaking servant is rare and
delusive, yet a necessity unless one speaks Dutch or Low Malay. Of all
the countries one may ever travel in, none equals Java in the difficulty
of being understood; and it is a question, too, whether the Malays who do
not know any English are harder to get along with than the Dutch who know
a little.
Thirty years ago Alfred Russel Wallace inveighed against the unnecessary
discomforts, annoyances, and expense of travel in Java, and every
tourist since has repeated his plaint. The philippics of returned
travelers furnish steady amusement for Singapore residents; and no one
brings back the same enthusiasm that embarked with him. It is not the
Java of the Javanese that these returned ones berate so vehemently,
but the Netherlands India, and the state created and brought about by
the merciless, cold-blooded, rapacious Hollanders who came half-way
round the world and down to the equator, nine thousand miles away from
their homes, to acquire an empire and enslave a race, and who impose
their hampering customs and restrictions upon even alien visitors. Java
undoubtedly is “the very finest and most interesting tropical island in
the world,” and the Javanese the most gentle, attractive, and innately
refined people of the East, after the Japanese; but the Dutch in Java
“beat the Dutch” in Europe ten points to one, and there is nothing so
surprising and amazing, in all man’s proper study of mankind, as this
equatorial Hollander transplanted from the cold fens of Europe; nor is
anything so strange as the effect of a high temperature on Low-Country
temperament. The most rigid, conventional, narrow, thrifty, prudish, and
Protestant people in Europe bloom out in the forcing-house of the tropics
into strange laxity, and one does not know the Hollanders until one sees
them in this “summer land of the world,” whither they threatened to
emigrate in a body during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
III
BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST
When one has driven through the old town of Batavia and seen its crowded
bazaars and streets, and has followed the lines of bricked canals, where
small natives splash and swim, women beat the family linen, and men go
to and fro in tiny boats, all in strange travesty of the solemn canals
of the old country, he comes to the broader avenues of the new town,
lined with tall tamarind- and waringen-trees, with plumes of palms, and
pyramids of blazing Madagascar flame-trees in blossom. He is driven
into the long garden court of the Hotel Nederlanden, and there beholds
a spectacle of social life and customs that nothing in all travel can
equal for distinct shock and sensation. We had seen some queer things
in the streets,—women lolling barefooted and in startling dishabille in
splendid equipages,—but concluded them to be servants or half-castes;
but there in the hotel was an undress parade that beggars description,
and was as astounding on the last as on the first day in the country.
Woman’s vanity and man’s conventional ideas evidently wilt at the line,
and no formalities pass the equator, when distinguished citizens and
officials can roam and lounge about hotel courts in pajamas and bath
slippers, and bare-ankled women, clad only in the native sarong, or
skirt, and a white dressing-jacket, go unconcernedly about their affairs
in streets and public places until afternoon. It is a dishabille beyond
all burlesque pantomime, and only shipwreck on a desert island would seem
sufficient excuse for women being seen in such an ungraceful, unbecoming
attire—an undress that reveals every defect while concealing beauty, that
no loveliness can overcome, and that has neither color nor grace nor
picturesqueness to recommend it.
The hotel is a series of one-storied buildings surrounding the four sides
of a garden court, the projecting eaves giving a continuous covered
gallery that is the general corridor. The bedrooms open directly upon
this broad gallery, and the space in front of each room, furnished with
lounging-chairs, table, and reading-lamp, is the sitting-room of each
occupant by day. There is never any jealous hiding behind curtains or
screens. The whole hotel register is in evidence, sitting or spread in
reclining-chairs. Men in pajamas thrust their bare feet out bravely,
puffing clouds of rank Sumatra tobacco smoke as they stared at the new
arrivals; women rocked and stared as if we were the unusual spectacle,
and not they; and children sprawled on the cement flooring, in only the
most intimate undergarments of civilized children. One turned his eyes
from one undressed family group only to encounter some more surprising
dishabille; and meanwhile servants were hanging whole mildewed wardrobes
on clothes-lines along this open hotel corridor, while others were
ironing their employers’ garments on this communal porch.
[Illustration: A JAVANESE YOUNG WOMAN.]
We were sure we had gone to the wrong hotel; but the Nederlanden was
vouched for as the best, and when the bell sounded, over one hundred
guests came into the vaulted dining-room and were seated at the one long
table. The men wore proper coats and clothes at this midday _riz tavel_
(rice table), but the women and children came as they were—_sans gêne_.
The Batavian day begins with coffee and toast, eggs and fruit, at any
time between six and nine o’clock; and the affairs of the day are
despatched before noon, when that sacred, solemn, solid feeding function,
the riz tavel, assembles all in shady, spacious dining-rooms, free from
the creaking and flapping of the punka, so prominent everywhere else in
the East. Rice is the staple of the midday meal, and one is expected to
fill the soup-plate before him with boiled rice, and on that heap as much
as he may select from eight or ten dishes, a tray of curry condiments
being also passed with this great first course. Bits of fish, duck,
chicken, beef, bird, omelet, and onions rose upon my neighbors’ plates,
and spoonfuls of a thin curried mixture were poured over the rice, before
the conventional chutneys, spices, cocoanut, peppers, and almond went to
the conglomerate mountain resting upon the “rice table” below. Beefsteak,
a salad, and then fruit and coffee brought the midday meal to a close.
Squeamish folk, unseasoned tourists, and well-starched Britons with small
sense of humor complain of loss of appetite at these hotel riz tavels;
and those Britons further criticize the way in which the Dutch fork, or
most often the Dutch knife-blade, is loaded, aimed, and shoveled with a
long, straight stroke to the Dutch interior; and they also criticize the
way in which portions of bird or chicken are managed, necessitating and
explaining the presence of the finger-bowl from the beginning of each
meal. But we forgot all that had gone before when the feast was closed
with the mangosteen—nature’s final and most perfect effort in fruit
creation.
After the riz tavel every one slumbers—as one naturally must after such
a very “square” meal—until four o’clock, when a bath and tea refresh
the tropic soul, the world dresses in the full costume of civilization,
and the slatternly women of the earlier hours go forth in the latest
finery of good fortune, twenty-six days from Amsterdam, for the afternoon
driving and visiting, that continue to the nine-o’clock dinner-hour.
Batavian fashion does not take its airing in the jerky sadoe, but in
roomy “vis-à-vis” or barouches, comfortable “milords” or giant victorias,
that, being built to Dutch measures, would comfortably accommodate three
ordinary people to each seat, and are drawn by gigantic Australian
horses, or “Walers” (horses from New South Wales), to match these
turnouts of Brobdingnag.
Society is naturally narrow, provincial, colonial, conservative,
and insular, even to a degree beyond that known in Holland. The
governor-general, whose salary is twice that of the President of the
United States, lives in a palace at Buitenzorg, forty miles away in the
hills, with a second palace still higher up in the mountains, and comes
to the Batavia palace only on state occasions. This ruler of twenty-four
million souls, who rules as a viceroy instructed from The Hague, with the
aid of a secretary-general and a Council of the Indies, has, in addition
to his salary of a hundred thousand dollars, an allowance of sixty
thousand dollars a year for entertaining, and it is expected that he will
maintain a considerable state and splendor. He has a standing army of
thirty thousand, one third Europeans, of various nationalities, raised
by volunteer enlistment in Holland, who are well paid, carefully looked
after, and recruited by long stays at Buitenzorg after short terms of
service at the sea-ports. After the Indian mutiny the Dutch were in great
fear of an uprising of the natives of Java, and placed less confidence
in native troops. Only Europeans can hold officers’ commissions; and
while the native soldiers are all Mohammedans, and great consideration
is paid their religious scruples, care is taken not to let the natives
of any one province or district compose a majority in any one regiment,
and these regiments frequently change posts. The colonial navy has done
great service to the world in suppressing piracy in the Java Sea and
around the archipelago, although steam navigation inevitably brought an
end to piracy and picturesque adventure. The little navy helps maintain
an admirable lighthouse service, and with such convulsions as that of
Krakatau always possible, and changes often occurring in the bed of
the shallow seas, its surveyors are continually busied with making new
charts.
The islands of Amboyna, Borneo, Celebes, and Sumatra are also ruled by
this one governor-general of the Netherlands Indies, through residents;
and the island of Java is divided into twenty-two residencies or
provinces, a resident, or local governor, ruling—or, as “elder brother,”
effectually advising—in the few provinces ostensibly ruled by native
princes. A resident receives ten thousand dollars a year, with house
provided and a liberal allowance made for the extra incidental expenses
of the position—for traveling, entertaining, and acknowledging in degree
the gifts of native princes. University graduates are chosen for this
colonial service, and take a further course in the colonial institute at
Haarlem, which includes, besides the study of the Malay language, the
economic botany of the Indies, Dutch law, and Mohammedan justice, since,
in their capacity as local magistrates, they must make their decisions
conform with the tenets of the Koran, which is the general moral law,
together with the unwritten Javanese code. They are entitled to retire
upon a pension after twenty years of service—half the time demanded of
those in the civil service in Holland. All these residents are answerable
to the secretary of the colony, appointed by the crown, and much of
executive detail has to be submitted to the home government’s approval.
Naturally there is much friction between all these functionaries, and
etiquette is punctilious to a degree. A formal court surrounds the
governor-general, and is repeated in miniature at every residency. The
pensioned native sovereigns, princes, and regents maintain all the forms,
etiquette, and barbaric splendor of their old court life, elaborated by
European customs. The three hundred Dutch officials condescend equally to
the rich planters and to the native princes; the planters hate and deride
the officials; the natives hate the Dutch of either class, and despise
their own princes who are subservient to the Dutch; and the wars and
jealousies of rank and race and caste, of white and brown, of native and
imported folk, flourish with tropical luxuriance.
Batavian life differs considerably from life in British India and all the
rest of Asia, where the British-built and conventionally ordered places
support the same formal social order of England unchanged, save for a few
luxuries and concessions incident to the climate. The Dutchman does not
waste his perspiration on tennis or golf or cricket, or on any outdoor
pastime more exciting than horse-racing. He does not make well-ordered
and expensive dinners his one chosen form of hospitality. He dines late
and dines elaborately, but the more usual form of entertainment in
Batavia is in evening receptions or musicales, for which the spacious
houses, with their great white porticos, are well adapted. Batavian
residents have each a paradise park around their dwellings, and the white
houses of classic architecture, bowered in magnificent trees and palms,
shrubs and vines and blooming plants, are most attractive by day. At
night, when the great portico, which is drawing-room and living-room and
as often dining-room, is illuminated by many lamps, each lovely villa
glows like a fairyland in its dark setting. If the portico lamps are not
lighted, it is a sign of “not at home,” and mynheer and his family may
sit in undress at their ease. There are weekly concerts at the Harmonie
and Concordia clubs, where the groups around iron tables might have been
summoned by a magician from some continental garden. There are such clubs
in every town on the island, the government subsidizing the opera and
supporting military bands of the first order; and they furnish society
its center and common meeting-place. One sees fine gowns and magnificent
jewels; ladies wear the heavy silks and velvets of an Amsterdam winter
in these tropical gardens, and men dance in black coats and broadcloth
uniforms. Society is brilliant, formal, and by lamplight impressive; but
when by daylight one meets the same fair beauties and bejeweled matrons
sockless, in sarongs and flapping slippers, the disillusionment is
complete.