the Stadkirche, the lighthouse, the old warehouse, and the walled gate of
Peter Elberfeld’s house, with the spiked skull of that half-caste rebel
against Dutch rule pointing a more awful reminder than the inscription
in several languages to his “horrid memory.” The pride of the city, and
the most creditable thing on the island, is the Museum of the Batavian
Society of Arts and Sciences (“Bataviaasch Genootschap von Kunsten en
Wepenschappen”), known sufficiently to the world of science and letters
as “the Batavian Society,” of which Sir Stamford Raffles was the first
great inspirer and exploiter, after it had dreamed along quietly in
colonial isolation for a few years of the last century. In his time were
begun the excavations of the Hindu temples and the archæological work
which the Dutch government and the Batavian Society have since carried
on, and which have helped place that association among the foremost
learned societies of the world. The museum is housed in a beautiful Greek
temple of a building whose white walls are shaded by magnificent trees,
and faces the broad Koenig’s Plein, the largest parade-ground in the
world, the Batavians say. The halls, surrounding a central court, shelter
a complete and wonderful exhibit of Javanese antiquities and art works,
of arms, weapons, implements, ornaments, costumes, masks, basketry,
textiles, musical instruments, models of boats and houses, examples of
fine old metal-work, and of all the industries of these gifted people.
It is a place of absorbing interest; but with no labels and no key
except the native janitor’s pantomime, one’s visit is often filled with
exasperation.
There is a treasure-chamber heaped with gold shields, helmets, thrones,
state umbrellas, boxes, salvers, betel and tobacco sets of gold, with
jeweled daggers and krises of finest blades, patterned with curious
veinings. Tributes and gifts from native sultans and princes display the
precious metals in other curious forms, and a fine large _coco-de-mer_,
the fabled twin nut of the Seychelles palm, that was long supposed to
grow in some unknown, mysterious isle of the sea-gods, is throned on a
golden base with all the honors due such a talisman. The ruined temples
and sites of abandoned cities in Middle Java have yielded rich ornaments,
necklaces, ear-rings, head-dresses, seals, plates, and statuettes of
gold and silver. A room is filled with bronze weapons, bells, tripods,
censers, images, and all the appurtenances of Buddhist worship,
characteristic examples of the Greco-Buddhist art of India, which even
more surprisingly confronts one in these treasures from the jungles of
the far-away tropical island. A central hall is filled with bas-reliefs
and statues from these ruins of Buddhist and Brahmanic temples, in
which the Greek influence is quite as marked, and Egyptian and Assyrian
suggestions in the sculptures give one other ideas to puzzle over.
The society’s library is rich in exchanges, scientific and art
publications of all countries; and the row of reports of the Smithsonian
Institution, the Geological Survey and Bureau of Ethnology, are as much
a matter of pride to the American visitor as the framed diplomas of
institutes and international expositions are to the Batavian curator.
The council-room contains the state chairs of native sovereigns, and
portraits and souvenirs of the great explorers and navigators who passed
this way in the last century and in the early years of this cycle.
Captain Cook left stores of South Sea curios on his way to and fro,
and during this century the museum has been the pet and pride of Dutch
residents and officials, and the subject of praise by all visitors.
The palace of the governor-general on this vast Koenig’s Plein is a
beautiful modern structure, but more interest attaches to the old palace
of the Waterloo Plein, the _palys_ built by the great Marshal Daendels,
who, supplanted by the British after but three years’ energetic rule,
withdrew to Europe.
IV
THE KAMPONGS
The _Tjina_, or China, and the Arab _kampongs_, are show-places to the
stranger in the curious features of life and civic government they
present. Each of these foreign kampongs, or villages, is under the charge
of a captain or commander, whom the Dutch authorities hold responsible
for the order and peace of their compatriots, since they do not allow
to these yellow colonials so-called “European freedom”—an expression
which constitutes a sufficient admission of the existence of “Asiatic
restraint.” Great wealth abides in both these alien quarters, whose
leading families have been there for generations, and have absorbed all
retail trade, and as commission merchants, money-lenders, and middlemen
have garnered great profits and earned the hatred of Dutch and Javanese
alike. The lean and hooked-nosed followers of the prophet conquered
the island in the fifteenth century, and have built their _messigits_,
or mosques, in every province. The Batavian messigit is a cool little
blue-and-white-tiled building, with a row of inlaid wooden clogs and
loose leather shoes at the door; and turbaned heads within bow before the
mihrab that points northwestward to Mecca. Since the Mohammedan conquest
of 1475, the Javanese are Mohammedan if anything; but they take their
religion easily, and are so lukewarm in the faith of the fire and sword
that they would easily relapse to their former mild Brahmanism if Islam’s
power were released. The Dutch have always prohibited the pilgrimages
to Mecca, since those returning with the green turban were viewed with
reverence and accredited with supernatural powers that made their
influence a menace to Dutch rule. Arab priests have always been enemies
of the government and foremost in inciting the people to rebellion
against Dutch and native rulers; but little active evangelical work seems
to have been done by Christian missionaries to counteract Mohammedanism,
save at the town of Depok, near Batavia.
In all the banks and business houses is found the lean-fingered Chinese
comprador, or accountant, and the rattling buttons of his abacus,
or counting-board, play the inevitable accompaniment to financial
transactions, as everywhere else east of Colombo. The 251,325 Chinese in
Netherlands India present a curious study in the possibilities of their
race. Under the strong, tyrannical rule of the Dutch they thrive, show
ambition to adopt Western ways, and approach more nearly to European
standards than one could believe possible. Chinese conservatism yields
first in costume and social manners; the pigtail shrinks to a mere
symbolic wisp, and the well-to-do Batavian Chinese dresses faultlessly
after the London model, wears spotless duck coat and trousers,
patent-leather shoes, and, in top or derby hat, sits complacent in a
handsome victoria drawn by imported horses, with liveried Javanese on
the box. One meets correctly gotten-up Celestial equestrians trotting
around Waterloo Plein or the alleys of Buitenzorg, each followed by an
obsequious groom, the thin remnant of the Manchu queue slipped inside the
coat being the only thing to suggest Chinese origin. The rich Chinese
live in beautiful villas, in gorgeously decorated houses built on ideal
tropical lines; and although having no political or social recognition
in the land, entertain no intention of returning to China. They load
their Malay wives with diamonds and jewels, and spend liberally for the
education of their children. The Dutch tax, judge, punish, and hold them
in the same regard as the natives, with whom they have intermarried for
three centuries, until there is a large mixed class of these Paranaks
in every part of the island. The native hatred of the Chinese is an
inheritance of those past centuries when the Dutch farmed out the revenue
to Chinese, who, being assigned so many thousand acres of rice-land,
and the forced labor of the people on them, gradually extended their
boundaries, and by increasing exactions and secret levies oppressed the
people with a tyranny and rapacity the Dutch could not approach. In time
the Chinese fomented insurrection against the Dutch, and in 1740, joining
with disaffected natives, entrenched themselves in a suburban fort. The
Dutch in alarm gave the order, and over 20,000 Chinese then within the
walls were put to death, not an infant, a woman, nor an aged person
being spared. In fear of the wrath of the Emperor of China, elaborate
excuses were framed and sent to Peking. Sage old Keen-Lung responded only
by saying that the Dutch had served them right, that any death was too
good for Chinese who would desert the graves of their ancestors.
After that incident they were restrained from all monopolies and revenue
farming, and restricted to their present humble political state. An
absolute exclusion act was passed in 1837, but was soon revoked, and the
Chinese hold financial supremacy over both Dutch and natives, trade and
commerce being hopelessly in the hands of the skilful Chinese comprador.
The Dutch vent their dislike by an unmerciful taxation. They formerly
assessed them according to the length of their queues and for each long
finger-nail. The Chinese are mulcted on landing and leaving, for birth
and death, for every business venture and privilege; yet they prosper
and remain, and these Paranaks in a few more generations may attain
the social and political equality they seek. It all proves that under
a strong, tyrannical government the Chinese make good citizens, and
can easily put away the notions and superstitions that in China itself
hold countless millions in the bondage of a long-dead past. The recent
exposure of Chinese forgeries of Java bank-notes to the value of three
million pounds sterling has put the captains of Batavia and Samarang
kampongs in prison, and has led to wholesale arrests of rich Chinese
throughout the island.
Native life swarms in this land of the betel and banana, where there
seems to be more of inherent dream and calm than in other lands of the
lotus. The Javanese are the finer flowers of the Malay race—a people
possessed of a civilization, arts, and literature in that golden period
before the Mohammedan and European conquests. They have gentle voices,
gentle manners, fine and expressive features, and are the one people of
Asia besides the Japanese who have real charm and attraction for the
alien. They are more winning, too, by contrast, after one has met the
harsh, unlovely, and unwashed people of China, or the equally unwashed,
cringing Hindu. They are a little people, and one feels the same
indulgent, protective sense as toward the Japanese. Their language is
soft and musical—“the Italian of the tropics”; their ideas are poetic;
and their love of flowers and perfumes, of music and the dance, of
heroic plays and of every emotional form of art, proves them as innately
esthetic as their distant cousins, the Japanese, in whom there is so
large an admixture of Malay stock. Their reverence for rank and age, and
their elaborate etiquette and punctilious courtesy to one another, are as
marked even in the common people as among the Japanese; but their abject,
crouching humility before their Dutch employers, and the brutality of the
latter to them, are a theme for sadder thinking, and calculated to make
the blood boil. When one actually sees the quiet, inoffensive peddlers,
who chiefly beseech with their eyes, furiously kicked out of the hotel
courtyard when mynheer does not choose to buy, and native children
actually lifted by an ear and hurled away from the vantage-point on the
curbstone which a pajamaed Dutchman wishes for himself while some troops
march by, one is content not to see or know any more.
These friendly little barefoot people are of endless interest, and their
daily markets, or _passers_, are panoramas of life and color that one
longs to transplant entire. Life is so simple and primitive, too, in
the sunshine and warmth of the tropics. A bunch of bananas, a basket
of steamed rice, and a leaf full of betel preparations comprise the
necessaries and luxuries of daily living. With the rice may go many
peppers and curried messes of ground cocoanut, which one sees made
and offered for sale in small dabs laid on bits of banana-leaf, the
wrapping-paper of the tropics. Pinned with a cactus-thorn, a bit of leaf
makes a primitive bag, bowl, or cup, and a slip of it serves as a sylvan
spoon. All classes chew the betel- or areca-nut, bits of which, wrapped
in betel-leaf with lime, furnish cheer and stimulant, dye the mouth,
and keep the lips streaming with crimson juice. In Canton and in all
Cochin China, across the peninsula, and throughout island and continental
India, men and women have equal delight in this peppery stimulant. The
Javanese lays his quid of betel tobacco between the lower lip and teeth,
and so great seem to be the solace and comfort of it that dozing venders
and peddlers will barely turn an eye and grunt responses to one’s eager
“_Brapa?_” (“How much?”)
[Illustration: PAINTING SARONGS.]
Peddlers bring to one’s doorway fine Bantam basketry and bales of the
native cotton cloth, or _battek_, patterned in curious designs that have
been in use from time out of mind. These native art fabrics are sold at
the passers also, and one soon recognizes the conventional designs,
and distinguishes the qualities and merits of these hand-patterned
cottons that constitute the native dress. The sarong, or skirt, worn by
men and women alike, is a strip of cotton two yards long and one yard
deep, which is drawn tightly around the hips, the fullness gathered in
front, and by an adroit twist made so firm that a belt is not necessary
to native wearers. The sarong has always one formal panel design, which
is worn at the front or side, and the rest of the surface is covered
with the intricate ornaments in which native fancy runs riot. There are
geometrical and line combinations, in which appear the swastika and the
curious latticings of central Asia; others are as bold and natural as
anything Japanese; and in others still, the palm-leaves and quaint animal
forms of India and Persia attest the rival art influences that have
swept over these refined, adaptive, assimilative people. One favorite
serpentine pattern running in diagonal lines does not need explanation in
this land of gigantic worms and writhing crawlers; nor that other pattern
where centipedes and insect forms cover the ground; nor that where the
fronds of cocoa-palm wave, and the strange shapes of mangos, jacks, and
breadfruit are interwoven. The deer and tapir, and the “hunting-scene”
patterns are reserved for native royalty’s exclusive wear. In village and
wayside cottages up-country we afterward watched men and women painting
these cloths, tracing a first outline in a rich brown waxy dye, which is
the foundation and dominant color in all these batteks. The parts which
are to be left white are covered with wax, and the cloth is dipped in or
brushed over with the dye. This resist, or mordant, must be applied for
each color, and the wax afterwards steamed out in hot water, so that a
sarong goes through many processes and handlings, and is often the work
of weeks. The dyes are applied hot through a little tin funnel of an
implement tapering down to a thin point, which is used like a painter’s
brush, but will give the fine line- and dot-work of a pen-and-ink
drawing. The sarong’s value depends upon the fineness of the drawing,
the elaborateness of the design, and the number of colors employed; and
beginning as low as one dollar, these brilliant cottons, or hand-painted
calico sarongs, increase in price to even twenty or thirty dollars. The
Dutch ladies vie with one another in their sarongs as much as native
women, and their dishabille dress of the early hours has not always
economy to recommend it. The battek also appears in the _slandang_,
or long shoulder-scarf, which used to match the sarong and complete
the native costume when passed under the arms and crossed at the back,
thus covering the body from the armpits to the waist. It is still worn
knotted over the mother’s shoulder as a sling or hammock for a child;
but Dutch fashion has imposed the same narrow, tight-sleeved _kabaia_,
the _baju_, or jacket, that Dutch women wear with the sarong. The _kam
kapala_, a square handkerchief tied around men’s heads as a variant of
the turban, is of the same figured battek, and, with the slandang, often
exhibits charming color combinations and intricate Persian designs. When
one conquers his prejudices and associated ideas enough to pay seemingly
fancy prices for these examples of free-hand calico printing, the taste
grows, and he soon shares the native longing for a sarong of every
standard and novel design.
The native silversmiths hammer out good designs in silver relief for
betel- and tobacco-boxes, and exhibit great taste and invention in belt-
and jacket-clasps, and in heavy knobs of hairpins and ear-rings, that are
often made of gold and incrusted over with gems for richer folk.
There are no historic spots nor show-places of native creation in
Batavia; no _kratons_, or _aloon-aloons_, as their palaces and courtyards
are called; and only a sentimental interest for a virtual exile pining
in his own country is attached to the villa of Raden Saleh. This son
of the regent of Samarang was educated in Europe, and lived there for
twenty-three years, developing decided talents as an artist, and enjoying
the friendship of many men of rank and genius on the Continent, among
the latter being Eugène Sue, who is said to have taken Raden Saleh as
model for the Eastern Prince in “The Wandering Jew.” In Java he found
himself sadly isolated from his own people by his European tastes and
habits; and he had little in common with the coarse, rapacious mynheers
whose sole thoughts were of crops and gulden. “Coffee and sugar, sugar
and coffee, are all that is talked here. It is a dreary atmosphere for
an artist,” said Raden Saleh to D’Almeida, who visited him at Batavia
sixty odd years ago. He has left a monument of his taste in this charming
villa, in a park whose land is now a vegetable-patch, its shady pleasance
a beer-garden and exposition-ground, and the sign “_Tu Huur_” (“To Hire”)
hung from the royal entrance. The exposition of arts and industries in
these grounds in 1893 was a great event in Java, the governor-general Van
der Wyk opening and closing the fair by electric signal, and the natives
making a particularly interesting display of their products and crafts.
V
TO THE HILLS
One’s most earnest desire, in the scorch of Batavian noondays and
stifling Batavian nights, is to seek refuge in “the hills”—in the
dark-green groves and forests of the Blue Mountains, that are ranged with
such admirable effect as background when one steams in from the Java Sea.
At Buitenzorg, only forty miles away and seven hundred and fifty feet
above the sea, heat-worn people find refuge in an entirely different
climate, an atmosphere of bracing clearness tempered to moderate
summer’s warmth. Buitenzorg (“without care”), the Dutch Sans Souci, has
been a general refuge and sanitarium for Europeans, the real seat of
government, and the home of the governor-general for more than a century.
It is the pride and show-place of Java, the great center of its social
life, leisure interests, and attractions. The higher officials and many
Batavian merchants and bankers have homes at Buitenzorg, and residents
from other parts of the island make it their place of recreation and goal
of holiday trips.
Undressed Batavia was just rousing from its afternoon nap, and the
hotel court was surrounded with barefoot guests in battek pajamas
and scant sarongs, a sockless, collarless, unblushing company, that
yawned and stared as we drove away, rejoicing to leave this Sans Gêne
for Sans Souci. The Weltevreden Station, on the vast Koenig’s Plein,
a spacious, stone-floored building, whose airy halls and waiting- and
refreshment-rooms are repeated on almost as splendid scale at all
the large towns of the island, was enlivened with groups of military
officers, whose heavy broadcloth uniforms, trailing sabers, and clanking
spurs transported us back from the tropics to some chilly European
railway-station, and presented the extreme contrast of colonial life.
The train that came panting from Tandjon Priok was made up of first-,
second-, and third-class cars, all built on the American plan, in that
they were long cars and not carriages, and we entered through doors at
the end platforms. The first-class cars swung on easy springs; there
were modern car-windows in tight frames, also window-frames of wire
netting; while thick wooden venetians outside of all, and a double roof,
protected as much as possible from the sun’s heat. The deep arm-chair
seats were upholstered with thick leather cushions, the walls were set
with blue-and-white tiles repeating Mauve’s and Mesdag’s pictures, and
adjustable tables, overhead racks, and a dressing-room furnished all the
railroad comforts possible. The railway service of Netherlands India
is a vast improvement on, and its cars are in striking contrast to,
the loose-windowed, springless, dusty, hard-benched carriages in which
first-class passengers are jolted across British India. The second-class
cars in Java rest on springs also, but more passengers are put in a
compartment, and the fittings are simpler; while the open third-class
cars, where native passengers are crowded together, have a continuous
window along each side, and the benches are often without backs. The
fares average 2.2 United States cents a kilometer (about five eighths
of a mile) for first class, 1.6 cents second class, and 6 mills third
class. The first-class fare from Batavia to Sourabaya, at the east end
of the island, is but 50 gulden ($20) for the 940-kilometer journey,
accomplished in two days’ train-travel of twelve and fourteen hours each,
so that the former heavy expense (over a dollar a mile for post-horses,
after one had bought or rented a traveling-carriage) and the delays of
travel in Java are done away with.
The railways have been built by both the government and private
corporations, connecting and working together, the first line dating
from 1875. The continuous railway line across the island was completed
and opened with official ceremonies in November, 1894. The gap of one
hundred miles or more across the “_terra ingrata_,” the low-lying swamp
and fever regions either side of Tjilatjap, had existed for years after
the track was completed to the east and west of it. Dutch engineers
built and manage the road, but the staff, the working force of the line,
are natives, or Chinese of the more or less mixed but educated class
filling the middle ground between Europeans and natives, between the
upper and lower ranks. Wonderful skill was shown in leading the road
over the mountains, and in building a firm track and bridges through
the reeking swamps, where no white man could labor, even if he could
live. The trains do not run at night, which would be a great advantage
in a hot country, for the reason that the train crews are composed
entirely of natives (since such work is considered beneath the grade of
any European), and the cautious Dutch will not trust native engineers
after dark. Through trains start from either end of the line and from
the half-way stations at five and six o’clock each morning, and run
until the short twilight and pitch-darkness that so quickly succeed the
unchanging six-o’clock tropical sunset. These early morning starts, and
the eight- and nine-o’clock dinner of the Java hotels, make travel most
wearisome. One may buy fruit at every station platform, and always tea,
coffee, chocolate, wine and schnapps, bread and biscuits at the station
buffets. At the larger stations there are dining-rooms, or a service of
lunch-baskets, in which the Gargantuan riz tavel, or luncheon, is served
hot in one’s compartment as the train moves on.