the climate had done its perfect work; every tree, bird, flower, and
insect rejoiced, and all nature literally sang. The warm red earth
breathed pleasant fragrance, every tree had its aroma, and the perfumed
flowers were overpowering with fresh sweetness. Then the master led
the house party for a long walk, first through the oldest tea-gardens,
where every leaf on every plant was erect, shining, as if ready for
dress-parade, and more intensely, softly green than ever after the daily
shower-bath and wind toilet. We strolled on through a toy village under
a kanari avenue, where all the avocations and industries of Javanese
life were on view, and the little people, smiling their welcome, dropped
on their heels in the permanent courtesy of the _dodok_, the squatting
attitude of humility common to all Asiatics. The servants who had brought
notes to the master, as he sat on the porch, crouched on their heels
as they offered them, and remained in that position until dismissed;
and the villagers and wayfarers, hastily dropping on their haunches,
maintained that lowly, reverent attitude until we had passed—an attitude
and a degree of deference not at all comfortable for an American to
contemplate, ineradicable old Javanese custom as it may be. The tiny
brown babies, exactly matching the brown earth in tone, crawled over the
warm lap of nature, crowing and gurgling their pleasure, their plump
little bodies free from all garments, and equally free from any danger of
croups or colds from exposure to the weather. We took a turn through the
great cement-floored _fabrik_, with its ingenious machines all silent for
that night, and only the electric-light dynamos whirling to illuminate
the great settlement of outbuildings around the residence. The stables
were another great establishment by themselves, and fifty odd Arabian and
Australian thoroughbreds, housed in a long, open-fronted stable, were
receiving their evening rub and fare from a legion of grooms. Morphine,
Malaria, Quinine, Moses, and Aaron, and other cup-winners, arched their
shining necks, pawed to us, and nibbled their reward of tasseled
rice-heads, brought on carrying-poles from the granaries, where legions
of rice-sparrows twittered in perpetual residence. We sat on a bank near
the little race-course, or manège, where the colts are trained, and the
favorites were led past and put through their paces and accomplishments
one by one. It was almost dusk, with the swiftness with which day closes
in the tropics, when the banteng, or wild cow (_Bos sondaicus_), was
trotted out—a clumsy, dun-colored creature, with a strange, musky odor,
that was brought as a calf from the wild south-coast country, and was at
once mothered and protected by a fussy little sheep, “the European goat,”
as the natives call the woolly animal from abroad, that was still guiding
and driving it with all the intelligence of a collie.
The bachelor planter partner showed us his bungalow, full of
hunting-trophies—skulls and skins of panthers, tigers, and wild dogs;
tables made of rhinoceros-hide resting on rhinoceros and elephant skulls,
and tables made of mammoth turtle-shells resting on deer-antlers. The
great prizes were the nine huge banteng skulls, trophies of hunting-trips
to the South Preanger, the lone region bordering on the Indian Ocean.
There were also chandeliers of deer-antlers, and a frieze-like
wall-bordering of python-skins, strange tusks and teeth, wings and
feathers galore, and dozens of kodak pictures as witnesses and records of
the many camps and battues of this sportsman—all gathered in that same
wild region of big game, as much as fifty or a hundred miles away, but
referred to in the Buitenzorg neighborhood as New York sportsmen used to
speak of the buffalo country—“the south coast” and “out West,” equally
synonyms for all untamed, far-away wildness. Elephant-hunting must be
enjoyed in Sumatra, since that animal has never existed in a wild state
in Java.
With the younger people of the master’s family, his young managers and
assistants, fresh from Amsterdam schools and European universities,
speaking English and several other languages, _au courant_ with all the
latest in the world’s music, art, literature, and drama, plantation life
and table-talk were full of interest and varied amusements. By a whir of
the telephone, two of the assistants were bidden ride over from their far
corner of the estate for dinner, and afterward a quartet of voices and
instruments made the marble-floored music-room ring, while the elder men
smoked meditatively, or clicked the billiard-balls in their deliberate,
long-running tourney. The latest books and the familiar American
magazines strewed boudoir and portico tables, and naturally there was
talk of them.
“Ah, we like so much your American magazines—the ‘Century’ and the
others. We admire so much the pictures. And then all those stories of the
early Dutch colonists at Manhattan! We like, too, your great American
novelists—Savage, Howells, Gunter—‘The Rise of Silas Lapham,’ ‘Mr. Potter
of Texas,’ and all those. We read them so much.”
They were undoubtedly disappointed that we did not speak Dutch, or at
least read it, since all Hollanders know that Dutch is the language of
the best families in New York, of the cultivated classes and all polite
society in the United States, since from the mynheers of Manhattan came
the first examples of refined living in the New World. “The English
colonists were of all sorts, you know, like in Australia,” said our
informants at Buitenzorg and everywhere else on the island, “and that is
why you Americans are all so proud of your Dutch descent.”
XI
PLANTATION LIFE
After the sunrise cup of coffee at Sinagar—such coffee as we had dreamed
of and confidently expected to enjoy, but never did encounter anywhere
else in Java—all the men of the household appeared in riding-gear, and
were off to inspect and direct work in the many gardens and sections of
the estate. The ladies took us for a walk across the tea-fields to the
great landmark of a Sinagar palm, which gave the name to the estate, and
from which lookout we could view the miles of luxuriant fields between
it and Parakan Salak’s group of white houses, and also, chief feature
in every view, the splendid blue slopes and summit of Salak clear cut
against a sky of the palest, most heavenly turquoise. It was a very dream
of a tropic morning, and a Java tea-garden seemed more than ever an
earthly paradise.
Tea-bushes covered thousands of acres around and below us, as the ground
dropped away from that commanding ridge, their formal rows decreasing in
perspective until they shaded the landscape like a fine line-engraving.
For mile after mile one could walk in direct line between soldierly files
of tea-bushes—Chinese, Assam, and hybrids. The Chinese plant, descended
by generations from that same wild bush discovered in Assam near the
Yunnan frontier by English botanists in 1834, has, by centuries of
cultivation, been brought to grow in low, compact little mats, or mere
rosettes of bushes. It has a thick, woody stem, gnarled and twisted like
any dwarf tree, and some of the Chinese tea-bushes at Sinagar are fifty
or sixty years of age, the pioneers and patriarchs of their kind in Java,
original seedlings and first importations from China. The Assam or wild
Himalayan tea-plant is a tall spindling bush with large, thin leaves, and
grafted on Chinese stock produces the tall hybrid commonly grown in the
tea-gardens of Java. The red soil of these gardens is always being raked
loose around the tea-plants, and at every dozen or twenty feet a deep
hole, or trench, is dug to admit air and water more freely to the roots.
Constant care is given lest these little open graves, or air-holes,
fill up after heavy rains, and not a weed nor a stray blade of grass is
allowed to invade these prim, orderly gardens and rob the soil of any of
its virtues. Each particular bush is tended and guarded as if it were the
rarest ornamental exotic, and the tea-gardens, with their broad stripings
of green upon the red ground, and skeleton lines of palms outlining the
footpaths and the divisional limits of each garden, are like a formal
exhibit of tea-growing, an exposition model on gigantic scale, a fancy
farmer’s experimental show-place.
In the unending summer of the hill-country there is no “tea season,”
no “spring leaf,” “first pickings,” or “fire-fly crop,” as in China and
Japan. Two years after the young seedling has been transplanted to the
formal garden rows its leaves may be gathered; and there are new leaves
every day, so that picking, curing, firing, and packing continue the
year round. The tea-pickers, mostly women, gather the leaves only when
the plants are free from dew or rain. They pick with the lightest touch
of thumb and finger, heaping the leaves on a square cloth spread on the
ground, and then tying up the bundle and “toting” it off on their heads,
for all the world like the colored aunties of our southern states. The
bright colors of their jackets and sarongs, and of their bundles, that
look like exaggerated bandana turbans, give gay and picturesque relief to
the green-striped gardens, whose exact lines converge in long, monotonous
perspective whichever way one looks. There is great fascination in
watching these bobbing figures among the bushes gradually converge to
single lines, and the procession of lank, slender sarongs file through
the gardens, down the avenues of palm and tamarind, to the fabrik.
[Illustration: JAVANESE DANCING-GIRL.]
The long, red-tiled buildings of the fabrik, in their order and speckless
neatness, with the array of ingenious and intelligent machines, seem yet
more like part of an exposition exhibit—a small machinery hall of some
great international industrial aggregation. The picking and the processes
of converting the tea-leaves into the green, oolong, and black teas of
commerce, and of packing them into large and small, air-tight, leaded
packages for export, occupy, at the most, but two days in ordinary
working seasons. Less green tea is sold each year, and soon the entire
Java crop of tea will be cured to the half black, or oolong, and the
standard black tea, which alone can find sale in England or in Russia,
the largest and most critical tea-consuming countries of Europe. An
especially fine black tea is made at these Preanger tea-fabriks, and for
this the green leaves are first exposed to the sun in wicker trays for
wilting, then rolled by machinery to free the juices in the leaf-cells,
and fermented in heaps for four or eight hours, until by their turning
a dark reddish brown there is evidence that the rank theine, the active
principle or stimulating alkaloid in the leaves, has been oxidized,
and so modified into something less injurious to human nerves and the
digestive system. The bruised red leaves are dried in a machine where hot
blasts and revolving fans make quick, clean work of the “firing,” that
perspiring coolies do by hand over charcoal pans in China and Japan. All
the sifting, sorting, packing, and labeling, the pressing of the broken
leaves and dust into bricks, go on as neatly, swiftly, and surely; and
the cases are hauled away to the railway-station and shipped from Batavia
to their special markets. The leaves to be made into green teas are given
a first toasting, almost as they come in from the bushes, are rolled on
great trays ranged on tables in an open court, and fired again, and more
thoroughly, before packing. As the taste of the world’s tea-drinkers
becomes more cultivated, green tea will lose favor, and the Java
tea-fabriks will be employed in directly competing with the factories of
India and Ceylon, from whose culture experiments they have profited,
and whose ingenious machines they have so generally adopted for curing
and preparing black teas. Often the profuse “flushing” of the tea-bushes
forces the fabrik to run all night to dispose of the quantity of fresh
leaves; and one gets an idea of the world’s increasing consumption of tea
in this quarter of a century since Java, India, and Ceylon entered into
competition in the tea-trade with China and Japan. Parakan Salak teas are
advertised and sold in Shanghai and Yokohama, and the appeal to those
great tea-marts is significant of a progressive spirit in Java trade,
that is matched by the threat that petroleum from Java’s oil-wells will
soon compete seriously with American and Russian oil.
The coffee harvest is a fixed event in the plantation’s calendar, and
occurs regularly in April and May, at the close of the rainy season. Now
that the finer Arabian shrub has been so largely replaced by the hardy
Liberian tree, coffee-culture is a little less arduous than before. The
berries are brought to the mill, husked by machinery, washed, dried
on concrete platforms in the sun, sacked, and shipped to Batavia, and
nothing more is heard of that crop until the next spring comes around.
The trees are carefully tended and watched, of course, throughout the
year, and scrutinized closely for any sign of scale or worm, bug or
blight. The glowing red volcanic soil is always being weeded and raked
and loosened, the trees trimmed, young plants from the great nursery of
seedlings set out in place of the old trees, and the coffee area extended
annually by clearings.
The Sundanese who live in their ornamental little fancy baskets of
houses beneath Sinagar’s tall tamarinds and kanari-trees are much to
be envied by their people. The great estate is a world of its own, an
agricultural Arcadia, where life goes on so happily that it is most
appropriate that they should have presented model Javanese village life
at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. These little Sinagar villagers have
their frequent passers on one side or the other of the demesne by turn,
with theater and _wayang-wayang_, or puppet-shows, lasting far into the
night. Professional raconteurs thrill them with classic tales of their
glorious past, while musicians make sweet, sad melodies to rise from
_gamelan_, or _gambang kayu_, from fiddle, drum, bowls, bells, and the
sonorous _alang-alang_—a rude instrument of most ancient origin, made
of five or eight graduated bamboo tubes, cut like organ-pipes, and hung
loosely in a frame, which, shaken by a master hand, or swinging in the
breeze from some tree-branch, produces the strangest, most weird and
fascinating melodies in all the East.
The play of village life about Sinagar is so prettily picturesque,
so well presented and carried out, that it seems only a theatrical
representation—a Petit Trianon sort of affair at the least. The smiling
little women, who rub and toss tea-leaves over the wilting-trays at the
fabrik, seem only to be playing with the loose leaves like a larger
sort of intelligent, careful children. In the same way the plucking
in the tea-gardens and the march to the fabrik in long, single file,
with bundles balanced on their heads, are mere kindergarten exercises
to develop the muscles of the back and secure an erect and graceful
carriage—the secret, perhaps, of their splendid bearing, although all
Javanese walk as kings and queens are supposed to walk, as the result of
not being hampered by useless garments, and thus having control of every
member and muscle of the body from earliest years. The same supple ease
and grace distinguish their manners too, and one young planter said:
“After living a few years among these gentle, graceful, winning natives,
you cannot know how Europe jarred upon me. All the hard, sad, scowling
faces and the harsh, angry voices oppressed me and made me so homesick
for Java that I was really glad to turn away from it. I never before was
so aware of the poverty, misery, distress, and vice of Europe.”
Visitors to the Paris Exposition of 1889 and the Chicago Exposition of
1893 had a typical model Javanese village set before them, and all were
unstinted in their praises of the _mise en scène_ and the human features
of the exhibit. The Chicago village was peopled by families from the
Sinagar and Parakan Salak estates, and, as a purely ethnological exhibit,
was the one success of that kind among the many trifling side-shows that
detracted from the character of the Midway Plaisance. The trip to America
was the prize and reward allotted to the most industrious and deserving
villagers, who with their properties and industrial accessories filled
two sailing-ships from Batavia to Hong Kong, whence they took steamer
to San Francisco and railway across the continent to Chicago. There was
a large outlay required at the start, and the best workmen were away
from the estates for a year; and between a dishonest shipping-agent
at Batavia and the heavy commissions upon all receipts levied by the
exposition’s managers at Chicago, and the free admissions which those
same generous American managers bestowed so widely, the village did not
nearly pay its current expenses, and the venture stands as an entire
loss, or a gift to the American people from the two public-spirited
Preanger planters who paid for it.
The good little Javanese who went to Chicago returned from their great
outing as simple and unspoiled as before, settled down contentedly
under their kanari-trees, and resumed their routine life in field and
fabrik. And what tales they had to tell to open-mouthed villagers
and neighbors, who sat around the traveled ones, to the neglect of
wayang-wayang and provincial professional story-tellers, listening to
their accounts of the very remarkable things on that other side of the
world! For the first time ever in their lives these Javanese saw white
men at work in the fields, drudging in city streets, and doing every
kind of menial, coolie labor. They saw a few black men, blacker than
Moormen, but they were great personages, wearing fine uniforms and having
command of the railway-trains, and riding in the most magnificently
gilded cars—individuals treated always with great respect, who came to
the Midway Plaisance in rich clothing, with gold watch-chains, jeweled
scarf-pins, and much loose money in their pockets—a superior and a
moneyed, if not the ruling class, in that topsy-turvy country, America.
A striped cat of the common roof-and-fence variety was given to one of
the village managers, and made the journey back to Java with the party.
Everything else in Chicago had been paid for so dearly that this tabby
could be fairly said to represent the entire profit and result of the
Chicago village venture. The cat was named “Chicago,” and soon became the
pet of the whole plantation, roaming freely everywhere, and feasting on
small rice-mice and tropical birds. “Chicago” came to us on our arrival,
rubbed in friendly fashion against one and another American knee,
and purred loudly, as if recognizing us for compatriots. The morning
we left Sinagar there was hubbub and running to and fro in the great
quadrangle of the residence. “Chicago,” while walking the well-curb with
gesticulating tail, had lost her balance, and with frightful cries and
a splash ended her existence—by unpleasant coincidence, just as we were
making our farewells to our kindly host. “In despair at being unable to
return to America with you,” said one mourner, “she has thrown herself
in the well. It is plainly suicide.” And this domestic tragedy saddened
our leave-taking from those charming people, the fine flavor of whose
hospitality, courtesy and kindliness took the edge from many of our
disagreeable experiences in Java, and gave us pleasant memories with
which to offset those of the other kind.
XII
ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES
One may ride all day by train from Buitenzorg before reaching the limits
of the Preanger regencies, where native princes still hold pretended
sway; and it is a continuous landscape feast from the sunrise start to
the sunset halt of the through-train. The railway line, after curving
around the shoulder of Salak, runs through the vaunted hill-country, the
region of the great tea, coffee, and kina estates; and from Soekaboemi to
Bandong, the two great headquarters for planters, one perceives that the
planter is paramount, the cultivator is king. The new cultures have not
dispossessed the old, however, and the _sawas_, or flooded rice-fields,
break the level of plain and valley floor with their myriad waving lines
of division, and climb by terraces to the very hilltops—a system of
cultivation and irrigation as old as the human race, and followed in
these same valleys by these same Sundanese since the beginning of their
recorded time. To them rice is a holy grain, the offspring of a god, and
the gods’ best gift to man; a grain both cultivated and worshiped. It
argues for the industry of a tropical race that they should grow this
troublesome grain at all, the grain that demands more back-breaking toil
and constant attention from planting to harvest-time than any other
grain which grows. It would seem discouraging to rice-cultivation,
too, when in old times the natives were taxed according to the area of
their rice-lands only, and mulcted of a fifth of their rice when it
was harvested—all in this happy land, where they might sit under the
breadfruit- and banana-trees and doze at their ease, while those kindly
fruits dropped in their laps. These picturesque rice-fields have won for
Java the name of “the granary of the East,” and enabled it to export
that grain in quantities, besides supporting its own great population,
one of the densest in the world, and averaging four hundred and fifty
inhabitants to each square mile. No fertilizer of any kind is applied to
these irrigated rice-fields, save to burn over and plow under the rich
stubble, after the _padi_, or ripe ears of grain, have been cut singly
with a knife and borne away in miniature sheaves strung on carrying-poles
across the peasants’ shoulders.
Beyond the region of the great plantations, where every hillside is
cleared and planted up to the kina limit, and only the summits and
steepest slopes are left to primeval jungle, there succeed great
stretches of wild country, where remarkable engineering feats were
required of the railway-builders. With two heavy engines the train climbs
to Tjandjoer station, sixteen hundred feet above the sea; and there,
if one has telegraphed the order ahead, he may lunch at ease in his
compartment as the train goes on. He may draw from the three-storied
lunch-basket handed in either a substantial riz tavel, consisting of
a little of everything heaped upon a day’s ration of boiled rice, or
a “tiffin,” whose _pièce de résistance_ is a huge _bifstek mit ard
appelen_, that would satisfy the cravings of any three dragoons. Either
feast is followed by bread or bananas, with a generous section of a
cheese, with mangosteens or other fruits, and one feels that he has
surely reached the land of plenty and solid, solid comforts, where fate
cannot harm him—when all this may be handed in to fleeting tourists at a
florin and a half apiece.
After this station of abundant rations, all signs of cultivation
and occupancy disappear, and the station buildings and the endless
lantana-hedges along the railway-track are the only signs of human
habitation or energy in the wilderness of hills covered with alang-alang
or bamboo-grass, and the coarse _glagah_ reeds which cattle will not
touch. The banteng, the one-horned rhinoceros, and the tigers that used
to roam these moors, fled when the shriek of the locomotive was heard in
the cañons, and the sportsmen have to seek such big game in the jungles
and grass-lands of the south coast. The streams that come cascading down
from all these green heights have carved out some beautiful scenery,
and the Tjitaroem River, foaming in sight for a while, disappears, runs
through a mountain by a natural tunnel, and reappears in a deep gorge, of
which one has an all-too-exciting view as the train crosses on a spidery
viaduct high in air.
A great, fertile green plain surrounds the native capital of Bandong,
and on its confines rises the Tangkoeban-Praoe, the Ararat of the
natives, who see in its square summit-lines the reversed _praoe_ in
which their ancestors survived the flood, and, turning their boat over
carefully to dry, descended, as the waters fell, to people the Malay
universe. One may ascend the butte-like peak, passing up first through a
belt of old coffee-plantations, whose product ranked first in the good
old days before the blight, and by the villa and experimental grounds of
Herr Junghuhn, the botanist, who first succeeded with the kina-culture
and introduced so many other economic plants and trees to the island.
At Lembang, ten miles from Bandong, the mountain-climber gives up his
pony or carriage, and is carried in a _djoelie_, or sedan-chair, through
a magnificent jungle to the edge of the open crater, where bubbling
sulphur-pools in an ashy floor, and a wide view over the fertile valley,
are sufficient reward for all exertion on the climber’s part.
Bandong itself, as the capital of the Preanger regencies and the home of
the native regent and the Dutch resident, is a place of great importance
to both races. The regent, as a mere puppet and pensioner of the colonial
government, supports the shadow of his old state and splendor in a large
_dalem_, or palace, in the heart of the town. He has also a suburban
villa in European style, to which are attached large racing-stables,
and this progressive regent is a regular cup-winner at the Buitenzorg
and Bandong races at every summer, or dry-season, meet, when the “good
monsoon” inspires all the islanders to their greatest social exertions.
As one gets farther into the center of the island, native life becomes
more picturesque, and every station platform offers one more diverting
study. There is more color in costume, and the wayside and platform
groups are kaleidoscopic with their gay sarongs and kerchiefs. More men
are seen wearing the military jacket of rank with the native sarong,
and the boat-handled kris thrust in the belt at the back. The little
children, who ride astride of their mothers’ hips and cling and cuddle
so confidingly in the slandang’s folds, seem of finer mold, and their
deep, dark Hindu eyes tell of a different strain in the Malay blood
than we had seen on the coast—these the Javanese, as distinguished from
the Sundanese. The clumsy buffalo, or water-ox, is everywhere, plowing
the fields, wallowing in mud, or browsing the stubble patch after the
gleaners, always with a patient, statuesque, nude little brown boy on his
blue-gray back, the fine, polished skins of these small herders glowing
in the sun as if they were inanimate bronze figurines.