island cultivated from edge to edge like a tulip-garden, and connected
throughout its length with post-roads smooth and perfect as park drives,
all arched with waringen-, kanari-, tamarind-, or teak-trees. The rank
and tangled jungle is invisible, save by long journeys; and great
snakes, wild tigers, and rhinoceroses are almost unknown now. One must
go to Borneo and the farther islands to see them, too. All the valleys,
plains, and hillsides are planted in formal rows, hedged, terraced,
banked, drained, and carefully weeded as a flower-bed. The drives are
of endless beauty, whichever way one turns from Buitenzorg, and we made
triumphal progresses through the kanari- and waringen-lined streets in
an enormous “milord.” The equipage measured all of twenty feet from the
tip of the pole to the footman’s perch behind, and with a cracking whip
and at a rattling gait we dashed through shady roads, past Dutch barracks
and hospitals, over picturesque bridges, and through villages where the
native children jumped and clapped their hands with glee as the great
Juggernaut vehicle rolled by. We visited the grave of Raden Saleh, a
lonely little pavilion or temple in a tangle of shrubbery that was once a
lovely garden shaded by tall cocoa-palms; and we drove to Batoe Toelis,
“the place of the written stone,” and in the little thatched basket of a
temple saw the sacred stone inscribed in ancient Kawi characters, the
original classic language of the Javanese. In another basket shrine were
shown the veritable footprints of Buddha, with no explanation as to how
and when he rested on the island, nor yet how he happened to have such
long, distinctively Malay toes. Near these temples is the villa where the
poor African prince of Ashantee was so long detained in exile—an African
chief whose European education had turned his mind to geology and natural
sciences, and who led the life of a quiet student here until, by the
exchange from Dutch to British ownership of Ashantee, a way was opened
for him to return and die in his own country. There is a magnificent
view from the Ashantee villa out over a great green plain and a valley
of palms to the peaks of Gedeh and Pangerango, and to their volcanic
neighbor, Salak, silent for two hundred years. Peasants, trooping along
the valley roads far below, made use of a picturesque bamboo bridge that
is accounted one of the famous sights of the neighborhood, and seemed but
processions of ants crossing a spider’s web. All the suburban roads are
so many botanical exhibitions approaching that in the great garden, and
one’s interest is claimed at every yard and turn.
[Illustration: FRANGIPANI AND SAUSAGE-TREE.]
It takes a little time for the temperate mind to accept the palm-tree as
a common, natural, and inevitable object in every outlook and landscape;
to realize that the joyous, living thing with restless, perpetually
threshing foliage is the same correct, symmetrical, motionless
feather-duster on end that one knows in the still life of hothouses
and drawing-rooms at home; to realize that it grows in the ground,
and not in a pot or tub to be brought indoors for the winter season.
The arches of gigantic kanari-trees growing over by-lanes and village
paths, although intended for triumphal avenues and palace driveways,
overpower one with the mad extravagance, the reckless waste, and the
splendid luxury of nature. One cannot accept these things at first as
utilities, just as it shocks one to have a servant black his shoes with
bruised hibiscus flowers or mangosteen rind, or remove rust from kris- or
knife-blades with pineapple-juice, thrusting a blade through and through
the body of the pine. The poorest may have his hedge of lantana, which,
brought from the Mauritius by Lady Raffles, now borders roads, gardens,
and the railway-tracks from end to end of the island. The humblest
dooryard may be gay with tall poinsettia-trees, and bougainvilleas may
pour a torrent of magenta leaves from every tree, wall, or roof. The
houses of the great planters around Buitenzorg are ideal homes in the
tropics, and the Tjomson and other large tea and coffee estates are like
parks. The drives through their grounds show one the most perfect lawns
and flower-beds and ornamental trees, vines, and palms, and such ranks
on ranks of thriving tea-bushes and coffee-bushes, every leaf perfect
and without flaw, every plant in even line, and the warm red earth lying
loosely on their roots, that one feels as if in some ornamental _jardin
d’acclimatation_ rather than among the most staple and serious crops of
commerce. Yet from end to end of the island the cultivation is as intense
and careful, entitling Java to its distinction as “the finest tropical
island in the world.” It is the gem of the Indies, the one splendid
jewel in the Netherlands crown, and a possession to which poor Cuba,
although corresponding exactly to it geographically and politically, has
been vainly compared.
There were often interesting _table d’hôte_ companies gathered at noon
and at night in the long dining-room of the Buitenzorg hotel. While
many of the Dutch officials and planters, and their wives, maintained
the wooden reserve and supercilious air of those uncertain folk of
the half-way strata in society everywhere, there were others whose
intelligence and courtesy and friendly interest remain as green spots in
the land. There was one most amiable man, who, we thought, in his love of
country, was anxious to hear us praise it. We extolled the cool breezes
and the charming day, and said: “You have a beautiful country here.”
“This is not my country,” he answered.
“But are you not Dutch?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then Java is yours. It is the Netherlands even if it is India.”
“Yes; but I am from East Java, near Malang”—a section all of three
hundred miles away, off at the other end of the island; but a strong
distinction—an extreme aloofness or estrangement—exists between residents
of East, West, and Middle Java, and between those of this island and
of the near-by Sumatra, Celebes, and Molucca, all Indonesians as they
are, under the rule of the one governor-general of Netherlands India,
representing the little queen at The Hague.
Often when we spoke of “India” or “southern India,” or referred to Delhi
and Bombay as “cities of India,” the Hollanders looked puzzled.
“Ah, when you say ‘India,’ you mean Hindustan or British India?”
“Certainly; that is India, the continent—the greater India.”
“But what, then, do you call this island and all the possessions of the
Netherlands out here?”
“Why, we speak of this island as Java. Every one knows of it, and of
Sumatra and Borneo, by their own names.”
The defender of Netherlands India said nothing; but soon a reference was
made to a guest who had been in official residence at Amboyna.
“Where?” we inquired with keen interest in the unknown.
“Amboyna. Do you in America not know of Amboyna?”
Average Americans must confess if, since early geography days, they have
not remembered carefully that one tiny island in the group of Moluccas
off the east end of Java—an island so tiny that even on the school
atlases used in Buitenzorg it is figured the size of a pea, and on the
maps for the rest of the world is but a nameless dot in the clustered
dots of the group that would better be named the Nutmeg Isles, since the
bulk of the world’s supply of that spicy fruit comes from their shores.
Then, away down there, out of the world, I was taken to task for that
chief sin and offending of my country against other countries—the
McKinley Bill of so long ago.
“Why, _we_ couldn’t make any money out of tobacco while such a law was in
existence,” said one Sumatra planter.
“But we are concerned with the prosperity of our own American
tobacco-growers. It is for the Dutch government to make laws to benefit
the tobacco-planters of Sumatra.”
“Ah! but you have new and better laws now since that last revolution in
the States, and we are all planting all the tobacco we can. We shall be
very prosperous now.”
VII
IN A TROPICAL GARDEN
The Buitenzorg passer proper is housed in a long, tiled pavilion facing
an open common, on which the country folk gather with their produce
twice a week, and, overflowing, stretch in a scattering encampment down
the broad street leading from the gate of the Botanical Garden. The
permanent passer, or regular bazaar in the covered building, is stocked
with the staples and substantials of life, and is open every day. The
town tailors have their abode under that cover, and squat in rows before
their little American hand-sewing machines, and sew the single seam of a
sarong skirt, or reel off a native jacket, while the customer waits. It
is the semi-weekly, early morning, outdoor market of chattering country
folk that most delights and diverts a stranger, however. The lines of
venders, strung along the shady street and grouped under palm-patched
umbrellas in the open, provide horticultural and floral exhibits of the
greatest interest, and afford the most picturesque scenes of native life.
The long street of the Tjina kampong beyond is dull and monotonous
by comparison, for when Dutch rules force the Chinese to be clean and
orderly all picturesqueness and character are gone from their quarter.
All the tasseled lanterns and strips of vermilion paper will not “tell”
artistically without their concomitant grease and dirt.
As a very new broom, a clever child pleased with the toy of a new
employer, Amat, our mild-mannered Moslem servant, was a treasure and
delight during those first days at Buitenzorg. He entered gleefully into
the spirit of our reckless purchase from the heaps of splendid fruits
poured from the great horn of plenty into the open passer. He gave us
the name of each particular strange fruit, taught us the odd tricks and
sleight-of-hand methods of opening these novelties of the market-place;
and it was quite like kindergarten play when he unbraided and wove
together again the ribbed palm-leaf reticules in which _dukus_ and such
small fruits are sold. We carried baskets of strange fruits back to the
hotel, and Amat added every vegetable curio and market’s marvel he could
find to the heaps of fruits and flowers. Our veranda was a testing-
and proving-ground, and there seemed to be no end to the delights and
surprises the tropics provided.
[Illustration: TROPICAL FRUITS.]
Tons of bananas were heaped high in the passer each day, the great golden
bunches making most decorative and attractive masses of color, and their
absurd cheapness tempting one to buy and to buy. The Java _pisang_, or
banana, however, is but a coarse plantain with a pinkish-yellow, dry
pulp, of a pumpkiny flavor that sadly disappoints the palate. Yet it
is nature’s greatest and most generously bestowed gift in the tropics,
and it was pleasant to eat it picked ripe in its native home, instead
of receiving it steam-ripened from Northern fruiterers’ warehouses.
Every tiny village and almost every little native hut in Java has its
banana-patch or its banana-tree, which requires nothing of labor in
cultivation, save the weeding away of the old stalks. It was intended as
a humane concentration of benefits when nature gave man this food-plant,
four thousand pounds of whose fruit will grow with so little human aid in
the same space of ground required to raise ninety-nine pounds of potatoes
or thirty-three pounds of wheat; both those Northern crops acquired, too,
only by incessant sweat of the brow and muscular exertion. The pisang is
the tropical staff of life for whites as well as natives, as wholesome
and necessary as bread, and an equivalent for the latter as a starchy
food. It comes to one with the earliest breakfast cup, appears at every
meal, arrives with the afternoon tea-tray, and always ends the late
dinner as the inevitable accompaniment of cheese, the happiest substitute
for bread or biscuits, tropical gourmets insist.
The lovely red rambutans (_Nephelium lappaceum_) we would have bought
for their beauty alone—those clusters of seemingly green chestnut-burs,
with spines tinted to the deepest rose, affording the most exquisite
color-study of all the fruits in the passer. The spiny shell pulls apart
easily, and discloses a juicy, half-transparent mass of white pulp
around a central core of smooth stones. The duku, looking like a big
green grape, a fresh almond, or an olive, contains just such another
ball of pulp within its leathery rind, and both fruits much resemble
the fresh _lychees_ of China in flavor. The _salak_, or “forbidden
fruit,” is a hard, scaly, pear-shaped thing, which very appropriately
grows on a prickly bush, and whose strange brown rind reminds one of a
pine-cone or a rattlesnake’s skin. This scaly, snaky shell prejudices one
against it; but the salak is as solid as an apple, with a nutty flavor
and texture. It is not unpleasant, nor is it distinctively anything
in flavor—nothing unique or delicious enough to make one seek hard or
long for a second taste of it. The _jamboa_, the eugenia or rose-apple
(_Eugenia malaccensis_), is a fruit of the same size and shape as the
salak, and in spite of its exquisite coloring it impresses one as being
an albino, a skinless or some other monstrous and unnatural product of
nature. Its outer integument, thinner than any nectarine’s rind, shades
from snow-white at the stem to the deepest rose-pink at the blossom
end, and it looks as if it were the most fragrant, delicious, and juicy
fruit. One bites into the fine, crisp, succulent pulp, and tastes exactly
nothing, and never forgives the beautiful, rose-tinted, watery blank
for its deluding. The _carambola_ (_Averrhoa_), the five-ribbed yellow
“star-fruit,” popularly known in real Cathay as the “Chinese gooseberry,”
is a favorite, fragrant study in spherical geometry, and the cutting
apart of its triangular sections is the nicest sort of after-dinner
amusement and demonstration; but its fine, deliciously acid pulp is
usually known to one before he reaches Java. Its relative, the _bilimbi_,
is the sharpest of acid fruits, and lends an edge to chutneys and curried
conglomerates.
The breadfruit and its gigantic relative, the _nanko_ (_Artocarpus
integrifolia_), or jackfruit, which often weighs thirty and even forty
pounds, and is sufficient load for a man to bring to market on his back,
are the vegetable mainstays of native life; but as both must be cooked to
a tasteless mush to be relished, one is satisfied only to look at them
in the passer. That swollen monstrosity, the nanko, grows goiter-like on
the trunk of a tree, and is supported in ratan slings while the great
excrescence ripens. One must speak of the breadfruit with respect,
though, after all that scientists have said, philosophers and political
economists have argued, concerning it. Since ten breadfruit-trees will
support a large family the year round, and a man may plant that many
within an hour and need give them no further care, Captain Cook observed
that such a man has then “as completely fulfilled his duty to his own and
future generations as the native of our less genial climate by plowing in
the cold of winter and reaping in the summer heat as often as the seasons
return.”
The prickly durian (_Durio Zibethinus_), which is almost as large as
the nanko, has a pulp a little like that of a cantaloup melon, only
smoother and more solid—a thick, creamy, “almondy-buttery” custard, which
is agreeable to the palate, but offends the nose with an odor of onion
and stale egg. It is spoken of with bitterness and contempt by most
Europeans, is extolled as “the king and emperor of fruits” by Wallace and
a few other intrepid ones, and the little English children in Java, who
all are fond of it, call it “darling durian.” In 1599 Linschott declared
it to surpass in flavor “all the other fruits of the world.” Crawfurd
said that it tasted like “fresh cream and filberts,” a description
which conjures up the cloying modern fantasia of English-walnut kernels
in a mayonnaise. Another great one has said that “to eat durians is a
new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience”; and Dr. Ward,
in his “Medical Topography of the Straits,” says: “Those who overcome
the prejudice excited by the disagreeable, fetid odor of the external
shell reckon it delicious. From experience I can pronounce it the most
luscious and the most fascinating fruit in the universe; the pulp
covering the seeds, the only part eaten, excels the finest custards which
could be prepared by either Ude or Kitchener.” One sees the monster
retailed in segments in every passer; the natives are always munching
it inconveniently to windward of one, and they not only praise it, but
write poems to it, and respectfully salute the tree they see it growing
on. This fruit of discordant opinions hangs high upon a tall tree, and
is never picked, but allowed to fall to the ground when it becomes
perfectly ripe. A falling durian is justly dreaded and guarded against
by the natives, who tell of men whose shoulders have been lacerated and
heads half crushed by the sudden descent of one of these great green
cannon-balls. Its unpleasant odor is said to come with age, and they tell
one that a freshly fallen durian is free from such objection; but the
watched durian never falls, I found, after maintaining the attitude of
the fox toward the grapes for a reasonable time before a durian-tree.
The papaya, a smaller custard-fruit, with unpleasant little curly gray
seeds in the mess, is like a coarse, flavorless melon, but is highly
extolled as a febrifuge and tonic. The much-heralded and disappointing
cherimoyer is grown too, and mangos ripen in every yard; but the Java
mangos are coarse and turpentiny, of a deep pumpkiny hue. Pineapples,
the _nanas_, or Portuguese _ananassa_, grow to perfection all over the
low, hot country; but one is warned to be careful in eating them, and
they are called the most dangerous, the most choleraic and fever-causing
of tropical fruits. The native orange on this south side of the equator
is not orange at all, even when ripe, but its peel is a deep, dark,
beautiful green, and its flavor unequaled. The big _Citrus decumana_, the
pomelo of China, the _pumplemoos_ of Java, the Batavian lime in British
India, the shaddock of the West Indies, and the grapefruit of Florida,
appears in the passers, but is coarse, dry, and tasteless, save for the
turpentine flavor, which does not lurk within, but stalks abroad.
The fruit of fruits, the prize of the Indies and of all the Malay
equatorial regions, where the tree is indigenous, is the mangosteen
(_Garcinia mangosteen_), and the tourist should avail himself of November
and December as the months for a tour in Java, if only to know the
mangosteen in its perfection. The dark-purple apples hang from the tall
trees by woody stems, and the natives bring the _manggis_ to market
tied together in bunches of twenties like clusters of gigantic grapes.
It is delight enough to the eye alone to cut the thick, fibrous rind,
bisect the perfect sphere at the equator line, and see the round ball
of “perfumed snow” resting intact in its rose-lined cup. The five white
segments separate easily, and may be lifted whole with a fork, and they
melt on the tongue with a touch of tart and a touch of sweet; one moment
a memory of the juiciest, most fragrant apple, at another a remembrance
of the smoothest cream ice, the most exquisite and delicately flavored
fruit-acid known—all the delights of nature’s laboratory condensed in
that ball of _neige parfumée_. It is fortunate that the mangosteen is
a harmless and wholesome fruit, and that one may eat with impunity,
laying store for a lifetime in his one opportunity. I often wondered how
it would be if the mangosteen were a dangerous or a forbidden fruit;
if it were wicked or a little of a sin to eat it; if mangosteens could
be obtained singly, at great risk or expense; or if they should be
prescribed for one as a tonic, something antimalarial, a substitute for
quinine, to be taken in doses of one, two, or ten before or after each
meal. The mangosteen cannot be transported to the temperate zone of
Europe,—not even with the aid of modern ships’ refrigerating-machines
and when coated with wax,—as in less than a week after leaving the trees
the pulp melts away to a brown mass. By the alternation of seasons the
mangosteen is always in market at Singapore, as it ripens north of the
equator during the summer six months of the northern hemisphere’s year,
and during this rainy season of Cochin China is carried from Saigon
successfully as far north as Shanghai and Yokohama. The offer by the
leading British steamship company of thirty pounds sterling to the
ship-captain who will get a basket of mangosteens to the Queen is still
open. The tree grows throughout the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago,
and groves have been successfully planted in Ceylon, so that there is
hope that this incomparable fruit may finally be acclimated in the West
Indies, and fast steamers make it known in New York and London. The
mangosteen is tinned for export at Singapore; but the faded segments
floating in tasteless syrup give one little idea of this peerless fruit
in its natural state.
[Illustration: TROPICAL FRUITS.]
It had been my particular haunting dream of the tropics to have a small
black boy climb a tree and throw cocoanuts down to me; and while we sat
admiring the rank beauty of the deserted garden around Raden Saleh’s
tomb, one afternoon, the expression of the wish caused a full-grown
Malay to saunter across the grass, and, cigarette in mouth, walk up the
straight palm-stem as easily as a fly. The Malay toes are as distinct
members as the fingers, and almost as long; and clasping the trunk with
the sole of the foot at each leaf-scar, that Malay climber gripped the
rough palm-stem as firmly with his toes as with claws or extra fingers.
It was so easily and commonly done that palm-tree climbing soon ceased to
be any more of a feat to watch than berry-picking; but the first native
who walked up a palm-tree for my benefit held me rapt, attentive, while
he picked the big nuts and sent twenty-pounders crashing down through the
shrubbery. We paid him well, and carried two of the nuts home with us;
and from them the servant brought us tall glasses, or schooners, filled
with the clear, colorless, tasteless milk, and a plate full of a white,
leathery stuff—tough, tasteless too, and wilted, like cold omelet without
eggs—the saddest sort of a feast of fresh cocoanuts.