of tropical landscapes as the train ran between a double panorama of
beauty. The soil was a deep, intense red, as if the heat of the sun
and the internal fires of this volcanic belt had warmed the fruitful
earth to this glowing color, which contrasted so strongly with the
complemental green of grain and the groves of palms and cacao-trees.
The level rice-fields were being plowed, worked, flooded, planted,
weeded, and harvested side by side, the several crops of the year going
on continuously, with seemingly no regard to seasons. Nude little boys,
astride of smooth gray water-buffaloes, posed statuesquely while those
leisurely animals browsed afield; and no pastoral pictures of Java remain
clearer in memory than those of patient little brown children sitting
half days and whole days on buffalo-back, to brush flies and guide the
stupid-looking creatures to greener and more luscious bits of herbage.
Many stories are told of the affection the water-ox often manifests for
his boy keeper, killing tigers and snakes in his defense, and performing
prodigies of valor and intelligence; but one doubts the tales the more he
sees of this hideous beast of Asia. Men and women were wading knee-deep
in paddy-field muck, transplanting the green rice-shoots from the
seed-beds, and picturesque harvest groups posed in tableaux, as the train
shrieked by. Children rolled at play before the gabled baskets of houses
clustered in toy villages beneath the inevitable cocoa-palms and bananas,
the combination of those two useful trees being the certain sign of a
kampong, or village, when the braided-bamboo houses are invisible.
[Illustration: RICE-FIELDS.]
At Depok there was a halt to pass the down-train, and the natives
of this one Christian village and mission-station, the headquarters
of evangelical work in Java, flocked to the platform with a prize
horticultural display of all the fruits of the season for sale. The
record of mission work in Java is a short one, as, after casting out
the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, the Dutch forbade any others to
enter, and Spanish rule in Holland had perhaps taught them not to try
to impose a strange religion on a people. During Sir Stamford Raffles’s
rule, English evangelists began work among the natives, but were
summarily interrupted and obliged to withdraw when Java was returned to
Holland. All missionaries were strictly excluded until the humanitarian
agitation in Europe, which resulted in the formal abolition of slavery
and the gradual abandonment of the culture system, led the government
to do a little for the Christianization and education of the people.
The government supports twenty-nine Protestant pastors and ten Roman
Catholic priests, primarily for the spiritual benefit of the European
residents, and their spheres are exactly defined—proselytizing and mutual
rivalries being forbidden. Missionaries from other countries are not
allowed to settle and work among the people, and whatever may be said
against this on higher moral grounds, the colonial government has escaped
endless friction with the consuls and governments of other countries.
The authorities have been quite willing to let the natives enjoy their
mild Mohammedanism, and our Moslem servant spoke indifferently of mission
efforts at Depok, with no scorn, no contempt, and apparently no hostility
to the European faith.
Until recently, no steps were taken to educate the Javanese, and previous
to 1864 they were not allowed to study the Dutch language. All colonial
officers are obliged to learn Low Malay, that being the recognized
language of administration and justice, instead of the many Javanese and
Sundanese dialects, with their two forms of polite and common speech.
These officials receive promotion and preferment as they make progress
in the spoken and written language. Low Malay is the most readily
acquired of all languages, as there are no harsh gutturals or difficult
consonants, and the construction is very simple. Children who learn the
soft, musical Malay first have difficulty with the harsh Dutch sounds,
while the Dutch who learn Malay after their youth never pronounce it as
well or as easily as they pronounce French. The few Javanese, even those
of highest rank, who acquired the Dutch language and attempted to use it
in conversation with officials, used to be bruskly answered in Malay, an
implication that the superior language was reserved for Europeans only.
This helped the conquerors to keep the distinctions sharply drawn between
them and their subject people, and while they could always understand
what the natives were saying, the Dutch were free to talk together
without reserve in the presence of servants or princes. Dutch is now
taught in the schools for natives maintained by the colonial government,
201 primary schools having been opened in 1887, with an attendance of
39,707 pupils. The higher schools at Batavia have been opened to the
sons of native officials and such rich Javanese as can afford them,
and conservatives lament the “spoiling” of the natives with all that
the government now does for them. They complain that the Javanese are
becoming too “independent” since schoolmasters, independent planters,
and tourists came, just as the old-style foreign residents of India, the
Straits, China, and Japan bemoan the progressive tendencies and upheavals
of this era of Asiatic awakening and enlightenment; and tourist travel
is always harped upon as the most offending and corrupting cause of the
changes in the native spirit.
Once above the general level of low-lying rice-lands, cacao-plantations
succeeded one another for miles beyond Depok; the small trees hung full
of fat pods just ripening into reddish brown and crimson. The air was
noticeably cooler in the hills, and as the shadows lengthened the near
green mountains began to tower in shapes of lazuli mist, and a sky of
soft, surpassing splendor made ready for its sunset pageant. When we
left the train we were whirled through the twilight of great avenues of
trees to the hotel, and given rooms whose veranda overhung a strangely
rustling, shadowy abyss, where we could just discern a dark silver line
of river leading to the pale-yellow west, with the mountain mass of Salak
cut in gigantic purple silhouette.
The ordinary bedroom of a Java hotel, with latticed doors and windows,
contains one or two beds, each seven feet square, hung with starched
muslin curtains that effectually exclude the air, as well as lizards
or winged things. The bedding, as at Singapore, consists of a hard
mattress with a sheet drawn over it, a pair of hard pillows, and a long
bolster laid down the middle as a cooling or dividing line. Blankets
or other coverings are unneeded and unknown, but it takes one a little
time to become acclimated to that order in the penetrating dampness of
the dewy and reeking hours before dawn. If one makes protest enough, a
thin blanket will be brought, but so camphorated and mildew-scented as
to be insupportable. Pillows are not stuffed with feathers, but with
the cooler, dry, elastic down of the straight-armed cotton-tree, which
one sees growing everywhere along the highways, its rigid, right-angled
branches inviting their use as the regulation telegraph-pole. The
floors are made of a smooth, hard cement, which harbors no insects,
and can be kept clean and cool. Pieces of coarse ratan matting are
the only floor-coverings used, and give an agreeable contrast to the
dirty felts, dhurries, and carpets, the patches of wool and cotton and
matting, spread over the earth or wooden floors of the unspeakable
hotels of British India. And yet the Javanese hotels are disappointing
to those who know the solid comforts and immaculate order of certain
favorite hostelries of The Hague and Amsterdam. Everything is done to
secure a free circulation of air, as a room that is closed for a day
gets a steamy, mildewed atmosphere, and if closed for three days blooms
with green mold over every inch of its walls and floors. The section of
portico outside each room at Buitenzorg was decently screened off to
serve as a private sitting-room for each guest or family in the hours of
startling dishabille; and as soon as the sun went down a big hanging-lamp
assembled an entomological congress. Every hotel provides as a night-lamp
for the bedroom a tumbler with an inch of cocoanut-oil, and a tiny tin
and cork arrangement for floating a wick on its surface. For the twelve
hours of pitch-darkness this little lightning-bug contrivance burns
steadily, emitting a delicious nutty fragrance, and allowing one to
watch the unpleasant shadows of the lizards running over the walls and
bed-curtains, and to look for the larger, poisonous brown gecko, whose
unpleasant voice calling “_Becky! Becky! Becky!_” in measured gasps, six
times, over and over again, is the actual, material nightmare of the
tropics.
British tourists, unmindful of the offending of their own India in more
vital matters, berate and scorn the tiny water-pitcher and basin of the
Java hotels, brought from the continent of Europe unchanged; and rage at
the custom of guests in Java hotels emptying their basins out of doors
or windows on tropical shrubbery or courtyard pavings at will. There are
swimming-pools at some hotels and in many private houses, but the usual
bath-room of the land offers the traveler a barrel and a dipper. One is
expected to ladle the water out and dash it over him in broken doses, and
as the swimming-pool is a rinsing-tub for the many, the individual is
besought not to use soap. Naturally the British tourist’s invectives are
deep and loud and long, and he will not believe that the dipper-bath is
more cooling than to soak and soap and scour in a comfortable tub of his
own. He will not be silenced or comforted in this tubless tropical land,
which, if it had only remained under British rule, might be—would be—etc.
All suffering tourists agree with him, however, that the worst laundering
in the world befalls one’s linen in Java, the cloth-destroying,
button-exterminating _dhobie_ man of Ceylon and India being a careful and
conscientious artist beside the clothes-pounder of Java. In making the
great circle of the earth westward one leaves the last of laundry luxury
at Singapore, and continues to suffer until, in the sub-stratum of French
civilization in Egypt, he finds the _blanchisseuse_.
The order of living is the same at the up-country hotels as at Batavia,
and the charges are the same everywhere in Java, averaging about three
dollars gold each day, everything save wine included; and at Buitenzorg
corkage was charged on the bottle of filtered water which a dyspeptic
tourist manufactured with a patent apparatus he carried with him.
Landlords do not recognize nor deal with fractions of days, if they can
help it, in charging one for board on this “American plan”; but when
that reckless royal tourist, the King of Siam, makes battle over his
Java hotel bills, lesser travelers may well take courage and follow his
example. The King of Siam has erected commemorative columns crowned
with white marble elephants, as souvenirs of his visits to Singapore
and Batavia, and after the king’s financial victory over Buitenzorg and
Garoet hotels, the tourist sees the white elephant as a symbol of victory
more personally and immediately significant than the lion on the Waterloo
column. It has been said that “no invalid nor dyspeptic should enter the
portals of a Java hotel,” and this cannot be insisted upon too strongly,
to deter any such sufferers from braving the sunrise breakfasts and bad
coffee, the heavy riz tavel, and the long-delayed dinner-hour, solely
for the sake of tropical scenery and vegetation, and a study of Dutch
colonial life.
VI
A DUTCH SANS SOUCI
At daylight we saw that our portico looked full upon the front of Mount
Salak, green to the very summit with plantations and primeval forests.
Deep down below us lay a valley of Eden, where thousands of palm-trees
were in constant motion, their branches bending, swaying, and fluttering
as softly as ostrich-plumes to the eye, but with a strange, harsh,
metallic rustle and clash, different from the whispers and sighs and
cooing sounds of temperate foliage. As stronger winds threshed the heavy
leaves, the level of the valley rippled and tossed in green billows like
a barley-field. There was a basket village on the river-bank, where
tropic life went on in as plain pantomime as in any stage presentation.
At sunrise the people came out of their fragile toy houses, stretched
their arms to the sky and yawned, took a swim in the river, and then
gathered in the dewy shade to eat their morning curry and rice from their
plantain-leaf plates. Then the baskets and cooking-utensils were held in
the swift-flowing stream,—such a fastidious, ideal, adorable sort of
dish-washing!—and the little community turned to its daily vocations.
The men went away to work, or sat hammering and hewing with implements
strangely Japanese, and held in each instance in the Japanese way. The
women pounded and switched clothing to and fro in the stream, and spread
it out in white and brilliant-colored mosaics on the bank to dry. They
plaited baskets and painted sarongs, and the happy brown children, in
nature’s dress, rolled at play under the cocoanut-trees, or splashed like
young frogs in and out of the stream.
[Illustration: MOUNT SALAK, FROM THE RESIDENT’S GARDEN, BUITENZORG.]
While this went on below, and we watched the dark indigo mass of Salak
turning from purple and azure to sunlit greens in the light of early
day, the breakfast of the country was brought to our porch: cold toast,
cold meats, eggs, fruit, tea or the very worst coffee in all the
world—something that even the American railway restaurant and frontier
hotel would spurn with scorn. Java coffee, in Java, comes to one in a
stoppered glass bottle or cruet, a dark-brown fluid that might as well
be walnut catsup, old port, or New Orleans molasses. This double extract
of coffee, made by cold filtration, is diluted with hot water and hot
milk to a muddy, gray-brown, lukewarm drink, that is uniformly bad in
every hotel and public place of refreshment that a tourist encounters on
the island. In private houses, where the fine Arabian berry is toasted
and powdered, and the extract made fresh each day, the morning draught
is quite another fluid, and worthy the cachet the name of Java gives to
coffee in far countries.
Buitenzorg, the Bogor of the natives, who will not call it by its
newer name, is one of the enchanted spots where days can slip by in
dateless delight; one forgets the calendar and the flight of time, and
hardly remembers the heavy, sickening heat of Batavia stewing away on
the plains below. It is the Versailles of the island, the seat of the
governor-general’s court, and the social life of the colony, a resort for
officials and the leisure class, and for invalids and the delicate, who
find strength in the clear, fresh air of the hills, the cool nights, and
the serenely tempered days, each with its reviving shower the year round.
Buitenzorg is the Simla of Netherlands India, but it awaits its Kipling
to record its social life in clear-cut, instantaneous pictures. There
are strange pictures for the Kipling to sketch, too, since the sarong
and the native jacket are as much the regular morning dress for ladies
at the cool, breezy hill-station as in sweltering Batavia, a fact rather
disproving the lowland argument that the heat demands such extraordinary
concessions in costume. But as that “Bengal Civilian” who wrote “_De
Zieke Reiziger_; or, Rambles in Java in 1852,” and commented so freely
upon Dutch costume, cuisine, and Sabbath-keeping, succeeded, Mr. Money
said, in shutting every door to the English traveler for years afterward,
and added extra annoyances to the toelatings-kaart system, budding and
alien Kiplings may take warning.
The famous Botanical Garden at Buitenzorg is the great show-place, the
paradise and pride of the island. The Dutch are acknowledgedly the
best horticulturists of Europe, and with the heat of a tropical sun, a
daily shower, and nearly a century’s well-directed efforts, they have
made Buitenzorg’s garden first of its kind in the world, despite the
rival efforts of the French at Saigon, and of the British at Singapore,
Ceylon, Calcutta, and Jamaica. The governor-general’s palace, greatly
enlarged from the first villa of 1744, is in the midst of the ninety-acre
inclosure reached from the main gate, near the hotel and the passer,
by what is undoubtedly the finest avenue of trees in the world. These
graceful kanari-trees, arching one hundred feet overhead in a great
green cathedral aisle, have tall, straight trunks covered with stag-horn
ferns, bird’s-nest ferns, ratans, creeping palms, blooming orchids, and
every kind of parasite and air-plant the climate allows; and there is a
fairy lake of lotus and _Victoria regia_ beside it, with pandanus and
red-stemmed Banka palms crowded in a great sheaf or bouquet on a tiny
islet. When one rides through this green avenue in the dewy freshness of
the early morning, it seems as though nature and the tropics could do no
more, until he has penetrated the tunnels of waringen-trees, the open
avenues of royal palms, the great plantation of a thousand palms, the
grove of tree-fern, and the frangipani thicket, and has reached the knoll
commanding a view of the double summit of Gedeh and Pangerango, vaporous
blue volcanic heights, from one peak of which a faint streamer of smoke
perpetually floats. There is a broad lawn at the front of the palace,
shaded with great waringen-, sausage-, and candle-trees, and trees whose
branches are hidden in a mantle of vivid-leafed bougainvillea vines, with
deer wandering and grouping themselves in as correct park pictures as if
under branches of elm or oak, or beside the conventional ivied trunks of
the North.
It is a tropical experience to reverse an umbrella and in a few minutes
fill it with golden-hearted white frangipani blossoms, or to find nutmegs
lying as thick as acorns on the ground, and break their green outer shell
and see the fine coral branches of mace enveloping the dark kernel. It is
a delight, too, to see mangosteens and rambutans growing, to find bread,
sausages, and candles hanging in plenty from benevolent trees, and other
fruits and strange flowers springing from a tree’s trunk instead of from
its branches. There are thick groves and regular avenues of the waringen,
a species of _Ficus_, and related to the banian- and the rubber-tree, a
whole family whose roots crawl above the ground, drop from the branches
and generally comport themselves in unconventional ways. Bamboos grow in
clumps and thickets, ranging from the fine, feathery-leafed canes, that
are really only large grasses, up to the noble giants from Burma, whose
stems are more nearly trunks easily soaring to a hundred feet in air, and
spreading there a solid canopy of graceful foliage.
The creepers run from tree to tree, and writhe over the ground like
gray serpents; ratans and climbing palms one hundred feet in length
are common, while uncommon ones stretch to five hundred feet. There is
one creeper with a blossom like a magnified white violet, and with all
a wood-violet’s fragrance; but with only Dutch and botanical names on
the labels, one wanders ignorantly and protestingly in this paradise of
strange things. The rarer orchids are grown in matted sheds in the shade
of tall trees; and although we saw them at the end of the dry season, and
few plants were in bloom, there was still an attractive orchid-show.
But the strangest, most conspicuous bloom in that choice corner was
a great butterfly flower of a pitcher-plant (a _nepenthes_), whose
pale-green petals were veined with velvety maroon, and half concealed the
pelican pouch of a pitcher filled with water. It was an evil-looking,
ill-smelling, sticky thing, and its unusual size and striking colors
made it haunt one longest of all vegetable marvels. There were other
more attractive butterflies fluttering on pliant stems, strange little
woolly white orchids, like edelweiss transplanted, and scores of delicate
Java and Borneo orchids, not so well known as the Venezuelan and Central
American orchids commonly grown in American hothouses, and so impossible
to acclimate in Java.
Lady Raffles died while Sir Stamford was governor of Java, and was
buried in the section of the palace park that was afterward (in 1817)
set apart as a botanical garden, and the care of the little Greek temple
over her grave near the kanari avenue was provided for in a special
clause in the treaty of cession. The bust of Theismann, who founded the
garden and added so much to botanical knowledge by his studies in Java
and Borneo, stands in an oval pleasance called the rose-garden; and
there one may take heart and boast of the temperate zone, since that
rare exotic, the rose, is but a spindling bush, and its blossoming less
than scanty at Buitenzorg, when one remembers California’s, and more
especially Tacoma’s, perennial prodigalities in showers of roses. In
1895 Professor Lotsy of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, was called
to assist the learned curator, Dr. Treub, in the management of this
famous _Hortus Bogoriensis_, which provides laboratory and working-space
for, and invites foreign botanists freely to avail themselves of, this
unique opportunity of study. Over one hundred native gardeners tend and
care for this great botanic museum of more than nine thousand living
specimens, all working under the direction of a white head-gardener. The
Tjiliwong River separates the botanic garden from a culture-garden of
forty acres, where seventy more gardeners look to the economic plants—the
various cinchonas, sugar-canes, rubber, tea, coffee, gums, spices, hemp,
and other growths, whose introduction to the colony has so benefited
the planters. Experiments in acclimatization are carried on in the
culture-garden, and at the experimental garden at Tjibodas, high up on
the slopes of Salak, where the governor-general has a third palace, and
there is a government hospital and sanatorium.
Theismann’s famous museum of living twig- and leaf-insects was abandoned
some years ago, the curator deciding to keep his garden strictly to
botanical lines. One no longer has the pleasure of seeing there those
curious and most extraordinary freaks of nature—the fresh green or dry
and dead-looking twigs that suddenly turn their heads or bend their long
angular legs and move away; or leaves, as delusive in their way, that
detach themselves from a tree-branch and fly away. These insects bearing
so astonishing a resemblance to their environment may be purchased now
and then from Chinese gardeners; but otherwise, if one asks where they
can be found or seen, there comes the usual answer, “In Borneo or
Celebes,”—always on the farther, remoter islands,—tropic wonders taking
wing like the leaf-insects when one reaches their reputed haunts.