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Title: Java
The garden of the East
Author: Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore
Release date: January 12, 2024 [eBook #72699]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Century Co, 1897
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAVA ***
Java
The Garden of the East
[Illustration: MALAYS DIVING FOR MONEY.]
Java
The Garden of the East
By
Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore
Author of “Jinrikisha Days in Japan”
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1898
Copyright, 1897,
By THE CENTURY CO.
THE DEVINNE PRESS
PREFACE
In presenting this account of a visit to one of the most beautiful
countries of the world, I shall hope that many will be induced to follow
there, and that my record may assist them to avoid certain things and to
take advantage of others that will add to their enjoyment of the island
where nature has been so prodigal with beauties and wonders.
After the body of this work had gone to press, the first copies of a
small, compact, and most admirable “Guide to the Dutch East Indies,”
written by Dr. J. F. Van Bemmelen and Colonel J. B. Hoover, by invitation
of the Royal Steam Packet Company, Amsterdam, and translated into English
by the Rev. B. J. Berrington, reached this country, and to this work
I hasten to extend my salutations, since my own pages contain so many
plaints for some such guide. It treats of all the islands under Dutch
rule, turning especial light upon the so little-known Sumatra, where
many attractions and possible resorts will invite pleasure-travel;
and, leading one from end to end of Java, it more than supplements what
Captain Schulze’s little guide had done for Batavia and the west end of
the island. Translating so much of local and special lore hitherto locked
away from the alien visitor in Dutch texts, it at last fairly opens
Java to the tourist world, and excites my keen regret that its earlier
publication had not lighted my way.
In preparing these pages every effort has been made to avoid errors,
and I invite other corrections, and acknowledge here with great
appreciation those suggested by Dutch readers, and at once made in
certain chapters that originally appeared in the “Century Magazine.”
In the varied English, French, and Dutch spelling of many words, in
drawing statistics from works in as many languages, and in accepting
as facts things verbally communicated to me by seemingly responsible
people, there were chances of error; but one can only beg to be set
right. In this connection I hasten to state that under the liberal policy
of recent years the Dutch government has withdrawn its prohibition of
the pilgrimage to Mecca, and more than six thousand of its Mohammedan
subjects have availed themselves of the privilege in one year. It should
also be noted that the Ashantee prince has not availed himself of the
privilege of living and dying under the British flag in South Africa,
and the pathetic tale of that exile, as told by Britons, lacks that
completing touch of fact. For these suggestions in particular, others
concerning Sumatra, and still others which had been anticipated, I thank
Mr. R. A. Van Sandick of Amsterdam, with appreciation of the spirit and
the loyalty to his own people which prompted his making them. Myths and
legends and fairy tales grow with tropic rankness in those far ends of
earth even to-day, and gravitate inevitably to the stranger’s ear.
E. R. S.
WASHINGTON, D. C., October 1, 1897.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. SINGAPORE AND THE EQUATOR 1
II. IN “JAVA MAJOR” 17
III. BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST 25
IV. THE KAMPONGS 37
V. TO THE HILLS 49
VI. A DUTCH SANS SOUCI 62
VII. IN A TROPICAL GARDEN 79
VIII. THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” 94
IX. THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” (_Continued_) 109
X. SINAGAR 126
XI. PLANTATION LIFE 136
XII. ACROSS THE PREANGER REGENCIES 147
XIII. “TO TISSAK MALAYA!” 156
XIV. PRISONERS OF STATE AT BORO BOEDOR 167
XV. BORO BOEDOR 182
XVI. BORO BOEDOR AND MENDOET 203
XVII. BRAMBANAM 216
XVIII. SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN 240
XIX. THE LAND OF KRIS AND SARONG 253
XX. DJOKJAKARTA 265
XXI. PAKOE ALAM: THE “AXIS OF THE UNIVERSE” 283
XXII. “TJILATJAP,” “CHALACHAP,” “CHELACHAP” 301
XXIII. GAROET AND PAPANDAYANG 312
XXIV. “SALAMAT!” 324
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MALAYS DIVING FOR MONEY _Frontispiece_
PAGE
A STREET IN SINGAPORE 5
MAP OF JAVA 16
A JAVANESE YOUNG WOMAN 27
PAINTING SARONGS 43
RICE-FIELDS 53
MOUNT SALAK, FROM THE RESIDENT’S GARDEN, BUITENZORG 63
FRANGIPANI AND SAUSAGE-TREE 73
TROPICAL FRUITS 81
TROPICAL FRUITS 89
A MARKET IN BUITENZORG 99
SCENES AROUND THE MARKET 105
A VIEW IN BUITENZORG 111
JAVANESE COOLIES GAMBLING 123
JAVANESE DANCING-GIRL 139
A MOHAMMEDAN MOSQUE 159
WAYSIDE PAVILION ON POST-ROAD 177
BORO BOEDOR, FROM THE PASSAGRAHAN 183
GROUND-PLAN OF BORO BOEDOR 187
FOUR BAS-RELIEFS FROM BORO BOEDOR 191
ON THE SECOND TERRACE 195
THE LATTICED DAGOBAS ON THE CIRCULAR TERRACES 199
THE RIGHT-HAND IMAGE AT MENDOET 207
TEMPLE OF LORO JONGGRAN AT BRAMBANAM 217
CLEARING AWAY RUBBISH AND VEGETATION AT BRAMBANAM
TEMPLES 221
KRISHNA AND THE THREE GRACES 225
LORO JONGGRAN AND HER ATTENDANTS 229
PLAN OF CHANDI SEWOU (“THOUSAND TEMPLES”) 233
FRAGMENT FROM LORO JONGGRAN TEMPLE 235
GANESHA, THE ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD 238
THE SUSUNHAN 243
THE DODOK 249
JAVA, BALI, AND MADURA KRISES 255
THE BRAMBANAM BABY 267
TYING THE TURBAN 279
WAYANG-WAYANG 285
TOPENG TROUPE WITH MASKS 291
TRANSPLANTING RICE 315
JAVA
THE GARDEN OF THE EAST
I
SINGAPORE AND THE EQUATOR
Singapore (or S’pore, as the languid, perspiring, exhausted residents
near the line most often write and pronounce the name of Sir Stamford
Raffles’s colony in the Straits of Malacca) is a geographical and
commercial center and cross-roads of the eastern hemisphere, like to no
other port in the world. Singapore is an ethnological center, too, and
that small island swinging off the tip of the Malay Peninsula holds a
whole congress of nations, an exhibit of all the races and peoples and
types of men in the world, compared to which the Midway Plaisance was a
mere skeleton of a suggestion. The traveler, despite the overpowering,
all-subduing influence of the heat, has some thrills of excitement at
the tropical pictures of the shore, and the congregation of varicolored
humanity grouped on the Singapore wharf; and there and in Java, where
one least and last expects to find such modern conveniences, his ship
swings up to solid wharves, and he walks down a gang-plank in civilized
fashion—something to be appreciated after the excitements and discomforts
of landing in small boats among the screaming heathen of all other
Asiatic ports.
On the Singapore wharf is a market of models and a life-class for a
hundred painters; and sculptors, too, may study there all the tones
of living bronze and the beauties of human patina, and more of repose
than of muscular action, perhaps. Japanese, Chinese, Siamese, Malays,
Javanese, Burmese, Cingalese, Tamils, Sikhs, Parsees, Lascars, Malabars,
Malagasy, and sailor folk of all coasts, Hindus and heathens of every
caste and persuasion, are grouped in a brilliant confusion of red,
white, brown, and patterned drapery, of black, brown, and yellow skins;
and behind them, in ghostly clothes, stand the pallid Europeans,
who have brought the law, order, and system, the customs, habits,
comforts, and luxuries of civilization to the tropics and the jungle.
All these alien heathens and picturesque unbelievers, these pagans and
idolaters, Buddhists, Brahmans, Jews, Turks, sun- and fire-worshipers,
devil-dancers, and what not, have come with the white man to toil for
him under the equatorial sun, since the Malays are the great leisure
class of the world, and will not work. The Malays will hardly live on the
land, much less cultivate it or pay taxes, while they can float about in
strange little hen-coops of house-boats that fill the river and shores
by thousands. Hence the Tamils have come from India to work, and the
Chinese to do the small trading; and the Malay rests, or at most goes
a-fishing, or sits by the canoe-loads of coral and sponges, balloon-fish
and strange sea treasures that are sold at the wharf.
A tribe of young Malays in dugout canoes meet every steamer and paddle
in beside it, shrieking and gesticulating for the passengers to toss
coins into the water. Their mops of black hair are bleached auburn by the
action of sun and salt water, and the canoe and paddle fit as naturally
to these amphibians as a turtle’s shell and flipper. They bail with an
automatic sweep of the hollowed foot in regular time with the dip of the
paddle; and when a coin drops, the Malay lets go the paddle and sheds
his canoe without concern. There is a flash of brown heels, bubbles
and commotion below, and the diver comes up, and chooses and rights
his wooden shell and flipper as easily and naturally as a man picks
out and assumes his coat and cane at a hall door. And in their hearts,
the civilized folk on deck, hampered with their multiple garments and
conventions, envy these happy-go-lucky, care-free amphibians in the land
of the breadfruit, banana, and scant raiment, with dives into the cool,
green water, teeming with fish and glittering with falling coins, as the
only exertion required to earn a living. Cold and hunger are unknown;
flannels and soup are no part of charity; and even that word, and the
many organizations in its name, are hardly known in the lands low on the
line.
S’pore is the great junction where travelers from the East or the West
change ship for Java; a commercial cross-roads where all who travel
must stop and see what a marvel of a place British energy has raised
from the jungle in less than half a century. The Straits Settlements
date from the time when Sir Stamford Raffles, after Great Britain’s
five years’ temporary occupancy of Java, returned that possession to
the Dutch in 1816, the fall of Napoleon removing the fear that this
possession of Holland would become a French colony and menace to
British interests in Asia. It had been intended to establish such a
British commercial entrepôt at Achin Head, the north end of Sumatra;
but Sir Stamford Raffles’s better idea prevailed, and the free port of
Singapore in the Straits of Malacca has won the commercial supremacy of
the East from Batavia, and has prospered beyond its founder’s dreams.
It is a well-built and a beautifully ordered city, and the municipal
housekeeping is an example to many cities of the temperate zone. Even the
untidy Malay and the dirt-loving Chinese, who swarm to this profitable
trading-center, and have absorbed all the small business and retail
trade of the place, are held to outer cleanliness and strict sanitary
laws in their allotted quarters. The stately business houses, the marble
palace of a bank, the long iron pavilions shading the daily markets, the
splendid Raffles Museum and Library, are all regular and satisfactory
sights; but the street life is the fascination and distraction of the
traveler before everything else. The array of turbans and sarongs gives
color to every thoroughfare; but the striking and most unique pictures
in Singapore streets are the Tamil bullock-drivers, who, sooty and
statuesque, stand in splendid contrast between their humped white oxen
and the mounds of white flour-bags they draw in primitive carts. Tiny
Tamil children, shades blacker, if that could really be, than their ebon-
and charcoal-skinned parents, are seen on suburban roads, clothed only
in silver chains, bracelets, and medals; and these lithe, lean people
from the south end of India are first in the picturesque elements of the
great city of the Straits. The Botanical Garden, although so recently
established, promises to become famous; and one arriving from the farther
East meets there for the first time the beautiful red-stemmed Banka
palm, and the symmetrical traveler’s palm of Madagascar, the latter all
conventionalized ready for sculptors’ use. Scores of other splendid
palms, giant creepers, gorgeous blossoms and fantastic orchids, known
to us only by puny examples in great conservatories at home, equally
delight one—all the wealth of jungle and swamp growing beside the smooth,
hard roads of an English park, over which one may drive for hours in the
suburbs of Singapore.
[Illustration: A STREET IN SINGAPORE.
After photograph by E. S. Platt.]
The Dutch mail-steamers to and from Batavia connect with the English
mail-steamers at Singapore; a French line connects with the Messagerie’s
ships running between Marseilles and Japan; an Australian line of
steamers gives regular communication; and independent steamers, offering
as much comfort, leave Singapore almost daily for Batavia. The five
hundred miles’ distance is covered in forty-eight or sixty hours, for a
uniform fare of fifty Mexican dollars or ninety Dutch gulden—an excessive
and unusual charge for a voyage of such length in that or any other
region. The traveler is usually warned long beforehand that living and
travel in the Netherlands Indies is the most expensive in the world;
and the change from the depreciated Mexican silver-dollar standard and
the profitable exchange of the far East to the gold standard of Holland
dismays one at the start. The completion of railways across and to
all parts of the island of Java, however, has greatly reduced tourist
expenses, so that they are not now two or three times the average of
similar expenses in India, China, and Japan.
At Singapore, only two degrees above the equator, the sun pursues a
monotony of rising and setting that ranges only from six minutes before
to six minutes after six o’clock, morning and evening, the year round.
Breakfasting by candle-light and leaving the hotel in darkness, there
was all the beauty of the gray-and-rose dawn and the pale-yellow rays of
the early sun to be seen from the wet deck when our ship let go from the
wharf and sailed out over a sea of gold. For the two days and two nights
of the voyage, with but six passengers on the large blue-funnel steamer,
we had the deck and the cabins, and indeed the equator and the Java Sea,
to ourselves. The deck was furnished with the long chairs and hammocks of
tropical life, but more tropical yet were the bunches of bananas hanging
from the awning-rail, that all might pick and eat at will; for this is
the true region of plenty, where selected bananas cost one Mexican cent
the dozen, and a whole bunch but five cents, and where actual living is
far too cheap and simple to be called a science.
The ship slipped out from the harbor through the glassy river of the
Straits of Malacca, and on past points and shores that to me had never
been anything but geographic names. There was some little thrill of
excitement in being “on the line” in the heart of the tropics, the
half-way house of all the world, and one expected strange aspects and
effects. There was a magic stillness of air and sea; the calm was as of
enchantment, and one felt as if in some hypnotic trance, with all nature
chained in the same spell. The pale, pearly sky was reflected in smooth
stretches of liquid, pearly sea, with vaporous hills, soft green visions
of land beyond. Everywhere in these regions the shallow water shows pale
green above the sandy bottom, and the anchor can be dropped at will. All
through the breathless day the ship coursed over this shimmering yellow
and gray-green sea, with faint pictures of land, the very landscapes of
mirage, drawn in vaporous tints on every side. We were threading a way
through the thousand islands, the archipelago lying below the point of
the Malay Peninsula, a region of unnamed, uncounted “summer isles of
Eden,” chiefly known to history as the home of pirates.
The high mountain-ridges of Sumatra barred the west for all the first
equatorial day, the land of this “Java Minor” sloping down and spreading
out in great green plains and swamps on the fertile but unhealthy eastern
coast. The large settlements and most attractive districts are on the
west coast, where the hills rise steeply from the ocean, and coffee-trees
thrive luxuriantly. Benkoelen, the old English town, and Padang, the
great coffee-mart, are on that coast, and from the latter a railway
leads to high mountain districts of great picturesqueness. There are few
government plantations on Sumatra, where land-tenures and leases are
the same as in Java. Immense areas have been devoted to tobacco-culture
near Deli, on the north or Straits coast, planters employing there and
on lower east-coast estates more than forty-three thousand Chinese
coolies—the Chinese, the one Asiatic who toils with ardor and regularity,
whom the tropics cannot debilitate, and to whom malaria and all germs,
microbes, and bacilli seem but tonic agents.
When the British returned Java, after the Napoleon scare was over, they
retained Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and sovereign rights over
Sumatra, relinquishing this latter suzerainty in 1872, in exchange for
Holland’s imaginary rights in Ashantee and the Gold Coast of Africa.
The Dutch then attempted to reduce the native population of Sumatra
to the same estate as the more pliant people of Java; but the wild
mountaineers and bucaneers, of the north, or Achin, end of the island
in particular, warned by the sad fate of the Javanese, had no intention
of being conquered and enslaved, of giving their labor and the fruit
of their lands to the strangers from Europe’s cold swamps. The Achin
war has continued since 1872, with little result save a general loss
of Dutch prestige in the East, an immense expenditure of Dutch gulden,
causing a deficit in the colonial budget every year, a fearful mortality
among Dutch troops, and the final abandonment, in this decade of trade
depression, of the aggressive policy. Dutch commanders are well satisfied
to hold their chain of forts along the western hills, and to punish the
Achinese in a small way by blockading them from their supplies of opium,
tobacco, and spirits. In one four years of active campaigning the Achin
war cost seventy million gulden, and seventy out of every hundred Dutch
soldiers succumbed to the climate before going into an encounter. The
Achinese merely retired to their swamps and jungles and waited, and
the climate did the rest, their confidence in themselves only shaken
during the command of General Van der Heyden, who for a time actually
crushed the rebellion. This picturesque fighter, a half-brother of Baron
de Stuers, inherited Malay instincts from a native mother, and carried
on such a warfare as the Achinese understood. He lost an eye in one
encounter, and the natives, then remembering an old tradition that their
country would be conquered by a one-eyed man, practically gave up the
struggle—to resume it, however, as soon as General Van der Heyden retired
and sailed for Holland, and military vigilance was relaxed in consequence
of Dutch economy. The Achinese leader, Toekoe Oemar, has several times
apparently yielded to the Dutch, only to perpetrate some greater injury;
and his treachery and crimes have given him repute as the very prince of
evil ones.
One’s sympathy goes naturally with the brave, liberty-loving Achinese;
and in view of their indomitable spirit, Great Britain did not lose
so much when she let go unconquerable Sumatra. British tourists are
saddened, however, when they see what their ministers let slip with Java,
for with that island and Sumatra, all Asia’s southern shore-line, and
virtually the far East, would have been England’s own.
Geologically this whole Malay Archipelago was one with the Malay
Peninsula, and although so recently made, is still subject to earthquake
change, as shown in the terrible eruption of the island of Krakatau in
the narrow Sunda Strait, west of Java, in August, 1883. Native traditions
tell that anciently Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Sumbawa were one island, and
“when three thousand rainy seasons shall have passed away they will be
reunited”; but Alfred Russel Wallace denies it, and proves that Java was
the first to drop away from the Asiatic mainland and become an island.
While the sun rode high in the cloudless white zenith above our ship the
whole world seemed aswoon. Hills and islands swam and wavered in the heat
and mists, and the glare and silence were terrible and oppressive. One
could not shake off the sensation of mystery and unreality, of sailing
into some unknown, eerie, other world. Every voice was subdued, the beat
of the engines was scarcely felt in that glassy calm, and the stillness
of the ship gave a strange sensation, as of a magic spell. It was not so
very hot,—only 86° by the thermometer,—but the least exertion, to cross
the deck, to lift a book, to pull a banana, left one limp and exhausted,
with cheeks burning and the breath coming faster, that insidious,
deceptive heat of the tropics declaring itself—that steaming, wilting
quality in the sun of Asia that so soon makes jelly of the white man’s
brain, and that in no way compares with the scorching, dry 96° in the
shade of a North American, hot-wave summer day.
At five o’clock, while afternoon tea and bananas were being served on
deck, we crossed the line—that imaginary parting of the world, the
invisible thread of the universe, the beginning and the end of all
latitude—latitude 0°, longitude 103° east, the sextant told. The position
was geographically exciting. We were literally “down South,” and might
now speak disrespectfully of the equator if we wished. A breeze sprang
up as soon as we crossed the line, and all that evening and through the
night the air of the southern hemisphere was appreciably cooler. The ship
went slowly, and loitered along in order to enter the Banka Straits by
daylight; and at sunrise we were in a smooth river of pearl, with the
green Sumatra shores close on one hand, and the heights of Banka’s island
of tin on the other. A ship in full sail swept out to meet us, and four
more barks under swelling canvas passed by in that narrow strait, whose
rocks and reefs are fully attested by the line of wrecks and sunken masts
down its length. The harbor of Muntuk, whence there is a direct railway
to the tin-mines, was busy with shipping, and the white walls and red
roofs of the town showed prettily against the green.
The open Java Sea was as still and glassy as the straits had been, and
for another breathless, cloudless day the ship’s engines beat almost
inaudibly as we went southward through an enchanted silence. When the
heat and glare of light from the midday sun so directly overhead drove
us to the cabin, where swinging punkas gave air, we had additional
suggestion of the tropics; for a passenger for Macassar, just down
from Penang and Malacca, showed us fifty freshly cured specimens of
birds, whose gorgeous plumage repeated the most brilliant and dazzling
tints of the rainbow, the flower-garden, and the jewel-case, and
left us bereft of adjectives and exclamations. Here we found another
passenger, who spoke Dutch and looked the Hollander by every sign, but
quickly claimed citizenship with us as a naturalized voter of the great
republic. He asked if we lived in Java, and when we had answered that we
were going to Java _en touriste_, “merely travelers,” he established
comradeship by saying, “I am a traveling man myself—New York Life.” This
naturalized American citizen said quite naturally, “We Dutchmen” and “our
queen”—Americanisms with a loyal Holland ring.
After the gold, rose, gray, and purple sunset had shown us such a sky of
splendor and sea of glory as we had but dreamed of above the equator,
banks of dark vapor defined themselves in the south. A thin young moon
hung among the huge yellow stars, that glowed steadily, with no cold
twinkling, in that intense night sky; but before the Southern Cross could
rise, dense clouds rolled up, and flashes, chains, and forks of angry
lightning made a double spectacular play against the inky-black sky and
the mirror-black sea. The captain promised us a tropical thunder-storm
from those black clouds in the south, and went forward to give ship’s
orders, advising us to make all haste below when the first drop should
fall, as in an instant a sheet of blinding rain would surround the
decks, against which the double awnings would be no more protection than
so much gauze, and through which one could not see the ship’s length.
The clouds remained stationary, however, and we missed the promised
sensation, although we waited for hours on deck, the ship moving quietly
through the soft, velvety air of the tropic’s blackest midnight, and the
lightning-flashes becoming fainter and fainter.
[Illustration: MAP OF JAVA.]
II
IN “JAVA MAJOR”
In the earliest morning a clean white lighthouse on an islet was seen
ahead, and as the sun rose, bluish mountains came up from the sea, grew
in height, outlined themselves, and then stood out, detached volcanic
peaks of most lovely lines, against the purest, pale-blue sky; soft
clouds floated up and clung to the summits; the blue and green at the
water’s edge resolved itself into groves and lines of palms; and over
sea and sky and the wonderland before us was all the dewy freshness of
dawn in Eden. It looked very truly the “gem” and the “pearl of the East,”
this “Java Major” of the ancients, and the Djawa of the native people,
which has called forth more extravagant praise and had more adjectives
expended on it than any other one island in the world. Yet this little
continent is only 666 miles long and from 56 to 135 miles wide, and on
an area of 49,197 square miles (nearly the same as that of the State of
New York) supports a population of 24,000,000, greater than that of all
the other islands of the Indian Ocean put together. With 1600 miles of
coast-line, it has few harbors, the north shore being swampy and flat,
with shallows extending far out, while the southern coast is steep and
bold, and the one harbor of Tjilatjap breaks the long line of surf
where the Indian Ocean beats against the southern cliffs. Fortunately,
hurricanes and typhoons are unknown in the waters around this “summer
land of the world,” and the seasons have but an even, regular change from
wet to dry in Java. From April to October the dry monsoon blows from the
southeast, and brings the best weather of the year—dry, hot days and
the coolest nights. From October to April the southwest or wet monsoon
blows. Then every day has its afternoon shower, the air is heavy and
stifling, all the tropic world is asteam and astew and afloat, vegetation
is magnificent, insect life triumphant, and the mountains are hidden in
nearly perpetual mist. There are heavy thunderstorms at the turn of the
monsoon, and the one we had watched from the sea the Hallowe’en night
before our arrival had washed earth and air until the foliage glistened,
the air fairly sparkled, nature wore her most radiant smiles, and the
tropics were ideal.
It was more workaday and prosaic when the ship, steaming in between long
breakwaters, made fast to the stone quays of Tandjon Priok, facing a
long line of corrugated-iron warehouses, behind which was the railway
connecting the port with the city of Batavia. The gradual silting up of
Batavia harbor after an eruption of Mount Salak in 1699, which first
dammed and then sent torrents of mud and sand down the Tjiliwong River,
finally obliged commerce to remove to this deep bay six miles farther
east, where the colonials have made a model modern harbor, at a cost of
twenty-six and a half million gulden, all paid from current revenues,
without the island’s ceasing to pay its regular tribute to the crown
of Holland. The customs officers at Tandjon Priok were courteous and
lenient, passing our tourist luggage with the briefest formality, and
kindly explaining how our steamer-chairs could be stored in the railway
rooms until our return to port. It is but nine miles from the Tandjon
Priok wharf to the main station in the heart of the original city of
Batavia—a stretch of swampy ground dotted and lined with palm-groves
and banana-patches, with tiny woven baskets of houses perched on stilts
clustered at the foot of tall cocoa-trees that are the staff and source
of life and of every economical blessing of native existence. We leaped
excitedly from one side of the little car to the other, to see each more
and more tropical picture; groups of bare brown children frolicking in
the road, and mothers with babies astride of their hips, or swinging
comfortably in a scarf knotted across one shoulder, and every-day life
going on under the palms most naturally, although to our eyes it was so
strange and theatrical.
At the railway-station we met the _sadoe_ (dos-à-dos), a two-wheeled
cart, which is the common vehicle of hire of the country, and is drawn by
a tiny Timor or Sandalwood pony, with sometimes a second pony attached
outside of the shafts. The broad cushioned seat over the axles will
accommodate four persons, two sitting each way. The driver faces front
comfortably; but the passenger, with no back to lean against but the
driver’s, must hold to the canopy-frame while he is switched about town
backward in the footman’s place, for one gulden or forty cents the hour.
Whether one comes to Java from India or China, there is hasty change
from the depreciated silver currency of all Asia to the unaltered gold
standard of Holland, and the sudden expensiveness of the world is a
sad surprise. The Netherlands unit of value, the gulden (value, forty
cents United States gold), is as often called a florin, a rupee, or
a dollar—the “Mexican dollar” or the equivalent “British dollar” of
the Straits Settlements, a coin which trade necessities drove British
conservatism to minting, which act robs the Briton of the privilege of
making further remarks upon “the almighty dollar” of the United States,
with its unchanging value of one hundred cents gold. This confusion of
coins, with prices quoted indifferently in guldens, florins, rupees, and
dollars, is further increased by dividing the gulden into one hundred
cents, like the Ceylon rupee, so that, between these Dutch fractions, the
true cents of the United States dollar that one instinctively thinks of,
and the depreciated cents of the British or the battered Mexican dollar,
one’s brain begins to whirl when prices are quoted, or any evil day of
reckoning comes.
No Europeans live at Tandjon Priok, nor in the old city of Batavia,
which from the frightful mortality during two centuries was known as
“the graveyard of Europeans.” The banks and business houses, the Chinese
and Arab towns, are in the “old town”; but Europeans desert that quarter
before sundown, and betake themselves to the “new town” suburbs, where
every house is in a park of its own, and the avenues are broad and
straight, and all the distances are magnificent. The city of Batavia,
literally “fair meadows,” grandiloquently “the queen of the East,”
and without exaggeration “the gridiron of the East,” dates from 1621,
when the Dutch removed from Bantam, where quarrels between Portuguese,
Javanese, and the East India Company had been disturbing trade for
fifteen years, and built Fort Jacatra at the mouth of a river off which
a cluster of islands sheltered a fine harbor. Its position in the midst
of swamps was unhealthy, and the mortality was so appalling as to seem
incredible. Dutch records tell of 87,000 soldiers and sailors dying in
the government hospital between 1714 and 1776, and of 1,119,375 dying
at Batavia between 1730 and August, 1752—a period of twenty-two years
and eight months.[1] The deadly Java fever occasioning this seemingly
incredible mortality was worst between the years 1733 and 1738, during
which time 2000 of the Dutch East India Company’s servants and free
Christians died annually. Staunton, who visited Batavia with Lord
Macartney’s embassy in 1793, called it the “most unwholesome place in the
universe,” and “the pestilential climate” was considered a sufficient
defense against attack from any European power.
The people were long in learning that those who went to the higher
suburbs to sleep, and built houses of the most open construction to admit
of the fullest sweep of air, were free from the fever of the walled town,
surrounded by swamps, cut by stagnant canals, and facing a harbor whose
mud-banks were exposed at low tide. The city walls were destroyed at the
beginning of this century by the energetic Marshal Daendels, who began
building the new town. The quaint old air-tight Dutch buildings were
torn down, and streets were widened; and there is now a great outspread
town of red-roofed, whitewashed houses, with no special features or
picturesqueness to make its street-scenes either distinctively Dutch or
tropical. Modern Batavia had 111,763 inhabitants on December 31, 1894,
less than a tenth of whom are Europeans, with 26,776 Chinese and 72,934
natives. While the eighteenth-century Stadhuis might have been brought
from Holland entire, a steam tramway starts from its door and thence
shrieks its way to the farthest suburb, the telephone “hellos” from
center to suburb, and modern inventions make tropical living possible.
The Dutch do not welcome tourists, nor encourage one to visit their
paradise of the Indies. Too many travelers have come, seen, and gone away
to tell disagreeable truths about Dutch methods and rule; to expose the
source and means of the profitable returns of twenty million dollars and
more for each of so many years of the last and the preceding century—all
from islands whose whole area only equals that of the State of New York.
Although the tyrannic rule and the “culture system,” or forced labor,
are things of the dark past, the Dutch brain is slow and suspicious, and
the idea being fixed fast that no stranger comes to Java on kindly or
hospitable errands, the colonial authorities must know within twenty-four
hours why one visits the Indies. They demand one’s name, age, religion,
nationality, place of nativity, and occupation, the name of the ship
that brought the suspect to Java, and the name of its captain—a dim
threat lurking in this latter query of holding the unlucky mariner
responsible should his importation prove an expense or embarrassment to
the island. Still another permit—a _toelatings-kaart_, or “admission
ticket”—must be obtained if one wishes to travel farther than Buitenzorg,
the cooler capital, forty miles away in the hills. The tourist pure
and simple, the sight-seer and pleasure traveler, is not yet quite
comprehended, and his passports usually accredit him as traveling in the
interior for “scientific purposes.” Guides or efficient couriers in the
real sense do not exist yet. The English-speaking servant is rare and
delusive, yet a necessity unless one speaks Dutch or Low Malay. Of all
the countries one may ever travel in, none equals Java in the difficulty
of being understood; and it is a question, too, whether the Malays who do
not know any English are harder to get along with than the Dutch who know
a little.
Thirty years ago Alfred Russel Wallace inveighed against the unnecessary
discomforts, annoyances, and expense of travel in Java, and every
tourist since has repeated his plaint. The philippics of returned
travelers furnish steady amusement for Singapore residents; and no one
brings back the same enthusiasm that embarked with him. It is not the
Java of the Javanese that these returned ones berate so vehemently,
but the Netherlands India, and the state created and brought about by
the merciless, cold-blooded, rapacious Hollanders who came half-way
round the world and down to the equator, nine thousand miles away from
their homes, to acquire an empire and enslave a race, and who impose
their hampering customs and restrictions upon even alien visitors. Java
undoubtedly is “the very finest and most interesting tropical island in
the world,” and the Javanese the most gentle, attractive, and innately
refined people of the East, after the Japanese; but the Dutch in Java
“beat the Dutch” in Europe ten points to one, and there is nothing so
surprising and amazing, in all man’s proper study of mankind, as this
equatorial Hollander transplanted from the cold fens of Europe; nor is
anything so strange as the effect of a high temperature on Low-Country
temperament. The most rigid, conventional, narrow, thrifty, prudish, and
Protestant people in Europe bloom out in the forcing-house of the tropics
into strange laxity, and one does not know the Hollanders until one sees
them in this “summer land of the world,” whither they threatened to
emigrate in a body during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
III
BATAVIA, QUEEN OF THE EAST
When one has driven through the old town of Batavia and seen its crowded
bazaars and streets, and has followed the lines of bricked canals, where
small natives splash and swim, women beat the family linen, and men go
to and fro in tiny boats, all in strange travesty of the solemn canals
of the old country, he comes to the broader avenues of the new town,
lined with tall tamarind- and waringen-trees, with plumes of palms, and
pyramids of blazing Madagascar flame-trees in blossom. He is driven
into the long garden court of the Hotel Nederlanden, and there beholds
a spectacle of social life and customs that nothing in all travel can
equal for distinct shock and sensation. We had seen some queer things
in the streets,—women lolling barefooted and in startling dishabille in
splendid equipages,—but concluded them to be servants or half-castes;
but there in the hotel was an undress parade that beggars description,
and was as astounding on the last as on the first day in the country.
Woman’s vanity and man’s conventional ideas evidently wilt at the line,
and no formalities pass the equator, when distinguished citizens and
officials can roam and lounge about hotel courts in pajamas and bath
slippers, and bare-ankled women, clad only in the native sarong, or
skirt, and a white dressing-jacket, go unconcernedly about their affairs
in streets and public places until afternoon. It is a dishabille beyond
all burlesque pantomime, and only shipwreck on a desert island would seem
sufficient excuse for women being seen in such an ungraceful, unbecoming
attire—an undress that reveals every defect while concealing beauty, that
no loveliness can overcome, and that has neither color nor grace nor
picturesqueness to recommend it.
The hotel is a series of one-storied buildings surrounding the four sides
of a garden court, the projecting eaves giving a continuous covered
gallery that is the general corridor. The bedrooms open directly upon
this broad gallery, and the space in front of each room, furnished with
lounging-chairs, table, and reading-lamp, is the sitting-room of each
occupant by day. There is never any jealous hiding behind curtains or
screens. The whole hotel register is in evidence, sitting or spread in
reclining-chairs. Men in pajamas thrust their bare feet out bravely,
puffing clouds of rank Sumatra tobacco smoke as they stared at the new
arrivals; women rocked and stared as if we were the unusual spectacle,
and not they; and children sprawled on the cement flooring, in only the
most intimate undergarments of civilized children. One turned his eyes
from one undressed family group only to encounter some more surprising
dishabille; and meanwhile servants were hanging whole mildewed wardrobes
on clothes-lines along this open hotel corridor, while others were
ironing their employers’ garments on this communal porch.
[Illustration: A JAVANESE YOUNG WOMAN.]
We were sure we had gone to the wrong hotel; but the Nederlanden was
vouched for as the best, and when the bell sounded, over one hundred
guests came into the vaulted dining-room and were seated at the one long
table. The men wore proper coats and clothes at this midday _riz tavel_
(rice table), but the women and children came as they were—_sans gêne_.
The Batavian day begins with coffee and toast, eggs and fruit, at any
time between six and nine o’clock; and the affairs of the day are
despatched before noon, when that sacred, solemn, solid feeding function,
the riz tavel, assembles all in shady, spacious dining-rooms, free from
the creaking and flapping of the punka, so prominent everywhere else in
the East. Rice is the staple of the midday meal, and one is expected to
fill the soup-plate before him with boiled rice, and on that heap as much
as he may select from eight or ten dishes, a tray of curry condiments
being also passed with this great first course. Bits of fish, duck,
chicken, beef, bird, omelet, and onions rose upon my neighbors’ plates,
and spoonfuls of a thin curried mixture were poured over the rice, before
the conventional chutneys, spices, cocoanut, peppers, and almond went to
the conglomerate mountain resting upon the “rice table” below. Beefsteak,
a salad, and then fruit and coffee brought the midday meal to a close.
Squeamish folk, unseasoned tourists, and well-starched Britons with small
sense of humor complain of loss of appetite at these hotel riz tavels;
and those Britons further criticize the way in which the Dutch fork, or
most often the Dutch knife-blade, is loaded, aimed, and shoveled with a
long, straight stroke to the Dutch interior; and they also criticize the
way in which portions of bird or chicken are managed, necessitating and
explaining the presence of the finger-bowl from the beginning of each
meal. But we forgot all that had gone before when the feast was closed
with the mangosteen—nature’s final and most perfect effort in fruit
creation.
After the riz tavel every one slumbers—as one naturally must after such
a very “square” meal—until four o’clock, when a bath and tea refresh
the tropic soul, the world dresses in the full costume of civilization,
and the slatternly women of the earlier hours go forth in the latest
finery of good fortune, twenty-six days from Amsterdam, for the afternoon
driving and visiting, that continue to the nine-o’clock dinner-hour.
Batavian fashion does not take its airing in the jerky sadoe, but in
roomy “vis-à-vis” or barouches, comfortable “milords” or giant victorias,
that, being built to Dutch measures, would comfortably accommodate three
ordinary people to each seat, and are drawn by gigantic Australian
horses, or “Walers” (horses from New South Wales), to match these
turnouts of Brobdingnag.
Society is naturally narrow, provincial, colonial, conservative,
and insular, even to a degree beyond that known in Holland. The
governor-general, whose salary is twice that of the President of the
United States, lives in a palace at Buitenzorg, forty miles away in the
hills, with a second palace still higher up in the mountains, and comes
to the Batavia palace only on state occasions. This ruler of twenty-four
million souls, who rules as a viceroy instructed from The Hague, with the
aid of a secretary-general and a Council of the Indies, has, in addition
to his salary of a hundred thousand dollars, an allowance of sixty
thousand dollars a year for entertaining, and it is expected that he will
maintain a considerable state and splendor. He has a standing army of
thirty thousand, one third Europeans, of various nationalities, raised
by volunteer enlistment in Holland, who are well paid, carefully looked
after, and recruited by long stays at Buitenzorg after short terms of
service at the sea-ports. After the Indian mutiny the Dutch were in great
fear of an uprising of the natives of Java, and placed less confidence
in native troops. Only Europeans can hold officers’ commissions; and
while the native soldiers are all Mohammedans, and great consideration
is paid their religious scruples, care is taken not to let the natives
of any one province or district compose a majority in any one regiment,
and these regiments frequently change posts. The colonial navy has done
great service to the world in suppressing piracy in the Java Sea and
around the archipelago, although steam navigation inevitably brought an
end to piracy and picturesque adventure. The little navy helps maintain
an admirable lighthouse service, and with such convulsions as that of
Krakatau always possible, and changes often occurring in the bed of
the shallow seas, its surveyors are continually busied with making new
charts.
The islands of Amboyna, Borneo, Celebes, and Sumatra are also ruled by
this one governor-general of the Netherlands Indies, through residents;
and the island of Java is divided into twenty-two residencies or
provinces, a resident, or local governor, ruling—or, as “elder brother,”
effectually advising—in the few provinces ostensibly ruled by native
princes. A resident receives ten thousand dollars a year, with house
provided and a liberal allowance made for the extra incidental expenses
of the position—for traveling, entertaining, and acknowledging in degree
the gifts of native princes. University graduates are chosen for this
colonial service, and take a further course in the colonial institute at
Haarlem, which includes, besides the study of the Malay language, the
economic botany of the Indies, Dutch law, and Mohammedan justice, since,
in their capacity as local magistrates, they must make their decisions
conform with the tenets of the Koran, which is the general moral law,
together with the unwritten Javanese code. They are entitled to retire
upon a pension after twenty years of service—half the time demanded of
those in the civil service in Holland. All these residents are answerable
to the secretary of the colony, appointed by the crown, and much of
executive detail has to be submitted to the home government’s approval.
Naturally there is much friction between all these functionaries, and
etiquette is punctilious to a degree. A formal court surrounds the
governor-general, and is repeated in miniature at every residency. The
pensioned native sovereigns, princes, and regents maintain all the forms,
etiquette, and barbaric splendor of their old court life, elaborated by
European customs. The three hundred Dutch officials condescend equally to
the rich planters and to the native princes; the planters hate and deride
the officials; the natives hate the Dutch of either class, and despise
their own princes who are subservient to the Dutch; and the wars and
jealousies of rank and race and caste, of white and brown, of native and
imported folk, flourish with tropical luxuriance.
Batavian life differs considerably from life in British India and all the
rest of Asia, where the British-built and conventionally ordered places
support the same formal social order of England unchanged, save for a few
luxuries and concessions incident to the climate. The Dutchman does not
waste his perspiration on tennis or golf or cricket, or on any outdoor
pastime more exciting than horse-racing. He does not make well-ordered
and expensive dinners his one chosen form of hospitality. He dines late
and dines elaborately, but the more usual form of entertainment in
Batavia is in evening receptions or musicales, for which the spacious
houses, with their great white porticos, are well adapted. Batavian
residents have each a paradise park around their dwellings, and the white
houses of classic architecture, bowered in magnificent trees and palms,
shrubs and vines and blooming plants, are most attractive by day. At
night, when the great portico, which is drawing-room and living-room and
as often dining-room, is illuminated by many lamps, each lovely villa
glows like a fairyland in its dark setting. If the portico lamps are not
lighted, it is a sign of “not at home,” and mynheer and his family may
sit in undress at their ease. There are weekly concerts at the Harmonie
and Concordia clubs, where the groups around iron tables might have been
summoned by a magician from some continental garden. There are such clubs
in every town on the island, the government subsidizing the opera and
supporting military bands of the first order; and they furnish society
its center and common meeting-place. One sees fine gowns and magnificent
jewels; ladies wear the heavy silks and velvets of an Amsterdam winter
in these tropical gardens, and men dance in black coats and broadcloth
uniforms. Society is brilliant, formal, and by lamplight impressive; but
when by daylight one meets the same fair beauties and bejeweled matrons
sockless, in sarongs and flapping slippers, the disillusionment is
complete.
The show-places of Batavia are easily seen in a day: the old town hall,
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.
The hour-and-a-half’s ride from Batavia to Buitenzorg gave us an epitome
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.
All Java is in a way as finished as little Holland itself, the whole
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.
We found all the countless common fragrant flowers that are so necessary
to these esthetic, perfume-loving people heaped for sale in the
flower-market of the passer, along with the oils and the gums and spices
that give out, and burn with, such delicious odors. Short-stemmed roses
and heaps of loose rose-petals were laid on beds of green moss or in
bits of palm-leaf in a way to delight one’s color-sense, and, with the
mounds of pale-green petals of the _kananga_, or ylang-ylang-tree’s
blossoms, filled the whole air with fragrance. We dried quantities of
kananga flowers for sachets, as they will crisp even in the damp air
of Java, and retain their spicy fragrance for years; but the exquisite
white-and-gold “Bo-flowers,” the sacred _sumboja_ or frangipani (the
_Plumeria acutifolia_ of the botanists), would not dry, but turned dark
and mildewed wherever one petal fell upon another. This lovely blossom
of Buddha is sticky and unpleasant to the touch when pulled from the
tree, and the stem exudes a thick milk. After they have fallen to the
ground they may be handled more easily, and fallen flowers retain the
spotless, waxen perfection of their thick, fleshy petals for even
two days. One wonders that the people do not more often wear these
flowers of the golden heart in their black hair; but the sumboja is a
religious flower in Java, as in India, and in Buddhist times was almost
as much an attribute and symbol of that great faith as the oltus. This
Bo-flower is still the favorite offering, together with the _champaka_,
or Arabian jasmine, in the Buddhist temples of Burma and Ceylon, and is
often laid before the few images of that old religion now remaining in
Java. All through the Malay world, however, it is especially the flower
of the dead, associated everywhere with funeral rites and graves, as
conventional an expression or accompaniment of grief, death, and burial
as the cypress and the weeping willow. For this reason one rarely sees
it used as an ornamental tree or hedge, even in a European’s garden or
pleasure-grounds, and its presence in hedges or copses indicates that
there are graves, or one of Islam’s little open-timbered temples of the
dead, within reach of its entrancing fragrance. Our Malay servant would
never accept our name of “frangipani” when told to spread out or stir
the petals we tried to dry in the sun. He stoically repeated the native
“sumboja” after me each time, very rightly resenting the baptism in
honor of an Italian marquis, who only compounded an essence imitating
the perfume of the West Indian red jasmine, which breathes a little of
the cloying sweetness of the peerless sumboja. After but a few trials
of its syllables, “sumboja” soon expressed to me more of the fragrance,
the sentiment and spirit, of the lovely death-flower than ever could the
word “frangipani.” Chinese Buddhists seem not to have any traditions or
associations with the Bo-flower, as in South China, where the tree is
grown in gardens, it is only the _kai tan fa_, or “egg-flower,” those
hideously matter-of-fact people noting only the resemblance of the lovely
petals to the contrasting yolk and albumen of a hard-boiled egg.
VIII
THE “CULTURE SYSTEM”
While the Dutch East India Company held the monopoly of trade and
production in Java, farmed out the revenues, and exacted forced labor
and forced delivery of produce, this tropical possession yielded an
enormous revenue. With the company’s monopoly of trade with Japan, and
only Portugal as Holland’s great rival in the ports of China, the company
made Amsterdam the tea- and spice-market and the center of Oriental trade
in Europe. The early Dutch traders not only cut down all the spice-trees
on the Molucca Islands, and forbade the planting of clove-, cinnamon-,
and nutmeg-trees, save on certain Dutch islands, but they burned tons of
spices in the streets of Amsterdam, in order to maintain prices in Europe
and realize their usual profit of three hundred per cent.
The Dutch East India Company acquired control of Java through pioneer
preëmption, purchase, conquest, strategy, and crooked diplomacy, and,
finally, as residuary legatee by the will of the Mohammedan emperor
at Solo. The company then claimed the same sovereign rights over the
people as the native rulers, who had exacted one fifth of the peasant’s
labor and one fifth of his crops as ground-rent, the land being all
the inalienable property of the princes. When the colony passed from
the company to the crown of Holland, Marshal Daendels at once turned
such feudal rights to profitable account and instituted public works
on a great scale. With such forced labor he built the great double
post-road over the island from Anjer Head to Banjoewangi,—that road
upon whose building twenty thousand miserable lives were expended,—so
that difficulty of communication no longer interfered with the delivery
of products at government warehouses on the sea-shore. He further
established government teak- and coffee-plantations, but the natives who
were forced to cultivate them were no more tyrannized over nor oppressed
than they had been under their own princes, the change of masters
making small difference in their condition. Previous to Daendels’s time
all the coffee came from the Preangers, whose princes, having yielded
their territories by treaty in the middle of the last century, retained
sovereignty and their old land-revenues on condition of paying the Dutch
East India Company an annual tribute in coffee, and after that selling
the balance of the crop to the company at the fixed rate of three and a
half florins the picul (133⅓ pounds).
Although the East India Company practically ended its rule in 1798, the
States-General canceled the lease in 1800, and the colony passed to the
crown of Holland, the same trade monopoly continued until the happy
interval of British rule (1811-16), and there was a continual movement
of natives from the Dutch to the native states up to 1811. Under Sir
Stamford Raffles’s enlightened control the Java ports were made free to
the ships of all nations, the peasants were given individual ownership of
lands, great estates were bestowed upon native chiefs, and a bewildering
doctrine of liberty and equality before the law was preached to the
people. Free trade, free culture, and free labor were decreed at once.
The same treaty of London (August, 1814) which restored Java to the
Dutch (August, 1816), at the close of the Napoleonic wars, secured the
freedom of the ports; but the Dutch quickly resumed the old system of
land-tenure by village communities paying ground-rent in produce and
labor through their _wedana_, or head man, who answered to a district
chief, who in turn reported to the native prince acting as regent for
the Dutch government. Dutch residents “advised” these native regents,
who ruled wholly under their orders and were mere middlemen between the
Dutch and the natives. These regents were always chosen from the greatest
family of the province, and the Dutch _contrôleurs_ directed the chiefs
and wedanas. The Dutch retained the excellent British police and judicial
system in the main, while having more regard for the native aristocracy,
their prejudices and their laws of caste. British philanthropy had
introduced the British India ryot system of separate property in the
soil and a separate land-tax, along with equality of rights, duties, and
imposts, while abolishing all monopolies, forced labor and productions.
The natives, like true Orientals, preferred their own old communal land
system, with yearly allotments of village lands and the just rotation of
the best lands, to any modern system of individual property, and to what
was most dreaded by the native, individual liability. The Dutch resumed
the old land system, exacted the old one fifth of produce as land-rent,
and obliged the peasants to plant one fifth of the village land in crops,
to be sold to the government at fixed prices; but they only demanded one
day’s labor in seven, instead of one day in five. The lands which Sir
Stamford Raffles had given to the chiefs and petty princes soon passed
into the hands of Europeans or Chinese; and except for this one tenth
of the land held by private owners, and two tenths held by the Preanger
regents, the rest of the island became crown land, subject to lease,
but never to be sold. The Preanger princes resumed their payment of a
revenue in coffee and the sale of the surplus crop to the government at
a fixed price. Marshal Daendels’s plantations, so long neglected, were
put in order again and cultivated by seventh-day labor. Each family was
required to keep one thousand coffee-trees in bearing on village lands,
to give two fifths of the crop to the government, and deliver it cleaned
and sorted at government warehouses established all through the coffee
districts.
But with the open ports, the abolition of the government’s spice monopoly
in 1824, and the expenses of a protracted war with the native ruler of
Middle Java (1817-30), the revenues still only met the expenses; and
there was great concern in Holland at the decrease of the golden stream
of Indian revenue, and consequent satisfaction in England that its
statesmen had handed back the island, that might have proved only an
embarrassment and intolerable expense instead of a profit to the British
crown. The King of Holland had established and guaranteed the Netherlands
Trading Company, which acted as the commission agent of the government in
Europe, importing in its own ships exclusively, selling all the produce
in Europe, and conducting a general business in the colony. The partial
failure of this company, which obliged the king to meet the guaranteed
interest, brought about a new order of things destined to increase the
colonial trade and crown revenues.
[Illustration: A MARKET IN BUITENZORG.]
As private enterprise could not make the Java trade what it had been,
Governor Van den Bosch, who originated the “culture system” as a means
of relieving the distressed finances, was sent out from Holland in 1830,
with power to grant cash credits and make ten-year contracts with private
individuals who would assist in developing the sugar industry. Sufficient
advances were made to these colonists to enable them to erect sugar-mills
and to maintain themselves until, by the sales of their products, they
were able to repay the capital and own their mills. The government agreed
that the natives of each community or district should grow sufficient
sugar-cane on their lands to supply the mills’ capacity, and deliver it
at the mills at fixed rates. The natives were obliged to plant one fifth
of the village lands in sugar-cane, and each man to give one day’s labor
in seven to tending the crop. The village head man was paid for the
community three and a half florins for each picul of sugar made from
their cane, and the natives who worked in the mills were paid regular
wages. The mill-owner sold one third of the finished product of his mill
to the government, at rates rising from eight to ten florins the picul;
the mill-owner paid back each year one tenth of the government’s cash
advanced to him in sugar at the same rate, and was then free to ship,
as his own venture, the balance of his sugar to the Netherlands Trading
Company, which held the monopoly of transport and sale of government
produce. Enormous profits resulted to the government and mill-owners from
the sales of such sugar in Europe, and during one prosperous decade the
crown of Holland enjoyed a revenue amounting to more than five million
dollars United States gold each year from its Java sugar sales. The whole
east end of the island and the low, hot lands along the coast were green
at their season with the giant grass whose cultivation has forced or
encouraged slavery everywhere throughout the earth’s tropic belt. Slavery
itself ceased in Java by royal edict in 1859, but sugar-culture went on
under the admirable Van den Bosch system so profitably that mill-owners
did not grumble at having to sell one third of their product to the
government at a merely nominal price.
The great success in sugar led the government to extend the culture
system’s method to other crops. Would-be colonists competed for such
profitable contracts, and all young Holland cherished the ambition to
sail away to the East and make fortunes on Java plantations. A choice was
exercised to secure the best class of young men as colonists; education,
cultivation, and gentlemanly manners were made essentials, and it was
known that no absenteeism would be tolerated, that the planters were
expected to settle in Java in permanence, and that leaves of absence
would be granted during the ten-year contracts only for actual illness.
By providing military bands and subsidizing an opera, by establishing
libraries and fostering the museum of the Batavian Society, and by
encouraging a liberal social life among the higher officials, everything
was done to secure all the advantages of civilization and to make life
tolerable in the far-away tropics.
Early experiments had been made with the tea-plant in Java, and the
government initiated tea-growing with great anticipations. Tea-plants
and -seeds were brought by botanists from Japan as early as 1826, and
later from China, together with skilled cultivators and workmen to
instruct the natives. Crown lands were leased on long terms, and cash
advances made during the first years of hill-clearing and planting. The
government obliged the planters to produce equal quantities of green
and black tea, and four grades or qualities of each kind; the planters
were to repay the government’s cash advances in tea, to sell the whole
crop to the government at a fixed rate, and to pay the workmen fixed
wages. Tea-growing was not profitable at first, as there was difficulty
in securing a market in Europe for the bitter, weedy Java leaf, until,
by a great reduction in the selling-price, its cheapness gained it a
sale in Germany. The discovery of the wild Assam tea-plant in India,
and the results obtained by grafting it on the Chinese plant, marked
a new departure in tea-growing, and with better understanding of new
methods and the aid of machinery in curing the leaf, tea-gardens became
profitable ventures. After fostering the industry to success, the
government refused further contracts after 1865, and the tea-planters
were free to dispose of their crops as they wished. All through the
hill-country of the Preangers tea-bushes stripe the rolling ground for
miles, and new ground is being cleared and leased each season. Java
teas have greatly improved in quality, and win medals and mention at
every exposition; but they have India and Ceylon as formidable rivals,
in addition to China and Japan, and their market remains in Holland and
Germany, and in Persia and Arabia by way of Bombay—this Mohammedan trade
an inheritance of those early times, when the Dutch drove the Moormen out
of Ceylon and the far Eastern trade.
While the culture system was succeeding with sugar and tea, the
government coffee-plantations were extended, and more and more
hill-country cleared for such cultivation. Coffee-culture was carried on
by the government without contractors’ aid. Each native was obliged to
plant six hundred Arabian or Mocha coffee-trees and keep them in bearing,
and deliver the crop cleaned and sorted at the government warehouses at a
fixed price—nine and twelve florins the picul previous to 1874, although
forty and forty-five florins were paid in the open market of the ports.
By careful supervision and by percentages paid to native officials for
any superior quality in the berries produced in their district, the
coffee from Java government stores was superior to anything else sold
in Europe, and maintained its average steadily. Coffee was indeed “the
pivot of the Netherlands colonial régime,” a staple of greater economic
value than spices had been. In 1879, the year of the greatest production
of the government plantations in Java, some 79,400 tons of coffee were
shipped to Europe. Blight and scale and insect pests were afterward to
reduce the shipments to but 17,750 tons in 1887.
Indigo was at first cultivated on the same terms as sugar, but the
government soon dispensed with such contracts, bought back the fabriks,
and continued the industry without contract aid, obliging the natives
to plant indigo on all village land not required for rice, and deliver
the crop to the mills at fixed prices. Cinnamon, pepper, cinchona,
and cochineal were grown by the natives in the same way, under merely
official supervision, and delivered to the government for a trifling
price.
In 1850 the government sent agents to Peru to obtain seeds of the
cinchona-tree, and after fifteen years of effort and risk the
indefatigable botanists and explorers secured the treasured seeds
of the red-barked kina-tree. The records of those expeditions, the
lives ventured and lost, are the romances of travel and exploration;
and Sir Clements Markham’s and Charles Ledger’s narratives are most
fascinating tales. The first little nursery of trees in the Buitenzorg
Botanical Garden and in experimental gardens on higher ground near
Bandong furnished the seeds and plants from which have sprung the great
kina-plantations, or cinchona-groves, both government and private,
whose red branches show in definite color-masses on every hillside of
the Preangers, while the spindling young trees shade acres of tea-,
coffee-, and cocoa-plants in their first growths. Java now produces, from
government and private plantations together, one half of the world’s
supply of quinine, Ceylon and India furnishing the balance. Ship-loads
of bark are sent to the laboratories or chemical factories of Europe,
which produce the precious sulphate on which rest England’s and Holland’s
conquest of the Indies and all European domination in the farther East,
and laboratories are now building for manufacturing the sulphate from the
bark in Java.
[Illustration: SCENES AROUND THE MARKET.]
Poppy-culture has always been strictly prohibited, although the natives
are greatly addicted to opium-smoking, especially in the middle or Hindu
provinces. With all their zeal for revenue, the Dutch have resisted the
example of the British in India and the Chinese in Szechuen and the
western provinces of China, and have never let the land bloom with that
seductive flower. The sale of opium is a closely guarded government
monopoly, conducted at present under the _régie_ system, the government
itself importing all that is consumed in the colony and selling it from
fixed offices throughout the island.
Salt-works and tin-mines were managed in as systematic and profitable a
way as crops and cultures. No private individual was allowed to make or
import salt into the colony. The government still holds the salt-supply
as a monopoly, and there are large salt-works on Madura Island, where the
natives are required to deliver fixed quantities of coarse salt at the
government warehouses at the rate (in 1897) of ten gulden the _kojan_
(1853 kilograms). The government manages the tin-mines on Banka Island
in the Java Sea, while the mines of the neighboring Billeton Island are
leased to private individuals.
IX
THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” (_Continued_)
The culture system, as an experiment in colonial government and finance,
was the greatest success and worked incalculable benefits to the
islands and the native people, as well as to the assisted colonists
and the crown of Holland. Great stretches of jungle were cleared and
brought under cultivation, and more money was paid in wages directly
to native cultivators and mill workmen each year than all the natives
paid in taxes to the government. The Javanese acquired better homes,
much personal wealth, and improved in all the conditions of living. The
population increased tenfold during the half-century that the culture
system was in operation—this alone an unanswerable reply to all critics
and detractors, who declaimed against the oppression and outrage upon
the Javanese. As the island became, under this system, a more profitable
possession than it had been under the real tyranny exercised during
the days of close-trade monopoly, the envy and attention of all the
other colonizing nations of Europe were drawn to this new departure in
colonial government. Spain copied the system in its tobacco-growing in
the Philippine Islands, but could not follow further. Philanthropic and
pharisaical neighbors, political economists, advanced political thinkers,
humanitarians, and sentimentalists, all addressed themselves to the
subject, and usually condemned the culture system in unmeasured terms.
Holland’s voluntary abolition of slavery in its East India possessions
by no means stilled the storm of invective and abuse. Leaders, speeches,
books, pamphlets, even novels,[2] showed up the horrors, the injustice
and iniquities said to be perpetrated in Java. It was shown that almost
nothing of the great revenues from the island was devoted to the
education or benefit of the natives; that no mission or evangelical work
was undertaken, or even allowed, by this foremost Protestant people of
Europe; and that next to nothing in the way of public works or permanent
improvements resulted to the advantage of those who toiled for the alien,
absentee landlord, i. e., the crown of Holland,—the country being drained
of its wealth for the benefit of a distant monarch. It was estimated that
between 1831 and 1877 the natives were mulcted of one billion, seven
hundred million francs by the forced labor exacted from them, and the
sales of their produce to the government at the low market prices fixed
by the purchaser. By continued philippics and exaggerated accusations,
the names of Dutch government and Java planter became, to the average
European, synonyms for all of rapacity, tyranny, extortion, and cruelty,
and there was an impression that something worse than Spanish persecution
in the Netherlands, in the name of religion, was being carried on by the
Hollanders in Java in the name of the almighty florin. All the iniquities
and horrors of the Dutch management of the cinnamon-gardens of Ceylon,
and all the infamy of the Dutch East India Company’s misrule in Java
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were stupidly mixed up
with and charged against the comparatively admirable, the orderly and
excellently devised culture system of Governor Van den Bosch. Contractor
planters vainly urged that the only tyranny and oppression of the people
came from their own village chiefs; but philanthropists pointed steadily
to the colonial government and the system which inspired and upheld the
village tyrants.
[Illustration: A VIEW IN BUITENZORG]
In 1859 Mr. J. W. B. Money, a Calcutta barrister, visited Java, made
exhaustive search and inquiry into every branch and detail of the
culture system’s working, and put the results in book form inwoven with
a comparison with the less intelligent and successful management of the
land and labor question in British India, where, with sixteen times the
area and twelve times the population of Java, the revenue is only four
times as great. His book, “Java: How to Manage a Colony” (London, Hurst &
Blackett, 1861), is a most complete and reliable résumé of the subject,
and his opinions throughout were an indorsement of the Van den Bosch
culture system. He contrasted warmly the failure and inefficiency of
the British India _ryot warree_, or land system, with the established
communal system which the Oriental prefers and is fitted for, and showed
how a similar culture system in Bengal and Madras would have worked to
the advantage, benefit, and profit of Hindustan, the Hindus, and the
British crown. Mr. Money especially noted how the Dutch refrained from
interfering with native prejudices and established customs; how the
prestige of the native aristocracy was as carefully maintained as that
of the white race, with no modern, Western notions of equality, even
before the law, the Dutch securing regentship to the leading noble of a
district, and giving him more revenue and actual power than were possible
under the native emperor. Mr. Money noted only the best of feeling
apparently existing between natives and Europeans, a condition dating
entirely from the establishment of the culture system, and the general
prosperity that succeeded. “No country in the East can show so rich or so
contented a peasantry as Java,” he said.
Alfred Russel Wallace, who visited Java several times between 1854 and
1862, while the culture system was at the height of its successful
working, spoke in approval and praise of what he saw of the actual
system and its results, and commended it as the only means of forcing
an indolent, tropical race to labor and develop the resources and
industries of the island. His was one of the few clear, dispassionate,
and intelligent statements given on that side, and he summed up his
observations in the declaration that Java was “the very garden of the
East, and perhaps, upon the whole, the richest, best-cultivated, and the
_best-governed_ island in the world.”
The competition of French beet-sugar, fed by large government bounties of
West Indian and Hawaiian sugars, so reduced the price of sugar in Europe
that in 1871 the Dutch government began to withdraw from the sugar-trade,
and by 1890 had no interest in nor connection with any of the many mills
which colonists had built on the island. Java ranked second only to Cuba
in the production of cane-sugar, and now (1897) ranks first in the world.
Trade returns now show sugar exports to the value of six million pounds
sterling from the private plantations of Java and Sumatra each year, and
the distillation of arrack for the trade with Norway and Sweden is an
important business.
At the time that sugar began to fall in price, owing to Western
competition, Brazilian and Central American coffees began to command
a place in the European market and to reduce prices; and then the
blight, which reached Sumatra in 1876, attacked Java plantations in
1879, and spread slowly over the island, ruining one by one all the
plantations of the choice Arabian or Mocha coffee-trees. As the area
of thriving plantations decreased, and acres and acres of the white
skeletons of blighted trees belted the hillsides, vain attempts were
made at replanting. Only the tough, woody, coarse African or Liberian
coffee-tree, with its large leaves and large, flat berries,—a plant
which thrives equally in a damp or a dry climate, and luxuriates in the
poorest, stoniest ground,—seems to be proof against the blight that
devastated the Ceylon and Java coffee-plantations so thoroughly at the
same time. Many of the old coffee-plantations in Java, as in Ceylon,
were burned over and planted to tea; yet in many places in the Preangers
one sees the bleached skeletons of Arabian trees still standing, and the
abandoned plantations smothered in weeds and creepers, and fast relapsing
to jungle. The virgin soil of Sumatra has so far escaped the severest
attacks of the blight, and the center of coffee-production there is near
Padang, on the west coast, whence the bulk of the crop goes directly to
England or America in British ships.
The blight forced the Dutch government to begin its retirement from the
coffee-trade, and but the smallest fraction of the coffee exported now
goes from government plantations or warehouses. Nearly all the Sumatra
plantations are owned or leased by private individuals, and the greater
part of coffee lands in Java are cultivated by independent planters, who
sell their crop freely in the open market. With the wholesale replanting
of the Liberian tree in place of the Arabian, and the shipping only of
the large, flat Liberian bean instead of the Mocha’s small, round berry,
it is questionable whether the little real “government Java” that goes to
market is entitled to the name which won the esteem of coffee-drinking
people for the century before the blight. The Dutch government still
raises and sells coffee, but under strong protest and opposition in
Holland, and as a temporary concession during these times of financial
straits.
Public opinion was gradually aroused in Holland, and opponents of the
culture system at last spoke out in the States-General; but not until
the prices of sugar and coffee had fallen seriously, and the blight
had ruined nearly all the government coffee-plantations, did the
stirring of Holland’s conscience bid the government retire from trade
and agriculture, and leave the development of the island’s resources,
in natural and legitimate ways, to the enterprise of the many European
settlers then established in permanence in Java, who had begun to see
that the government was their most serious rival and competitor in the
market.
The common sense and cooler vision of these days since its abandonment
have shown that the culture system was an inspiration, a stroke of
administrative genius of the first order, accomplishing in a few decades,
for the material welfare of the island and its people, what the native
race of a tropical country never could or would have done in centuries.
The American mind naturally puzzles most over the idea that twenty odd
millions of people of one race, language, and religion should ever
have submitted to be ruled by a mere handful of over-sea usurpers and
speculators. Considering the genius and characteristics of all Asiatic
people, their superstitions, fatalism, self-abasement, and continuous
submission to alien conquests and despotisms, which all their histories
record and their religions almost seem to enjoin, and remembering the
successive Buddhist, Brahmanic, and Mohammedan conquests and conversions
of Java, and the domestic wars of three centuries since Islam’s invasion,
the half-century of the culture system’s prosperous trial seems a most
fortunate epoch and the cause of the admirable and surprising conditions
existing to-day in that model garden and hothouse of the world.
It was much regretted later that some part of the culture system’s
enormous profits was not devoted to railway construction and the making
of the new harbor for Batavia at Tandjon Priok, as, immediately after
the system’s abandonment, railways and the new harbor became more urgent
needs, and had to be provided for out of the current revenues, then taxed
with the vigorous beginning of the Achinese struggle—Holland’s thirty
years’ war in the Indies, which has so sadly crippled the exchequer.
In order to provide a crown revenue in lieu of the sugar and coffee
sales, a poll-tax was imposed on the natives in place of the seventh
of their labor given to culture-system crops, and increased taxes were
levied on lands and property; but through the extensive public works,
the long-continued Achinese war in Sumatra, and the little war with the
Sassaks in Lombok (1894), the deficits in the colonial budgets have
become more ominous every year since 1876. The crown of Holland no longer
receives a golden stream from the Indies, and is pushed to devise means
to meet its obligations.
The culture system brought to Java a selected lot of refined,
intelligent, capable, energetic colonists, who, settling there in
permanence and increasing their holdings and wealth, have become the
most numerous and important body of Europeans on the island. The great
sugar and coffee barons, the patriarchal rulers of vast tea-gardens,
the kina and tobacco kings, really rule Netherlands India. The planters
and the native princes have much in common, and in the Preangers these
horse-racing country gentlemen affiliate greatly and make common social
cause against the small aristocracy of office-holders, who have been
wont to regard the native nobles and the mercantile communities of the
ports from on high.
The colonial government has never welcomed aliens to the isles, whether
those bent on business or on pleasure. Dutch suspicion still throws as
many difficulties as possible in the way of a tourist, and it took strong
preventive measures against an influx of British or other _uitlander_
planters when the abandonment of the culture system made private
plantations desirable, and the opening of the Suez Canal brought Java
so near to Europe. As a better climate, better physical conditions of
every kind, and a more docile, industrious native race were to be found
in Java than elsewhere in the Indies, there was a threatened invasion of
coffee- and tea-planters, more particularly from India and Ceylon. The
Boer of the tropics, like his kinsman in South Africa, found effectual
means to so hamper as virtually to exclude the uitlander planters.
Land-transfers and leases were weighted with inconceivable restrictions
and impositions; heavy taxes, irksome police and passport regulations,
and nearly as many restraints as were put upon Arabs and Chinese, urged
the British planter to go elsewhere, since he could not have any voice in
local or colonial government in a lifetime.[3] Six years’ residence is
required for naturalization, but the Briton is rarely willing to change
his allegiance—it is his purpose rather to Anglicize, naturalize, annex,
or protect all outlying countries as English.
The governor-general of the colony may revoke the toelatings-kaart of
any one, Dutch as well as alien, and order him out of Netherlands
India; and a resident is such an autocrat that he can order any planter
or trader out of his domain if it is shown that he habitually maltreats
or oppresses the natives, or does anything calculated to compromise the
superior standing or prestige of the white people. The Dutch are severe
upon this latter point, and the best of them uphold a certain noblesse
oblige as imperative upon all who possess a white skin. The European
military officer is sent to Holland for court martial and punishment,
that the native soldiers may remain ignorant of his degradation, and the
European who descends to drunkenness is hurried from native sight and
warned. While the conquerors hold these people with an iron grasp, they
aim to treat them with absolute justice. Many officials and planters have
married native wives, and their children, educated in Europe, with all
the advantages of wealth and cultured surroundings, do not encounter any
race or color prejudice nor any social barriers in their life in Java.
They are Europeans in the eye of the law and the community, and enjoy
“European freedom.” No native man is allowed to marry or to employ a
European, not even as a tutor or governess, and no such subversion of
social order as the employment of a European servant is to be thought of.
There is a romance, all too true, of governmental interference, and the
dismissal from his office of regent, of the native prince who wished to
marry a European girl whose parents fully consented to the alliance. The
laws allow a European to put away his native wife, to legally divorce
her, upon the slightest pretexts, and to abandon her and her children
with little redress; but fear of Malay revenge, the chilling tales of
slow, mysterious deaths overtaking those who desert Malay wives or return
to Europe without these jealous women, act as restraining forces.
The Dutch do not pose as philanthropists, nor pretend to be in Java “for
the good of the natives.” They have found the truth of the old adage
after centuries of obstinate experiment in the other line, and honesty in
all dealings with the native is much the best policy and conduces most to
the general prosperity and abundant crops. Fear of the Malay spirit of
revenge, and the terrible series of conspiracies and revolts of earlier
times, have done much, perhaps, to bring about this era of kindness,
fair dealing, and justice. The native is now assured his rights almost
more certainly than in some freer countries, and every effort is made to
prevent the exercise of tyrannical authority by village chiefs, the main
oppressors. He can always appeal to justice and be heard; the prestige
of the native aristocracy is carefully maintained; the Oriental ideas of
personal dignity and the laws of caste are strictly regarded, and, if
from prudential and economic reasons only, no omissions in such lines are
allowed to disturb the even flow of the florin Hollandward.
Already the spirit of the age is beginning to reach Java, and it is
something to make all the dead Hollanders turn in their graves when it
can be openly suggested that there should be a separate and independent
budget for Netherlands India, and that there should be some form of
popular representation—a deliberative assembly of elected officials
to replace the close Council of India. In fact, suggestions for the
actual autonomy of Java have been uttered aloud. There are ominous signs
everywhere, and the government finds its petty remnant of coffee-culture
and grocery business a more vexing and difficult venture each year. The
Samarang “Handelsblad,” in commenting on it, says:
“The Javanese are no longer as easily led and driven as a flock of sheep,
however much we may deplore that their character has changed in this
respect. The Javanese come now a great deal into contact with Europeans,
the education spread among them has had an effect, and communication has
been rendered easy. They do not fear the European as they did formerly.
The time is gone when the entire population of a village could be driven
to a far-off plantation with a stick; the pruning-knife and the ax would
quickly be turned against the driver in our times. The Javanese to-day
does not believe that you are interested in his welfare only; he is well
aware that he is cheated out of a large proportion of the value of the
coffee that is harvested. Some people may think it a pity that the time
of coercion is coming to an end in Java, but that cannot change the
facts. The dark period in the history of Java is passing away, and every
effort to prevent reforms will call forth the enmity of the natives.”
The state committee on government coffee-plantations says in its latest
reports:
“It cannot be denied that the intellectual status of the Javanese at the
present day is very different from that during the time when the coffee
monopoly was introduced. The reforms which we have introduced in the
administration of justice, the education according to Western methods,
and the free admission of private enterprise have all brought about a
change. If the native has not become more progressive and more sensible,
he is at least wiser in matters about which he had best be kept in the
dark, unless the government means to remove coercion at the expense of
the exchequer.”
[Illustration: JAVANESE COOLIES GAMBLING.]
The Amsterdam “Handelsblad” remarks that, “as far as the Dutch
possessions are concerned, coercion and monopoly indeed must go. People
who cannot see this betimes will find out their mistake rather suddenly.”
That sage socialist, Élisée Reclus, remarks that “once more it appears
that monopoly ends in the ruin not only of the despoilers, but of the
state.”
X
SINAGAR
Scientists and lay tourists have equally exhausted their adjectives in
laudations of Java, Miss Marianne North calling it “one magnificent
garden of luxuriance, surpassing Brazil, Jamaica, and Sarawak combined”;
and Alfred Russel Wallace epitomizing it after this fashion: “Taking it
as a whole, and surveying it from every point of view, Java is probably
the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world.... The
most fertile, productive, and populous island in the tropics.” Lesser
folk have been as sweeping in their superlatives, and all agree that, of
all exiled cultivators in the far parts of the world, the Java planter
is most to be envied, leading, as he does, the ideal tropical life, the
one best worth living, in a land where over great areas it is always
luxurious, dreamy afternoon, and in the beautiful hill-country is always
the fresh, breezy, dewy summer forenoon of the rarest June.
The most favored and the most famous plantations are those around
Buitenzorg and in the Preanger regencies, which lie on the other side
of Gedeh and Salak, those two sleeping volcanoes that look down upon
their own immediate foot-hills and valleys, to see those great, rolling
tracts all cultivated like a Haarlem tulip-bed. Above the cacao limit,
tea-gardens, coffee-estates, and kina-plantations cover all the land
lying between the altitudes of two thousand and four thousand feet above
the level of the sea. The owners of these choicest bits of “the Garden
of the East” lead an existence that all other planters of growing crops,
and most people who value the creature comforts, the luxuries of life,
and nature’s opulence, may envy. The climate of the hills is all that
Sybarite could wish for,—a perpetual 70° by day, with light covering
required at night,—the warm sun of the tropics tempering the fresh
mountain air to an eternal mildness, in which the human animal thrives
and luxuriates quite as do all the theobromas and caffein plants in the
ground. In the near circle of these two great peaks there is no really
dry season, despite the southeast monsoon of the conventional summer
months. Every day in the year enjoys its shower, swept from one mountain
or the other; and the heavy thunderstorms at the change of the monsoons
and during the winter rainy season are the joy of the planter’s heart,
shaking out myriads of young tea-leaves by their jar and rushing winds,
and freshening the coffee-trees like a tonic. As every day has its
shower, each day has its tea-crop gathered and cured in this favorable
region; and that profitable industry is as continuous and unchanging as
the seasons on the Preanger hillsides, and paramount there, now that
coffee is no longer king.
The two great plantations of Sinagar and Parakan Salak, principalities of
twelve and fifteen thousand acres respectively, that lie in the valley
between Salak and Gedeh, are the oldest and the model tea-gardens of
Java, the show-places of the Preangers. Parong Koeda and Tjibitad, an
hour beyond Buitenzorg, are practically private railway-stations for
these two great estates. The post-road from Tjibitad to Sinagar follows
the crest of a ridge, and gives magnificent views between its shade-trees
over twenty miles of rolling country, cultivated to the last acre. Blue
vapors were tumbling in masses about the summit of Salak the afternoon
we coursed along the avenues of shade-trees, and the low growls of
distant thunder gave promise of the regular afternoon benefit shower
to the thirsty plants and trees that ridged every slope and level with
lines of luxuriant green. The small ponies scampered down an avenue
of magnificent kanari-trees, with a village of basket houses like to
those of Lilliput at the base of the lofty trunks, and, with a rush and
a sudden turn around tall shrubbery, brought up before the low white
bungalow, where the master of Sinagar sat in his envied ease under such
vines and trees as would form a _mise en scène_ for an ideal, generally
acceptable paradise. A sky-line of tall areca-palms, massed flame-trees,
and tamarinds, with vivid-leafed bougainvillea vines pouring down from
one tree-top and mantling two or three lesser trees, filled the immediate
view from the great portico-hall, or living-room, where the welcoming
cups of afternoon tea were at once served.
With the nearest neighbor ten miles away, and the thousand workmen
employed upon the place settled with their families in different
villages within its confines, Sinagar is a little world or industrial
commune by itself, its master a patriarchal ruler, whose sway over these
gentle, childlike Javanese is as absolute as it is kindly and just. The
“master” has sat under his Sinagar palms and gorgeous bougainvilleas
for twenty-six out of the thirty-three years spent in Java, and his
sons and daughters have grown up there, gone to Holland to finish their
studies, and, returning, have made Sinagar a social center of this part
of the Preangers. The life is like that of an English country house,
with continental and tropical additions that unite in a social order
replete with pleasure and interest. Weekly musicales are preceded by
large dinner-parties, guests driving from twenty miles away and coming
by train; and, with visitors in turn from all parts of the world, the
guest-book is a polyglot and cosmopolitan record of great interest. Long
wings have been added to the original bungalow dwelling, inclosing a
spacious court, or garden, all connected by arcades and all illuminated
by electric lights. The ladies’ boudoir at the far end of the buildings
opens from a great portico, or piazza, furnished with the hammocks, the
ratan furniture, and the countless pillows of a European or American
summer villa, but looking out on a marvelous flower-garden and an
exquisite landscape view. To that portico were brought the rarest flowers
and fruits for our inspection,—such lilies and orchids and strangely
fragrant things!—and we cut apart cacao-pods, and those “velvety,
cream-colored peaches” inclosing the nutmeg, and dissected clove-buds
with a zeal that amused the young hostesses, to whom these had all been
childhood toys. The telephone and telegraph connect all parts of the
estate with virtually all parts of the world; and with the great news
of Europe clicking in from Batavia, or “helloed” over by some friend at
Buitenzorg, one could quite forget the distance from the older centers
of civilization, and wonder that all the world did not make Java its
playground and refuge of delight, and every man essay the rôle of Java
planter.
While we sat at tea that first afternoon, two brilliant scarlet minivers
flashed across the screen of shrubbery like tongues of flame, followed
by crimson-and-black orioles; while at the master’s call a flock of
azure-and-iris-winged pigeons came whirling through the air and settled
before us in all the sheen and beauty of their plumage. A great wire
house full of rare tropic birds was the center of attraction for all the
wild birds of the neighborhood, and gorgeously feathered and strangely
voiced visitors were always on wing among the shrubbery. In that big
aviary lived and flew and walked in beauty the crested Java pigeon, a
creature flashing with all intense prismatic blues, and wearing on its
head an aigret of living sapphires trembling on long, pliant stems—one
of the most graceful and beautiful birds in the world. Other birds of
brilliant plumage, wonderful cockatoos, parrots, long-tailed pheasants,
and beauties of unknown name, lived as a happy family in the one great
cage, around which prowled and sat licking its whiskers a cat of most
enterprising and sagacious mien—a cat that had come all the way from
Chicago, only to have its lakeside appetite tormented by this Barmecide
feast of rainbow birds.
We were led past flower-beds nodding with strange lilies, past
rose-gardens and oleander-hedges, down a paved path that was a steep
tunnel through dense shrubbery and overarching trees, to a great white
marble tank, or swimming-pool, as large as a ball-room; though few
ball-rooms can ever have such lavish decorations of palms, bamboos, and
tree-ferns as screen that pool around, with the purple summit of Salak
showing just above the highest plumes and fronds—a landscape study
just fitted for a theatrical drop-curtain. We might swim or splash,
dive or float, or sit on marble steps and comfortably soak at will in
that great white tank, the clear spring water warmed by the sun to a
soothing temperature for the long, luxurious afternoon bath, and cooled
sufficiently through the night to give refreshing shock to early morning
plungers. Only the approaching storm, the nearer rumbles of thunder, and
finally the first small raindrops induced us to leave that fairy white
pool, deep sunk in its tropic glen.
After a half-hour of soft rain, accompanied by three sharp thunder-claps,
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.
The train climbs very slowly from Bandong to Kalaidon Pass, and, after
toiling with double engines up the steep grades, it rests at a level, and
there bursts upon one the view of the plain of Leles—the fairest of all
tropical landscapes, a vision of an ideal promised land, and such a dream
of beauty that even the leaden blue clouds of a rainy afternoon could not
dim its surpassing loveliness. The railway follows a long shelf hewn high
on the mountain wall, that encircles an oval plain set with two conical
mountains that rise more than two thousand feet above the level of this
plain of Leles, itself two thousand feet above the level of the sea.
The finely wrought surface of the plain—networked with the living green
dikes and terraces of rice-fields, which, flooded, gleam and glitter
in the fitful sun-rays, or, sown and harvested, glow with a mosaic of
green and gold—is one exquisite symphony in color, an arrangement in
greens that holds one breathless with delight. All the golden greens of
rice seed-beds, the intense, vivid greens of young rice transplanted,
the opaque and darker greens of advanced crops, and the rich tones of
stubble are relieved by the clumps and masses of palms and fine-leaved
trees, which, like islands or mere ornamental bits of shrubbery, are
disposed with the most admirable effect to be attained by landscape
art. Each of these tufted clumps of trees, foregrounded with broad,
translucent banana-leaves, declares the presence of toy villages, where
the tillers of the plain, the landscape-farmers, and the artist-artisans
have woven and set up their pretty basketry homes. A masterpiece, a
central ornament or jewel, to which the valley is but the fretted and
appropriate setting, a very altar of agriculture, a colossal symbol and
emblem of abundance, is the conical Goenong-Kalaidon, a mountain which
rises three thousand feet from the level of the plain, and is terraced
all the way from base to summit with narrow ribbons of rice-fields—the
whole mountain mass etched with myriad fine green lines of verdure,
wrinkled around and around with the curving parapets and tiny terraces
that retain the flooded hanging gardens. Beyond this amazing piece of
agricultural sculpture stands Goenong-Haroeman, a more perfect pyramid,
a still rarer trophy of the landscape-farmer’s art, even more finely
carved in the living green lines of ancient terrace-culture. The rush of
the thousand rills, dropping from one tiny terrace to another, fills the
air with a peculiar singing undertone, an eerie accompaniment that adds
the last magic touch to the fascination of the plain of Leles. Hardly the
miles of sculptured bas-reliefs on Boro Boedor and Brambanam temple walls
make them any more impressive as monuments and records of human toil
than these great green pyramids of Kalaidon and Haroeman, on which human
labor has been lavished for all the seasons of uncounted generations—the
ascending lines, the successive steps of the great green staircases of
rice-terraces, recording ages of toil as plainly as the rings within a
tree-trunk declare its successive years of growth.
The railway, dipping nearly to the level of the plain as it describes a
great curve around the gloriously green Kalaidon, again ascends along the
side of the mountain wall, loops itself around the Haroeman pyramid, and
halts at the station of Leles. From that point one has a backward view
over the enchanting picture (a line of white bridges and culverts marking
the path of the railway along the mountain-side) and he looks directly
across at the soft green slopes of Haroeman, which faces him—that vast
green dome or pyramid, which is a little world in itself, with uncounted
villages nestling under clumps of palm-trees that break the lines of
singing terraces, and those peasants of the hanging gardens looking down
upon the most pleasing prospect, the most beautiful landscape in all
Java, which should be world-famous, and whose charm it is as impossible
to exaggerate as to describe.
The sesquipedalian names of the railway-stations throughout the Preanger
regencies, are something to fill a traveler’s mind between halts, and
almost explain why the locomotives not only toot and whistle nearly
all the time they are in motion, but stand on the track before station
sign-boards and shriek for minutes at a time, like machines demented.
Radjamendala is an easy arrangement in station names for the early
hours of the trip, and all that family of names—Tjitjoeroek, Tjibeber,
Tjirandjang, Tjipenjeum, Tjitjalenka, and also Tagoogapoe—will slip
from the tongue after a few trials; but when one strains his eyes
toward the limits of the plain of Leles, he may almost see the houses
of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan. People actually live there and pay
taxes, and it is my one regret that I did not leave the train, drive
over, and have some letters postmarked with that astonishing aggregation
of sound-symbols. Only actual sight, too, could altogether convince
one, that one small village of metal-workers could really support so
much nomenclature together with any amount of profitable trade. In the
intervals of practising the pronunciation of that particular geographic
name, the artisans of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan do hammer out
serviceable gongs, bowls, and household utensils of brass and copper. In
earlier times Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan was the Toledo of the isles,
and the kris-blades forged there had finer edge than those from any other
place in the archipelago. In these railroad and tramp-steamer days of
universal, wholesale trade rivalry, the blade of the noble kris more
often comes from abroad, and the chilled edges from Birmingham or those
made in Germany have displaced the blades made at the edge of the plain
of Leles, and the glory of Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan has departed.
XIII
“TO TISSAK MALAYA!”
The sun fell at six o’clock, and in the fast-gathering twilight of the
tropics the train shrieked past Tjihondje and Radjapolah, stopped but a
minute at Indihiang, and panted into Tissak Malaya like an affrighted
creature, to put up for the night. We were whirled through avenues of
pitch-darkness, with illuminated porticos gleaming through splendid
shrubberies, to the _passagrahan_, or government rest-house. At first we
thought the Parthenon had been restored and whitened, and leased to some
colonial landlord, or at least that we had come to the deserted summer
palace of some great sovereign, so lofty were the columns, so enormous
the shining white portico before which the sadoes halted. Quite feudal
and noble we felt ourselves, too, when the sadoe-drivers crouched on
their heels in that abject position of the dodok, or squatting obeisance,
and when they raised the coins to their foreheads in a reverent _simbah_,
or worshipful thanksgiving. Truly we were reaching the heart of a strange
country, and experiences were thickening!
The passagrahan was an object for sight-seers by itself. The great open
space under the portico was the usual living-room, with huge tables,
reading-lamps, and lounging- and arm-chairs fitted for a giant’s ease. A
grand hallway running straight through the center of the building held
the scattered and massive furniture of a banquet-hall. Bedrooms with
latticed doors opened from either side of this noble hall, the least
of these chambers twenty feet square, with ceilings twenty feet high;
while the beds, measuring seven by nine feet, suggested Brobdingnagian
nightmares to match.
At nine o’clock we followed a silent, beckoning Malay with a lantern off
into pitch-darkness, down a deserted street, around a hedge, to a smaller
white portico with lamps and rocking-chairs and center-tables. We were
dazed as we came suddenly into the glare of lights; and the other guests
at the _table d’hôte_ of the little hotel viewed us as they would have
viewed sudden arrivals by balloon.
“From America! To Tissak Malaya!” they all exclaimed, and we almost
apologized for having come so far. There was an amiable and charming
young Dutch woman in the company, who, speaking English, benefited all
her compatriots with the details of our present itinerary, our past lives
and mutual relationships, after each little conversational turn she took
with us.
Having commanded a sunrise breakfast for the next morning, we followed
the lantern and the silent Malay back through blackness to our
illuminated Parthenon of a passagrahan, and had entomological excitement
and entertainment for an hour, while all the strange flying things filled
the air and strewed the table beneath the lamps. The usual lizards
chuck-chucked and called for “Becky” in the shadows, and thin wraiths
of lizards ran over the great columns and walls; but a house-front that
was not decorated with lizards would be the strangest night sight in
Java. When we had laid ourselves out on the state catafalques in the
great bedrooms, stealthy whisperings and rustlings of palm-trees beyond
the latticed windows, other strange sounds, and startled bird-calls
throughout the night suggested the great snakes we had expected to
encounter daily and nightly in Java. The tiny light floating in a
tumbler of cocoanut-oil threw weird shadows over the walls, and within
the bed-curtains one had space to dance a quadrille or arrange a whole
set of ordinary bedroom furniture, while the open construction of the
upper partition-walls let one converse at will with the occupant of the
farthest apartment.
[Illustration: A MOHAMMEDAN MOSQUE.]
In the first clear light of the dewy morning we saw that a beautiful
garden surrounded the passagrahan, and our vast Parthenon of the darkness
did not seem so colossal when seen in the shadow of the magnificent
kanari-trees that shaded the street before it. While lost in admiration
of this splendid aisle of shade-trees, I saw a solitary pedestrian coming
down the green avenue, just the pygmy touch of human life needed to
complete the picture and give one measure for the soaring tree-trunks
and vast canopy of leaves. The slender figure, advancing with the
splendid, slow stride of these people, was visible now in a glorifying
shaft of earliest, level yellow sunlight, and then almost invisible
against the tall hibiscus-hedges or the green shadows of tree-trunks. A
nearer flash of sunlight gilded a tray he was carrying—a tray furnished
with three small cups of coffee and a plate with six thin wafers of
toast, which, well cooled by the long promenade in the fresh air of the
morning, constituted the breakfast of three able-bodied travelers, who
were to pass the rest of the day on the train, with only opportunity
for a sandwich lunch before the evening’s nine-o’clock dinner. We sent
back those thimble cups, and they were refilled with the same lukewarm,
indefinite, muddy gray fluid; but finally, by personal exertions and
a hasty trip down the magnificent avenue, some solid additions were
secured to the usual scant, skeleton, impressionist breakfast of the
country—some marmalade, some eggs, and a bit of the cold blue meat of the
useful buffalo. Everywhere in Java one’s first, best instincts and finer
feelings of the day are hurt and the appetite affronted by just such
early morning incidents; protest and prevision are alike useless, and
travel on the island is beset with unnecessary hardships.
The semi-weekly passer of Tissak Malaya was then beginning in a park,
or open market-place, in front of the passagrahan, and picturesque
processions of venders and buyers came straggling down the arched
avenues, and filled the shady quadrangle with a holiday hum. There were
double panoramas and stages of living pictures along each path in the
passer encampment, that grew like magic; and the glowing colors of the
fruit-, the flower-, and the pepper-markets, the bright sarongs and
turbans, and, above all, the cheerful chatter, were quite inspiring.
We bought everywhere—fruits, and a queer three-story basket to hold
them; yards of jasmine garlands, bunches of roses, and great double
handfuls of the green, lindenish ylang-ylang flowers, pinned with a
thorn in a plantain-leaf cornucopia—this last lot of perpetual fragrance
for three gulden cents only. Odd bottles of home-made attars of rose
and jasmine were sold as cheaply, and gums in straw cases, ready for
burning. There was a dry-goods district, where booths were piled high
and hung round with Cheribon and other gay sarongs of Middle Java,
slandangs and kerchiefs of strongest colors and intricate borderings.
We were distracted with the wide choice offered, but could not rouse
the phlegmatic dealers to any eagerness or excitement in bargaining;
the whole overcharge, reductions, and slow-descending fall in prices
proceeding, on the part of the dealers, with a well-assumed indifference,
an uninterrupted betel-chewing, a bored and lethargic manner that wore
one sadly. A long row of country tailors, thirty or forty of them in a
line, sat like so many sparrows around the edges of the passer in the
comforting shade of the kanari-trees. All were spectacled like owls,
and sat cross-legged before their little American sewing-machines. The
customers brought their cloth, the tailors measured them with the eye,
and in no time at all the machines were humming up and down the seams of
the jackets, that needed no fitting nor trying on, and were made while
the candidates sat and smoked and chatted with the sartorial artists.
From the chatter-chatter along this tailors’ row one might conclude that
what the barbers are to Seville, as purveyors of news, the tailors are to
Tissak Malaya.
All too soon we had to tear ourselves away from the fascinating passer,
and, loaded down with our mixed marketing, fly by sadoe to the station at
the far end of town. We saw then the magnificent aisle of kanari-trees we
had passed through in darkness the night before—an avenue more fitted for
an emperor’s triumphal procession than for our queer little two-wheeled
carts, drawn each by a mite of a pony, that was all but lifted from the
ground by the shafts when I stepped on the after foot-board untimely, the
driver dodoking like a hop-toad on the ground in respectful humility. The
natives were streaming down the great _allée_ and in from all the side
streets and by-paths toward the passer, and we half wished we might miss
the train when we realized what a spectacle that Tissak Malaya passer was
about to be.
In Middle Java, where the railway descends from the Preanger hills to
the _terra ingrata’s_ succession of jungle and swamp at the coast-level,
one experiences the same dull, heavy, sickening, depressing heat as
in Batavia. After the clear, fresh, mildly cool air, the eternal
southern-California climate of the hills, this sweltering atmosphere
gave full suggestion of the tropics’ deadly perils. Hour after hour
the train followed a raised embankment across an endless swamp, the
brilliantly flowered lantana-hedges still accompanying the tracks, and
a dense forest wall, tangled and matted together with ratans and other
creepers, shutting off the view on either side. The malaria and the
deadly fever-germs that haunt this region were almost visible, so dense
was the air. While this section of the railway was building, even the
native workmen were carried back each day to sleep in camps in safer
neighborhoods. No white man could work, nor remain there directing work,
and Chinese, who are germ-, bacillus-, microbe-, and miasma-proof in
every climate, superintended work between the flying visits of European
engineers. Beside these tangled and noisome swamps there are quicksand
regions, into which car-loads of solid materials were dumped for week
after week, and where the track is still always being raised and rebuilt,
and the floating earth-crust trembles with each passing train.
As we coursed along past those miles of rankest vegetation, not a waft
of perfume reached us, nor did any mass of color or cloak of blossoms
delight the eye—a green monotony of uninteresting vegetation, save for
the ratan-palms which decorated every tree with their beautiful pinnate
leaves. There was one luxuriant vine, half covering a tall tree, which
bore clusters of large white blossoms and pendent red berries; but
that was the one ideal vine of the imagined tropical jungle’s mad riot
of stranger and more gorgeous things than bougainvillea. No clouds,
cascades, or festoons of gorgeous flowers, no waves of overpowering
perfume, no masses of orchids, rewarded eager scrutiny; no birds of
brilliant plumage flashed across the jungle’s front; no splendidly
striped tigers licked their chops and snarled in the jungle’s shade; no
rhinoceros snorted at the iron horse; and not a serpent raised a hissing
head, slid away through dank grass, or looped itself from tree-top to
tree-top in proper tropical fashion, as we steamed across the deadly,
uninhabitable _terra ingrata_. Nor had even the first construction gangs
of railway-builders met with any such sensational incidents, so the chief
engineer of the railways afterward informed us. Seeing our disappointment
and dejection, this obliging official racked his memory and at last
recalled that he himself had once seen a wild peacock walking the track
in the _terra ingrata_.
“And yes! so there was. I remember now that one of our engineers, who
was running a special locomotive along there, did see a tiger sitting on
the track. He whistled loudly, and the tiger trotted up the track until
he found the engine gaining on him, and then the royal beast bounded off
into the jungle, snarling and spitting like an angry cat.”
“But there are great snakes in the swamps surely? You must run over them
often?” we persisted.
“Doubtless; but we rarely see snakes here in Java. There are many in
Borneo, Sumatra, and the other islands that are so wild yet. But you will
see them all at the zoölogical garden in Batavia.”
Closer questioning could only elicit the statement that, while all the
terrible Java snake-stories we had read might be true, we had no need
in this modern day to shake the pillows gently each night and morning
to dislodge the sleeping cobra or python; nor to draw the bed-curtains
closely at sounds like dry leaves blowing over the floor; nor to regard
the harmless hop-toad as the certain pilot and advance-guard of a snake.
I almost began to doubt, to discredit that standard favorite, that
typical tropical snake-story of the man who fell asleep on the edge of a
Java sawa, or rice-field, and waking with a sensation of great dampness
around one knee, found that a huge but harmless sawa snake had swallowed
his leg to that point. I was ready even to hear that there never had been
any skeleton-strewn, deadly upas-tree valley on Papandayang’s slope,
since every expected sensation had fled my approach—had removed to
Borneo, to Sulu, to more remote and impossible islands.
All travel, though, is only such disillusionment and disappointment,
and he who would believe and enjoy blood-curdling things should stay by
his own fireside. The disillusioned traveler has but to choose, on his
return, whether he will truthfully dispel others’ fondest illusions,
or, joining that nameless club of so many returned travelers, continue
to clothe the more distant parts of the world with the glamour of
imagination.
XIV
PRISONERS OF STATE AT BORO BOEDOR
The fact is not generally appreciated that there are ruins of Buddhist
and Brahmanic temples in Middle Java surpassing in extent and
magnificence anything to be seen in Egypt or India. There, in the heart
of the steaming tropics, in that summer land of the world below the
equator, on an island where volcanoes cluster more thickly and vegetation
is richer than in any other region of the globe, where earthquakes
continually rock and shatter, and where deluges descend during the rainy
half of the year, remains nearly intact the temple of Boro Boedor,
covering almost the same area as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. It is
ornamented with hundreds of life-size statues and miles of bas-reliefs
presenting the highest examples of Greco-Buddhist art—a sculptured
record of all the arts and industries, the culture and civilization,
of the golden age of Java, of the life of the seventh, eighth, and
ninth centuries in all the farther East—a record that is not written in
hieroglyphs, but in plainest pictures carved by sculptor’s chisel. That
solid pyramidal temple, rising in magnificent sculptured terraces, that
was built without mortar or cement, without column or pillar or arch,
is one of the surviving wonders of the world. On the spot it seems a
veritable miracle.
It is one of the romances of Buddhism that this splendid monument of
human industry, abandoned by its worshipers as one cult succeeded
another, and forgotten after the Mohammedan conquest imposed yet another
creed upon the people, should have disappeared completely, hidden in the
tangle of tropical vegetation, a formless, nameless, unsuspected mound
in the heart of a jungle, lost in every way, with no part in the life of
the land, finally to be uncovered to the sight of the nineteenth century.
When Sir Stamford Raffles came as British governor of Java in 1811, the
Dutch had possessed the island for two centuries, but in their greed for
gulden had paid no heed to the people, and knew nothing of that earlier
time before the conquest when the island was all one empire, the arts
and literature flourished, and, inspired by Hindu influence, Javanese
civilization reached its highest estate; nor did the Hollander allow
any alien investigators to peer about this profitable plantation. Sir
Stamford Raffles, in his five years of control, did a century’s work. He
explored, excavated, and surveyed the ruined temples, and searching the
voluminous archives of the native princes, drew from the mass of romantic
legends and poetic records the first “History of Java.” His officers
copied and deciphered inscriptions, and gradually worked out all the
history of the great ruins, and determined the date of their erection at
the beginning of the seventh century.
At this time Sir Stamford wrote: “The interior of Java contains temples
that, as works of labor and art, dwarf to nothing all our wonder and
admiration at the pyramids of Egypt.” Then Alfred Russel Wallace said:
“The number and beauty of the architectural remains in Java ... far
surpass those of Central America, and perhaps even those of India.” And
of Boro Boedor he wrote: “The amount of human labor and skill expended
on the Great Pyramid of Egypt sinks into insignificance when compared
with that required to complete this sculptured hill-temple in the
interior of Java.” Herr Brumund called Boro Boedor “the most remarkable
and magnificent monument Buddhism has ever erected”; and Fergusson, in
his “History of Indian and Eastern Architecture,” finds in that edifice
the highest development of Buddhist art, an epitome of all its arts and
ritual, and the culmination of the architectural style which, originating
at Barhut a thousand years before, had begun to decay in India at the
time the colonists were erecting this masterpiece of the ages in the
heart of Java.
There is yet no Baedeker, or Murray, or local red book to lead one to and
about the temples and present every dry detail of fact. The references
to the ruins in books of travel and general literature are vague or
cautious generalities, absurd misstatements, or guesses. In the great
libraries of the world’s capitals the archæologists’ reports are rare,
and on the island only Dutch editions are available. Fergusson is one’s
only portable guide and aid to understanding; but as he never visited
the stupendous ruin, his is but a formal record of the main facts. Dutch
scientists criticize Sir Stamford Raffles’s work and all that Von
Humboldt and Lassen deduced from it concerning Javanese religion and
mythology. They entirely put aside all native histories and traditions,
searching and accepting only Chinese and Arabic works, and making a close
study of ancient inscriptions, upon the rendering of which few of the
Dutch savants agree.
We had applied for new toelatings-kaarten, or admission tickets, to the
interior of the island; and as they had not arrived by the afternoon
before we intended leaving Buitenzorg, we drove to the assistant
resident’s to inquire. “You shall have them this evening,” said that
gracious and courtly official, standing beside the huge carriage; “but
as it is only the merest matter of form, go right along in the morning,
ladies, anyhow, and I shall send the papers after you by post. To Tissak
Malaya? No? Well, then, to Djokjakarta.”
Upon that advice we proceeded on our journey, crossed the Preangers,
saw the plain of Leles, and made our brief visit to Tissak Malaya. We
rode for a long, hot day across the swamps and low-lying jungles of
the _terra ingrata_ of Middle Java, and just before sunset we reached
Djokjakarta, a provincial capital, where the native sultan resides in
great state, but poor imitation of independent rulership. We had tea
served us under the great portico of the Hotel Toegoe, our every movement
followed by the uncivilized piazza stare of some Dutch residents—that
gaze of the summer hotel that has no geographic or racial limit, which
even occurs on the American littoral, and in Java has a fixedness born of
stolid Dutch ancestry, and an intensity due to the tropical fervor of
the thermometer, that put it far beyond all other species of unwinking
scrutiny. The bovine, ruminant gaze of those stout women, continued
and continued past all provincial-colonial curiosity as to the cut and
stuff of our gowns, drove us to the garden paths, already twinkling with
fireflies. The landlord joined us there, and strolled with us out to the
street and along a line of torch-lighted booths and shops, where native
products and native life were most picturesquely presented. Our landlord
made himself very agreeable in explaining it all, walked on as far as
the gates of the sultan’s palace, plying us with the most point-blank
personal questions, our whence, whither, why, for how long, etc.; but
we did not mind that in a land of stares and interrogative English. He
showed us the carriage we could have for the next day’s twenty-five-mile
drive to Boro Boedor—“if you go,” with quite unnecessary emphasis on the
phrase of doubt. He finally brought us back to the portico, disappeared
for a time, and returning, said: “Ladies, the assistant resident wishes
to meet you. Will you come this way?” And the courteous one conducted us
through lofty halls and porticos to his own half-office parlor, all of us
pleased at this unexpected attention from the provincial official.
A tall, grim, severe man in the dark cloth clothes of ceremony, with
uniform buttons, waved a semi-military cap, and said curtly: “Ladies, it
is my duty to inform you that you have no permission to visit Djokja.”
It took some repetitions for us to get the whole sensation of the heavens
suddenly falling on us, to learn that a telegram had come from official
headquarters at Buitenzorg to warn him that three American ladies would
arrive that afternoon, without passports, to visit Djokja.
“Certainly not, because those Buitenzorg officials told us not to wait
for the passports—that they would mail them after us.” Then ensued
the most farcical scene, a grand burlesque rendering of the act of
apprehending criminals, or rather political suspects. The assistant
resident tried to maintain the stern, judicial manner of a police-court
magistrate, cross-examining us as closely as if it were testimony in a
murder trial we were giving, and was not at all inclined to admit that
there could be any mistake in the elaborately perfect system of Dutch
colonial government. Magnificently he told us that we could not remain
in Djokja, and we assured him that we had no wish to do so, that we
were leaving for Boro Boedor in the morning. The Pickwickian message
from Buitenzorg had not given any instructions. It merely related that
we should arrive. We had arrived, and the assistant resident evidently
did not know just what to do next. At any rate, he intended that we
should stand in awe of him and the government of Netherlands India.
He “supposed” that it was intended that we should be sent straight
back to Buitenzorg. We demurred, in fact refused—the two inflammable,
impolitic ones of us, who paid no heed to the gentle, gray-haired elder
member of our party, who was all resignation and humility before the
terrible official. We produced our United States passports, and quite
as much as told him that he and the noble army of Dutch officials might
finish the discussion with the American consul; we had other affairs,
and were bound for Boro Boedor. He waved the United States passports
aside, curtly said they were of “no account,” examined the letters of
credit with a shade more of interest, and gave his whole attention
to my “Smithsonian passport,” or general letter “to all friends of
science.” That beautifully written document, with its measured phrases,
many polysyllabic words in capital letters, and the big gold seal of
Saint-Gaudens’s designing, worked a spell; and after slowly reading all
the commendatory sentences of that great American institution “for the
increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” he read it again:
“Hum-m-m! Hum-m-m! The Smithsonian Institution of
Washington—National Geographic Society—scientific observation and
study—anthropology—photography—G. Brown Goode, acting secretary! Ah,
ladies, since you have such credentials as _this_,”—evidently the
Smithsonian Institution has better standing abroad than the Department of
State, and G. Brown Goode, acting secretary of the one, was a better name
to conjure with away from home than Walter Q. Gresham, actual secretary
of the other,—“since you come so highly commended to us, I will allow you
to proceed to Boro Boedor, and remain there while I report to Buitenzorg
and ask for instructions. You will go to Boro Boedor as early as possible
in the morning,” he commanded, and then asked, “How long had you intended
to remain there?”
“That depends. If it is comfortable, and the rains keep off, we may stay
several days. If not, we return to-morrow evening.”
“No, no, no!” he cried in alarm; “you must stay there at Boro Boedor.
You have no permission to visit Djokja, and I cannot let you stay in my
residency. You must stay at Boro Boedor or go back to Buitenzorg.”
To be ordered off to the Buddhist shrine at sunrise put the pilgrimage in
quite another light; to be sentenced to Nirvana by a local magistrate in
brass buttons was not like arriving there by slow stages—meditation and
reincarnation; but as the assistant resident seemed to be on the point of
repenting his clemency, we acquiesced, and the great man and his minions
drove away, the bearer of the _pajong_, or official umbrella of his rank,
testifying to the formal character of the visit he had been paying. The
landlord mopped his brow, sighed, and looked like one who had survived
great perils; and we then saw that his sightseeing stroll down the
street with us had been a ruse, a little clever scouting, a preliminary
reconnaissance for the benefit of the puzzled magistrate.
We left Djokja at sunrise, with enthusiasm somewhat dampened from former
anticipations of that twenty-five-mile drive to Boro Boedor, “the aged
thing” in the Boro district of Kedu Residency, or Bára Budha, “Great
Buddha.” We had expected to realize a little of the pleasure of travel
during the barely ended posting days on this garden island, networked
over with smooth park drives all shaded with tamarind-, kanari-, teak-,
and waringen-trees, and it proved a half-day of the greatest interest and
enjoyment. Our canopied carriage was drawn by four little rats of ponies,
driven by a serious old coachman in a gay sarong and military jacket,
with a huge lacquered vizor or crownless hat tied on over his battek
turban, like a student’s exaggerated eye-shade. This gave the shadow
of great dignity and owlish wisdom to his wrinkled face, ornamented by
a mustache as sparsely and symmetrically planted as walrus whiskers.
He held the reins and said nothing. When there was anything to do, the
running footman did it—a lithe little creature who clung to a rear step,
and took to his heels every few minutes to crack the whip over the
ponies’ heads, and with a frenzied “Gree! G-r-r-_ee_! _Gr-r-r-e-e-e!_”
urge the mites to a more breakneck gallop in harness. He steered them by
the traces as he galloped beside them, guided them over bridges, around
corners, past other vehicles, and through crowds, while the driver held
the reins and chewed betel tobacco in unconcerned state. We rocked and
rolled through beautiful arched avenues, with this bare-legged boy in gay
petticoat “gr-r-ree-ing” us along like mad, people scattering aside like
frightened chickens, and kneeling as we passed by. The way was fenced
and hedged and finished, to each blade of grass, like some aristocratic
suburb of a great capital, an endless park, or continuous estate, where
fancy farming and landscape-gardening had gone their most extravagant
lengths. There was not a neglected acre on either side for all the
twenty-five miles; every field was cultivated like a tulip-bed; every
plant was as green and perfect as if entered in a horticultural show.
Streams, ravines, and ditches were solidly bridged, each with its white
cement parapet and smooth concrete flooring, and each numbered and marked
with Dutch preciseness; and along every bit of the road were posted the
names of the kampongs and estates charged to maintain the highway in its
perfect condition. Telegraph- and telephone-wires were strung on the
rigid arms of cotton-trees, and giant creepers wove solid fences as they
were trained from tree-trunk to tree-trunk—the tropics tamed, combed, and
curbed, hitched to the cart of commerce and made man’s abject servant.
Every few miles there were open red-tiled pavilions built over the
highways as refuges for man and beast from the scorching sun of
one season and the cloud-burst showers of the rainy half of the
year. Twice we found busy passers going on in groves beside these
rest-houses—picturesque gatherings of men, women, and children, and
displays of fowls, fruits, nuts, vegetables, grain, sugar, spices, gums,
and flowers, that tempted one to linger and enjoy, and to photograph
every foot of the passer’s area. The main road was crowded all the way
like a city street, and around these passers the highway hummed with
voices. One can believe in the density of the population—450 to the
square mile[4]—when he sees the people trooping along these country
roads; and he can well understand why every foot of land is cultivated,
how even in the benevolent land of the banana every one must produce
something, must work or starve. The better sanitary condition of the
native kampongs is given as a great factor in the remarkable increase of
population in the last half-century; but it took many years of precept
and example, strict laws, and a rating of native rulers and village
chiefs according to the cleanliness of their kampongs, before the native
hamlets became tropical counterparts of Broek and the other absurdly
clean towns of Holland. These careless children of the tropics are
obliged to whitewash their houses twice a year, look to their drains and
debris, and use disinfectants; and with the dainty little basket houses,
one of which may be bought outright for five dollars, and the beautiful
palms and shrubberies to serve as screens from rice-field vapors, each
little kampong is a delight in every way.
[Illustration: WAYSIDE PAVILION ON POST-ROAD.]
Men and boys toiled to the passer, bent over with the weight of one or
two monstrous jack-fruits or durians on their backs. A woman with a baby
swinging in the slandang over her shoulder had tied cackling chickens
to the back of her belt, and trudged on comfortably under her umbrella;
and a boy swung a brace of ducks from each end of a shoulder-pole, and
trotted gaily to the passer. The kampongs, or villages, when not hidden
in palm- and plantain-groves behind fancy bamboo fences, were rows of
open houses on each side of the highway, and we reviewed native life at
leisure while the ponies were changed. The friendly, gentle little brown
people welcomed us with amused and embarrassed smiles when our curiosity
as to sarong-painting, lacquering, and mat-weaving carried us into the
family circle. The dark, round-eyed, star-eyed babies and children showed
no fear or shyness, and the tiniest ones—their soft little warm brown
bodies bare of ever a garment save the cotton slandang in which they
cuddle so confidingly under the mother’s protecting arm—let us lift and
carry and play with them at will.
We left the main road, and progressed by a narrower way between open
fields of pepper, manioc, indigo, and tobacco, with picturesque views of
the three symmetrical and beautiful mountains, Soembung, Merbaboe, and
Merapi—the first and largest one as pure in line, as exquisite and ideal
a peak, as Fujiyama, and the others sloping splendidly in soft volcanic
outlines. Soembung is the very center of Java, and native legends cling
to the little hill of Tidar at its base—the “spike of the universe,” the
nail which fastens the lovely island to the face of the earth. Merbaboe,
the “ash-ejecting,” has wrought ruin in its time, and a faint white plume
of steam waves from its summit still. The capitulations which delivered
the Napoleonic possessions of the Dutch East Indies to England in 1811
were signed at the base of Merbaboe, and in our then frame of mind
toward the Dutch government we wished to make a pilgrimage of joyous
celebration to the spot. The third of the graceful peaks, Merapi, the
“fire-throwing,” was a sacred peak in Buddhist times, when cave-temples
were hewn in its solid rock and their interiors fretted over with fine
bas-reliefs. A group of people transplanting rice, a little boy driving
a flock of geese down the road, a little open-timbered temple of the
dead in a frangipani-grove—all these, with the softly blue-and-purple
mountains in the background, are pictures in enduring memory of that
morning’s ride toward Nirvana.
A gray ruin showed indistinctly on a hilltop, and after a run through a
long, arched avenue we came out suddenly at the base of the hill-temple.
Instead of a mad, triumphant sweep around the great pyramid, the ponies
balked, rooted themselves past any lashing or “gr-r-ree-ing,” and we
got out and walked under the noonday sun, around the hoary high altar
of Buddha, down an avenue of tall kanari-trees, lined with statues,
gargoyles, and other such _recha_, or remains of ancient art, to the
passagrahan, or government rest-house.
XV
BORO BOEDOR
The deep portico of the passagrahan commands an angle and two sides of
the square temple, and from the mass of blackened and bleached stones the
eye finally arranges and follows out the broken lines of the terraced
pyramid, covered with such a wealth of ornament as no other one structure
in the world presents. The first near view is almost disappointing. In
the blur of details it is difficult to realize the vast proportions of
this twelve-century-old structure—a pyramid the base platform of which
is five hundred feet square, the first terrace walls three hundred feet
square, and the final dome one hundred feet in height. Stripped of every
kindly relief of vine and moss, every gap and ruined angle visible, there
was something garish, raw, and almost disordered at the first glance,
almost as jarring as newness, and the hard black-and-white effect of the
dark lichens on the gray trachyte made it look like a bad photograph
of the pile. The temple stands on a broad platform, and rises first
in five square terraces, inclosing galleries, or processional paths,
between their walls, which are covered on each side with bas-relief
sculptures. If placed in single line these bas-reliefs would extend for
three miles. The terrace walls hold four hundred and thirty-six niches or
alcove chapels, where life-size Buddhas sit serene upon lotus cushions.
Staircases ascend in straight lines from each of the four sides, passing
under stepped or pointed arches the keystones of which are elaborately
carved masks, and rows of sockets in the jambs show where wood or metal
doors once swung. Above the square terraces are three circular terraces,
where seventy-two latticed _dagobas_ (reliquaries in the shape of the
calyx or bud of the lotus) inclose each a seated image, seventy-two more
Buddhas sitting in these inner, upper circles of Nirvana, facing a great
dagoba, or final cupola, the exact function or purpose of which as key
to the whole structure is still the puzzle of archæologists. This final
shrine is fifty feet in diameter, and either covered a relic of Buddha,
or a central well where the ashes of priests and princes were deposited,
or is a form surviving from the tree-temples of the earliest, primitive
East when nature-worship prevailed. The English engineers made an opening
in the solid exterior, and found an unfinished statue of Buddha on a
platform over a deep well-hole; and its head, half buried in debris,
still smiles upon one from the deep cavern. M. Freidrich, in “L’Extrême
Orient” (1878), states that this top dagoba was opened in the time of the
resident Hartman (1835), and that gold ornaments were found; and it was
believed that there were several stories or chambers to this well, which
reached to the lowest level of the structure. M. Désiré de Charnay, who
spent an afternoon at Boro Boedor in 1878 in studying the resemblance of
the pyramid temples of Java to those of Central America, believed this
well-hole to be the place of concealment for the priest whose voice used
to issue as a mysterious oracle from the statue itself.
[Illustration: BORO BOEDOR. FROM THE PASSAGRAHAN]
A staircase has been constructed to the summit of this dagoba, and from
it one looks down upon the whole structure as on a ground-plan drawing,
and out over finely cultivated fields and thick palm-groves to the
matchless peaks and the nearer hills that inclose this fertile valley of
the Boro Boedor—“the very finest view I ever saw,” wrote Marianne North.
Three fourths of the terrace chapels and the upper dagobas have crumbled;
hundreds of statues are headless, armless, overturned, missing; tees, or
finials, are gone from the bell-roofs; terrace walls bulge, lean outward,
and have fallen in long stretches; and the circular platforms and the
processional paths undulate as if earthquake-waves were at the moment
rocking the mass. No cement was used to hold the fitted stones together,
and another Hindu peculiarity of construction is the entire absence of a
column, a pillar, or an arch. Vegetation wrought great ruin during its
buried centuries, but earthquakes and tropical rains are working now a
slow but surer ruin that will leave little of Boro Boedor for the next
century’s wonder-seekers, unless the walls are soon straightened and
strongly braced.
[Illustration: GROUND-PLAN OF BORO BOEDOR.]
All this ruined splendor and wrecked magnificence soon has an
overpowering effect on one. He almost hesitates to attempt studying out
all the details, the intricate symbolism and decoration lavished by those
Hindus, who, like the Moguls, “built like Titans, but finished like
jewelers.” One walks around and around the sculptured terraces, where
the bas-reliefs portray all the life of Buddha and his disciples, and
the history of that great religion—a picture-Bible of Buddhism. All the
events in the life of Prince Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, are followed in
turn: his birth and education, his leaving home, his meditation under
Gaya’s immortal tree, his teaching in the deer-park, his sitting in
judgment, weighing even the birds in his scales, his death and entrance
into Nirvana. The every-day life of the seventh and eighth century is
pictured, too—temples, palaces, thrones and tombs, ships and houses, all
of man’s constructions, are portrayed. The life in courts and palaces, in
fields and villages, is all seen there. Royal folk in wonderful jewels
sit enthroned, with minions offering gifts and burning incense before
them, warriors kneeling, and maidens dancing. The peasant plows the
rice-fields with the same wooden stick and ungainly buffalo, and carries
the rice-sheaves from the harvest-field with the same shoulder-poles,
used in all the farther East to-day. Women fill their water-vessels
at the tanks and bear them away on their heads as in India now, and
scores of bas-reliefs show the unchanging customs of the East that offer
sculptors the same models in this century. Half the wonders of that
great three-mile-long gallery of sculptures cannot be recalled. Each
round disclosed some more wonderful picture, some more eloquent story,
told in the coarse trachyte rock furnished by the volcanoes across the
valley. Even the humorous fancies of the sculptors are expressed in
stone. In one rilievo a splendidly caparisoned state elephant flings
its feet in imitation of the dancing-girl near by. Other sportive
elephants carry fans and state umbrellas in their trunks; and the marine
monsters swimming about the ship that bears the Buddhist missionaries
to the isles have such expression and human resemblance as to make one
wonder if those primitives did not occasionally pillory an enemy with
their chisels, too. In the last gallery, where, in the progress of the
religion, it took on many features of Jainism, or advancing Brahmanism,
Buddha is several times represented as the ninth avatar, or incarnation,
of Vishnu, still seated on the lotus cushion, and holding a lotus with
one of his four hands. Figure after figure wears the Brahmanic cord, or
sacrificial thread, over the left shoulder; and all the royal ones sit
in what must have been the pose of high fashion at that time—one knee
bent under in tailor fashion, the other bent knee raised and held in a
loop of the girdle confining the sarong skirt. There is not a grotesque
nor a nude figure in the whole three miles of sculptured scenes, and the
costumes are a study in themselves; likewise the elaborate jewels which
Maia and her maids and the princely ones wear. The trees and flowers are
a sufficient study alone; and on my last morning at Boro Boedor I made
the whole round at sunrise, looking specially at the wonderful palms,
bamboos, frangipani-, mango-, mangosteen-, breadfruit-, pomegranate-,
banana-, and bo-trees—every local form being gracefully conventionalized,
and, as Fergusson says, “complicated and refined beyond any examples
known in India.” It is such special rounds that give one a full idea
of what a monumental masterpiece the great Buddhist _vihara_ is, what
an epitome of all the arts and civilization of the eighth century A.
D. those galleries of sculpture hold, and turn one to dreaming of the
builders and their times.
No particularly Javanese types of face or figure are represented. All the
countenances are Hindu, Hindu-Caucasian, and pure Greek; and none of the
objects or accessories depicted with them are those of an uncivilized
people. All the art and culture, the highest standards of Hindu taste
and living, in the tenth century of triumphant Buddhism, are expressed
in this sculptured record of the golden age of Java. The Boro Boedor
sculptures are finer examples of the Greco-Buddhist art of the times
than those of Amravati and Gandahara as one sees them in Indian museums;
and the pure Greek countenances show sufficient evidence of Bactrian
influences on the Indus, whence the builders came.
Of the more than five hundred statues of Buddha enshrined in niches and
latticed dagobas, all, save the one mysterious figure standing in the
central or summit dagoba, are seated on lotus cushions. Those of the
terrace rows of chapels face outward to the four points of the compass,
and those of the three circular platforms face inward to the hidden,
mysterious one. All are alike save in the position of the hands, and
those of the terrace chapels have four different poses accordingly as
they face the cardinal points. As they are conventionally represented,
there is Buddha teaching, with his open palm resting on one knee; Buddha
learning, with that hand intently closed; Buddha meditating, with both
hands open on his knees; Buddha believing and convinced, expounding the
lotus law with upraised hand; and Buddha demonstrating and explaining,
with thumbs and index-fingers touching. The images in the lotus bells
of the circular platforms hold the right palm curved like a shell over
the fingers of the left hand—the Buddha who has comprehended, and sits
meditating in stages of Nirvana. It was never intended that worshipers
should know the mien of the great one in the summit chalice, the serene
one who, having attained the supreme end, was left to brood alone,
inaccessible, shut out from, beyond all the world. For this reason it
is believed that this standing statue was left incomplete, the profane
chisel not daring to render every accessory and attribute as with the
lesser ones.
[Illustration: FOUR BAS-RELIEFS FROM BORO BOEDOR.
After Wilsen’s drawings.]
Humboldt first noted the five different attitudes of the seated figures,
and their likeness to the five Dhyani Buddhas of Nepal; and the discovery
of a tablet in Sumatra recording the erection of a seven-story vihara to
the Dhyani Buddha was proof that the faith that first came pure from the
mouth of the Oxus and the Indus must have received later bent through
missionaries from the Malay Peninsula and Tibet. The Boro Boedor images
have the same lotus cushion and aureole, the same curls of hair, but not
the long ears of the Nepal Buddhas, who in the Mongol doctrine had each
his own paradise or quarter of the earth. The first Dhyani, who rules
the paradise of the Orient, is always represented in the same attitude
and pose of the hands as the image in the latticed bells of these upper,
circular or Nirvana terraces of Boro Boedor. The images on the east
side of Boro Boeder’s square terraces correspond to the second Dhyani’s
conventional pose; those on the south walls, to the third Dhyani; the
west-facing ones, to the fourth Dhyani; and the northern ones, to the
fifth Dhyani of Nepal.
There are no inscriptions visible anywhere in this mass of
picture-writings, no corner-stone or any clue to the exact year of its
founding. We know certainly that the third great synod of Buddhists in
Asoka’s time, 264 B. C., resolved to spread Buddhism abroad, and that
the propaganda begun in Ceylon was carried in every direction, and that
Asoka opened seven of the eight original dagobas of India enshrining
relics of Buddha’s body, and, subdividing, put them in eighty-four
thousand vases or precious boxes, that were scattered to the limits of
that religious world. Stupas, or dagobas, were built over these holy
bits, and all the central dagoba of Boro Boedor is believed to have been
the original structure built over some such reliquary, and afterward
surrounded by the great sculptured terraces. Fa Hian, the Chinese pilgrim
who visited Java in 414 A. D., remarked upon the number of “heretics and
Brahmans” living there, and noted that “the law of Buddha is not much
known.” Native records tell that in 603 A. D. the Prince of Gujerat came,
with five thousand followers in one hundred and six ships, and settled at
Mataram, where two thousand more men of Gujerat joined him, and a great
Buddhist empire succeeded that of the Brahmanic faith. An inscription
found in Sumatra, bearing date 656 A. D., gives the name of Maha Raja
Adiraja Adityadharma, King of Prathama (Great Java), a worshiper of
the five Dhyani Buddhas, who had erected a great seven-storied vihara,
evidently this one of Boro Boedor, in their honor. This golden age of the
Buddhist empire in Java lasted through the seventh, eighth, and ninth
centuries. Arts and religion had already entered their decline in the
tenth century, when the Prince Dewa Kosoumi sent his daughter and four
sons to India to study religion and the arts. The princelings returned
with artists, soldiers, and many trophies and products; but this last
fresh importation did not arrest the decay of the faith, and the people,
relapsing peaceably into Brahmanism, deserted their old temples. With the
Mohammedan conquest of 1475-79 the people in turn forsook the worship of
Siva, Durga, and Ganesha, and abandoned their shrines at Brambanam and
elsewhere, as they had withdrawn from Boro Boedor and Chandi Sewou.
[Illustration: ON THE SECOND TERRACE.]
When the British engineers came to Boro Boedor, in 1814, the inhabitants
of the nearest village had no knowledge or traditions of this noblest
monument Buddhism ever reared. Ever since their fathers had moved there
from another district it had been only a tree-covered hill in the midst
of forests. Two hundred coolies worked forty-five days in clearing away
vegetation and excavating the buried terraces. Measurements and drawings
were made, and twelve plates from them accompany Sir Stamford Raffles’s
work. After the Dutch recovered possession of Java, their artists and
archæologists gave careful study to this monument of earlier civilization
and arts. Further excavations showed that the great platform or broad
terrace around the temple mass was of later construction than the body
of the pyramid, that a flooring nine feet deep had been put entirely
around the lower walls, presumably to brace them, and thus covering
many inscriptions the meanings of which have not yet been given, not to
English readers at least. Dutch scientists devoted many seasons to the
study of these ruins, and Herr Brumund’s scholarly text, completed and
edited by Dr. Leemans of Leyden, accompanies and explains the great folio
volumes of four hundred plates, after Wilsen’s drawings, published by
the Dutch government in 1874. Since their uncovering the ruins have been
kept free from vegetation, but no other care has been taken. In this
comparatively short time legends have grown up, local customs have become
fixed, and Boro Boedor holds something of the importance it should in its
immediate human relations.
For more than six centuries the hill-temple was lost to sight, covered
with trees and rank vegetation; and when the Englishmen brought the
great sculptured monument to light, the gentle, easily superstitious
Javanese of the neighborhood regarded these recha—statues and relics of
the ancient, unknown cult—with the greatest reverence. They adopted them
as tutelary divinities, as it were, indigenous to their own soil. While
Wilsen lived there the people brought daily offerings of flowers. The
statue on the first circular terrace at the right of the east staircase,
and the secluded image at the very summit, were always surrounded with
heaps of stemless flowers laid on moss and plantain-leaves. Incense
was burned to these recha, and the people daubed them with the yellow
powder with which princes formerly painted, and even humble bridegrooms
now paint, themselves on festal days, just as Burmese Buddhists daub
gold-leaf on their shrines, and, like the Cingalese Buddhists, heap
champak and tulse, jasmine, rose, and frangipani flowers, before their
altars. When questioned, the people owned that the offerings at Boro
Boedor were in fulfilment of a vow or in thanksgiving for some event
in their lives—a birth, death, marriage, unexpected good fortune, or
recovery from illness. Other worshipers made the rounds of the circular
terraces, reaching to touch each image in its latticed bell, and many
kept all-night vigils among the dagobas of the Nirvana circles. Less
appealing was the custom, that grew up among the Chinese residents of
Djokjakarta and its neighborhood, of making the temple the goal of
general pilgrimage on the Chinese New Year’s day. They made food and
incense offerings to the images, and celebrated with fireworks, feasts,
and a general May-fair and popular outdoor fête.
[Illustration: THE LATTICED DAGOBAS ON THE CIRCULAR TERRACES.]
After the temple was uncovered the natives considered it a free quarry,
and carried off carved stones for door-steps, gate-posts, foundations,
and fences. Every visitor, tourist or antiquarian, scientist or
relic-hunter, helped himself; and every residency, native prince’s
garden, and plantation lawn, far and near, is still ornamented with
Boro Boedor’s sculptures. In the garden of the Magelang Residency, Miss
Marianne North found a Chinese artist employed in “restoring” Boro Boedor
images, touching up the Hindu countenances with a chisel until their
eyes wore the proper Chinese slant. The museum at Batavia has a full
collection of recha, and all about the foundation platform of the temple
itself, and along the path to the passagrahan, the way is lined with
displaced images and fragments, statues, lions, elephants, horses; the
_hansa_, or emblematic geese of Buddhism; the _Garouda_, or sacred birds
of Vishnu; and giant genii that probably guarded some outer gates of
approach. A captain of Dutch hussars told Herr Brumund that, when camping
at Boro Boedor during the Javanese war, his men amused themselves by
striking off the heads of statues with single lance- or saber-strokes.
Conspicuous heads made fine targets for rifle and pistol practice. Native
boys, playing on the terraces while watching cattle, broke off tiny heads
and detachable bits of carving, and threw them at one another; and a few
such playful shepherds could effect as much ruin as any of the imaginary
bands of fanatic Moslems or Brahmans. One can better accept the plain,
rural story of the boy herders’ destructiveness than those elaborately
built up tales of the religious wars, when priests and people, driven
to Boro Boedor as their last refuge, retreated, fighting, from terrace
to terrace, hurling stones and statues down upon their pursuers, the
last heroic believers dying martyrs before the summit dagoba. Fanatic
Mohammedans in other countries doubtless would destroy the shrines of
a rival, heretic creed; but there is most evidence in the history and
character of the Javanese people that they simply left their old shrines,
let them alone, and allowed the jungle to claim at its will what no
longer had any interest or sacredness for them. To this day the Javanese
takes his religion easily, and it is known that at one time Buddhism and
Brahmanism flourished in peace side by side, and that conversion from
one faith to the other, and back again, and then to Mohammedanism, was
peaceful and gradual, and the result of suasion and fashion, and not of
force. The old cults faded, lost prestige, and vanished without stress of
arms or an inquisition.
XVI
BORO BOEDOR AND MENDOET
With five hundred Buddhas in near neighborhood, one might expect a little
of the atmosphere of Nirvana, and the looking at so many repetitions of
one object might well produce the hypnotic stage akin to it. The cool,
shady passagrahan at Boro Boedor affords as much of earthly quiet and
absolute calm, as entire a retreat from the outer, modern world, as one
could ever expect to find now in any land of the lotus. This government
rest-house is maintained by the resident of Kedu, and every accommodation
is provided for the pilgrim, at a fixed charge of six florins the day.
The keeper of the passagrahan was a slow-spoken, lethargic, meditative
old Hollander, with whom it was always afternoon. One half expected him
to change from battek pajamas to yellow draperies, climb up on some
vacant lotus pedestal, and, posing his fingers, drop away into eternal
meditation, like his stony neighbors. Tropic life and isolation had
reduced him to that mental stagnation, torpor, or depression so common
with single Europeans in far Asia, isolated from all social friction,
active, human interests, and natural sympathies, and so far out of touch
with the living, moving world of the nineteenth century. Life goes on
in placidity, endless quiet, and routine at Boro Boedor. Visitors come
rarely; they most often stop only for riz tavel, and drive on; and not a
half-dozen American names appear in the visitors’ book, the first entry
in which is dated 1869.
I remember the first still, long lotus afternoon in the passagrahan’s
portico, when my companions napped, and not a sound broke the stillness
save the slow, occasional rustle of palm-branches and the whistle of
birds. In that damp, heated silence, where even the mental effort
of recalling the attitude of Buddha elsewhere threw one into a bath
of perspiration, there was exertion enough in tracing the courses
and projections of the terraced temple with the eye. Even this easy
rocking-chair study of the blackened ruins, empty niches, broken statues,
and shattered and crumbling terraces, worked a spell. The dread genii
by the doorway and the grotesque animals along the path seemed living
monsters, the meditating statues even seemed to breathe, until some
“chuck-chucking” lizard ran over them and dispelled the half-dream.
In those hazy, hypnotic hours of the long afternoon one could best
believe the tradition that the temple rose in a night at miraculous
bidding, and was not built by human hands; that it was built by the
son of the Prince of Boro Boedor, as a condition to his receiving the
daughter of the Prince of Mendoet for a wife. The suitor was to build
it within a given time, and every detail was rigidly prescribed. The
princess came with her father to inspect the great work of art, with its
miles of bas-reliefs and hundreds of statues fresh from the sculptor’s
chisel. “Without doubt these images are beautiful,” she said coldly, “but
they are dead. I can no more love you than they can love you”; and she
turned and left her lover to brood in eternal sorrow and meditation upon
that puzzle of all the centuries—the Eternal Feminine.
At last the shadows began to stretch; a cooler breath came;
cocoanut-leaves began to rustle and lash with force, and the musical
rhythm of distant, soft Malay voices broke the stillness that had been
that of the Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle. A boy crept out of
a basket house in the palm-grove behind the passagrahan, and walked
up a palm-tree with that deliberate ease and nonchalance that is not
altogether human or two-footed, and makes one rub his eyes doubtingly at
the unprepared sight. He carried a bunch of bamboo tubes at his belt,
and when he reached the top of the smooth stem began letting down bamboo
cups, fastening one at the base of each leaf-stalk to collect the sap.
Everywhere in Java we saw them collecting the sap of the true sugar-palm
and the toddy-palm, that bear such gorgeous spathes of blossoms; but
it is only in this region of Middle Java that sugar is made from the
cocoa-palm. Each tree yields daily about two quarts of sap that reduce
to three or four ounces of sugar. The common palm-sugar of the passers
looks and tastes like other brown sugar, but this from cocoa-palms has a
delicious, nutty fragrance and flavor, as unique as maple-sugar. We were
not long in the land before we learned to melt cocoa-palm sugar and pour
it on grated ripe cocoanut, thus achieving a sweet supreme.
The level valley about Boro Boedor is tilled in such fine lines that it
seems in perspective to have been etched or hatched with finer tools
than plow and hoe. There is a little Malay temple surrounded by graves
in a frangipani-grove near the great pyramid, where the ground is white
with the fallen “blossoms of the dead,” and the tree-trunks are decked
with trails of white and palest pink orchids. The little kampong of Boro
Boedor hides in a deep green grove—such a pretty, picturesque little
lot of basket houses, such a carefully painted village in a painted
grove,—the village of the Midway Plaisance, only more so,—such a set
scene and ideal picture of Java, as ought to have wings and footlights,
and be looked at to slow music. And there, in the early summer mornings,
is a busy passer in a grove that presents more and more attractive
pictures of Javanese life, as the people come from miles around to buy
and to sell the necessaries and luxuries of their picturesque, primitive
life, so near to nature’s warmest heart.
All the neighborhood is full of beauty and interest, and there are
smaller shrines at each side of Boro Boedor, where pilgrims in ancient
times were supposed to make first and farewell prayers. One is called
Chandi Pawon, or more commonly Dapor, the kitchen, because of its empty,
smoke-blackened interior resulting from the incense of the centuries of
living faith, and of the later centuries when superstitious habit, and
not any surviving Buddhism, led the humble people to make offerings to
the recha, the unknown, mysterious gods of the past.
[Illustration: THE RIGHT-HAND IMAGE AT MENDOET.]
Chandi Mendoet, two miles the other side of Boro Boedor, is an exquisite
pyramidal temple in a green quadrangle of the forest, with a walled foss
and bridges. Long lost and hidden in the jungle, it was accidentally
discovered by the Dutch resident Hartman in 1835, and a space cleared
about it. The natives had never known of or suspected its existence,
but the investigators determined that this gem of Hindu art was erected
between 750 and 800 A. D. The workmanship proves a continued progress
in the arts employed at Boro Boedor, and the sculptures show that the
popular faith was then passing through Jainism back to Brahmanism. The
body of the temple is forty-five feet square as it stands on its walled
platform, and rises to a height of seventy feet. A terrace, or raised
processional path, around the temple walls is faced with bas-reliefs
and ornamental stones, and great bas-reliefs decorate the upper walls.
The square interior chapel is entered through a stepped arch or door,
and the finest of the Mendoet bas-reliefs, commonly spoken of as the
“Tree of Knowledge,” is in this entrance-way. There Buddha sits beneath
the bo-tree, the trunk of which supports a pajong, or state umbrella,
teaching those who approach him and kneel with offerings and incense.
These figures, as well as the angels overhead, the birds in the trees,
and the lambs on their rocky shelf, listening to the great teacher, are
worked out with a grace and skill beyond compare. Three colossal images
are seated in the chapel, all with Buddha’s attributes, and Brahmanic
cords as well, and the long Nepal ears of the Dhyani ones. They are
variously explained as the Hindu trinity, as the Buddhist trinity, as
Buddha and his disciples, and local legends try to explain them even
more romantically. One literary pilgrim describes the central Adi Buddha
as the statue of a beautiful young woman “counting her fingers,” the
mild, benign, and sweetly smiling faces of all three easily suggesting
femininity.
One legend tells that this marvel of a temple was built by a rajah who,
when once summoned to aid or save the goddess Durga, was followed by
two of his wives. To rid himself of them, he tied one wife and nailed
the other to a rock. Years afterward he built this temple in expiation,
and put their images in it. An avenging rival, who had loved one of the
women, at last found the rajah, killed him, turned him to stone, and
condemned him to sit forever between his abused partners.
A legend related to Herr Brumund told that “once upon a time” the
two-year-old daughter of the great Prince Dewa Kosoumi was stolen by a
revengeful courtier. The broken-hearted father wandered all over the
country seeking his daughter, but at the end of twelve years met and,
forgetting his grief, demanded and married the most beautiful young
girl he had ever seen. Soon after a child had been born to them, the
revengeful courtier of years before told the prince that his beautiful
wife was his own daughter. The priests assured Prince Dewa that no
forgiveness was possible to one who had so offended the gods, and that
his only course of expiation lay in shutting himself, with the mother
and child, in a walled cell, and there ending their days in penitence
and prayer. As a last divine favor, he was told that the crime would be
forgiven if within ten days he could construct a Boro Boedor. All the
artists and workmen of the kingdom were summoned, and working with zeal
and frenzy to save their ruler, completed the temple, with its hundreds
of statues and its miles of carvings, within the fixed time. But it was
then found that the pile was incomplete, lacking just one statue of the
full number required. Prayers and appeals were useless, and the gods
turned the prince, the mother, and the child to stone, and they sit in
the cell at Mendoet as proof of the tale for all time.
With such interests we quite forgot the disagreeable episode in the
steaming, provincial town beyond the mountains, and cared not for
toelatings-kaart or assistant resident. Nothing from the outer world
disturbed the peace of our Nirvana. No solitary horseman bringing
reprieve was ever descried from the summit dagoba. No file of soldiers
grounded arms and demanded us for Dutch dungeons. Life held every tropic
charm, and Boro Boedor constituted an ideal world entirely our own. The
sculptured galleries drew us to them at the beginning and end of every
stroll, and demanded always another and another look. A thousand Mona
Lisas smiled upon us with impassive, mysterious, inscrutable smiles,
as they have smiled during all these twelve centuries, and often the
realization, the atmosphere of antiquity was overpowering in sensation
and weird effect.
Boro Boedor is most mysterious and impressive in the gray of dawn, in
the unearthly light and stillness of that eerie hour. Sunrise touches
the old walls and statues to something of life; and sunset, when all
the palms are silhouetted against skies of tenderest rose, and the warm
light flushes the hoary gray pile, is the time when the green valley
of Eden about the temple adds all of charm and poetic suggestion.
Pitch-darkness so quickly follows the tropic sunset that when we left the
upper platform of the temple in the last rose-light, we found the lamps
lighted, and huge moths and beetles flying in and about the passagrahan’s
portico. Then lizards “chuck-chucked,” and ran over the walls; and the
invisible gecko, gasping, called, it seemed to me, “_Becky! Becky! Becky!
Becky! Becky! Becky!_” and Rebecca answered never to those breathless,
exhausted, appealing cries, always six times repeated, slowly over and
over again, by the fatigued soul doomed to a lizard’s form in its last
incarnation. There was infinite mystery and witchery in the darkness and
sounds of the tropic night—sudden calls of birds, and always the stiff
rustling, rustling of the cocoa-palms, and the softer sounds of other
trees, the shadows of which made inky blackness about the passagrahan;
while out over the temple the open sky, full of huge, yellow, steadily
glowing stars, shed radiance sufficient for one to distinguish the mass
and lines of the great pyramid. Villagers came silently from out the
darkness, stood motionless beside the grim stone images, and advanced
slowly into the circle of light before the portico. They knelt with many
homages, and laid out the cakes of palm-sugar, the baskets and sarongs,
we had bought at their toy village. Others brought frangipani blossoms
that they heaped in mounds at our feet. They sat on their heels, and
with muttered whispers watched us as we dined and went about our affairs
on the raised platform of the portico, presenting to them a living drama
of foreign life on that regularly built stage without footlights. One of
the audience pierced a fresh cocoanut, drank the milk, and then rolling
kanari and benzoin gum in corn-fiber, lighted the fragrant cigarette,
and puffed the smoke into the cocoa-shell. “It is good for the stomach,
and will keep off fever,” they answered, when we asked about this
incantation-like proceeding; and all took a turn at puffing into the
shell and reinhaling the incense-clouds. The gentle little Javanese who
provided better dinners for passagrahan guests than any island hotel had
offered us, came into the circle of light, with her mite of a brown baby
sleeping in the slandang knotted across her shoulder. The old landlord
could be heard as he came back far enough from his Nirvana to call for
the boy to light a fresh pipe; and one felt a little of the gaze and
presence of all the Dhyani Buddhas on the sculptured terraces in the
strange atmosphere of such far-away tropic nights by the Boedor of Boro.
When we came “gree-ing” back by those beautiful roads to Djokja, and
drew up with a whirl at the portico of the Hotel Toegoe, the landlord of
beaming countenance ran to meet us, greet us with effusion, and give us a
handful of mail—long, official envelops with seals, and square envelops
of social usage.
“Your passports are here. They came the next day. They are so chagrined
that it was all a stupid mistake. The assistant resident at Buitenzorg
telegraphed to the resident here to tell the three American ladies
who were to arrive in Djokja that he had posted their passports, and
to have every attention paid you. He wished to commend you and put you
_en rapport_ with the Djokja officials, that you might enjoy their
courtesies. Then the telegraph operator changed the message so as not to
have to send so many words on the wire, and he made them all think you
were some very dangerous people whom they must arrest and send back. The
assistant resident knew there was some mistake as soon as he saw you.”
(Did he?) “He is so chagrined. And it was all the telegraph operator’s
fault, and you must not blame our Djokja Residency.”
Instead of mollifying, this rather irritated us the more, and the
assistant resident’s long, formal note was fuel to the flame.
“LADIES: This morning I telegraphed to the secretary-general
what in heaven’s name could be the reason you were not to go
to Djokja. I got no answer from him, but received a letter
from the chief of the telegraph, who had received a telegram
from the telegraph office of Buitenzorg, to tell me there had
been a mistake in the telegram. Instead of ‘The permission is
not given,’ there should have been written, ‘The papers of
permission I have myself this moment posted. Do all you can
in the matter,’ etc. Perhaps you will have received them the
moment you get this my letter.
“So I am so happy I did not insist upon your returning to
Buitenzorg, and so sorry you had so long stay at Boro Boedor;
and I hope you will forget the fatal mistake, and feel yourself
at ease now,” etc.
Evidently the little episode was confined to the bureau of telegraphs
entirely, the messages to the American consul, secretary-general, and
Buitenzorg resident all suppressed before reaching them. Certainly this
was no argument for the government ownership and control of telegraphs in
the United States. There were regrets and social consolations offered,
but no distinct apology; and we were quite in the mood for having the
American consul demand apology, reparation, and indemnity, on pain of
bombardment, as is the foreign custom in all Asia. Pacification by small
courtesies did not pacify. Proffered presentation to native princes,
visits to their bizarre palaces, and attendance at a great performance
by the sultan’s actors, dancers, musicians, and swordsmen, would
hardly offset being arrested, brought up in an informal police-court,
cross-questioned, bullied, and regularly ordered to Boro Boedor under
parole. We would not remain tacitly to accept the olive-branch—not then.
The profuse landlord was nonplussed that we did not humbly and gratefully
accept these amenities.
“You will not go back to Buitenzorg now, with only such unhappy
experience of Djokja! Every one is so chagrined, so anxious that you
should forget the little contretemps. Surely you will stay now for the
great _topeng_ [lyric drama], and the wedding of Pakoe Alam’s daughter!”
“No; we have our toelatings-kaarten, and we leave on the noon train.”
And then the landlord knew that we should have been locked up for other
reasons, since sane folk are never in a hurry under the equator. They
consider the thermometer, treat the zenith sun with respect, and do not
trifle with the tropics.
XVII
BRAMBANAM
“In the whole course of my life I have never met with such
stupendous and finished specimens of human labor and of the
science and taste of ages long since forgot, crowded together
in so small a compass, as in this little spot [Brambanam],
which, to use a military phrase, I deem to have been the
headquarters of Hinduism in Java.” (Report to Sir Stamford
Raffles by Captain George Baker of the Bengal establishment.)
There are ruins of more than one hundred and fifty temples in the
historic region lying between Djokjakarta and Soerakarta, or Djokja
and Solo, as common usage abbreviates those syllables of unnecessary
exertion in this steaming, endless mid-summer land of Middle Java. As
the train races on the twenty miles from Djokja to Brambanam, there is
a tantalizing glimpse of the ruined temples at Kalasan; and one small
temple there, the Chandi Kali Bening, ranks as the gem of Hindu art in
Java. It is entirely covered, inside as well as outside, with bas-reliefs
and ornamental carvings which surpass in elaboration and artistic merit
everything else in this region, where refined ornament and lavish
decoration reached their limit at the hands of the early Hindu sculptors.
The Sepoy soldiers who came with the British engineers were lost in
wonder at Kalasan, where the remains of Hindu art so far surpassed
anything they knew in India itself; while the extent and magnificence of
Brambanam’s Brahmanic and Buddhist temple ruins amaze every visitor—even
after Boro Boedor.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF LORO JONGGRAN AT BRAMBANAM.]
We had intended to drive from Boro Boedor across country to Brambanam,
but, affairs of state obliging us to return from our Nirvana directly
to Djokja, we fell back upon the railroad’s promised convenience.
In this guide-bookless land, where every white resident knows every
crook and turn in Amsterdam’s streets, and next to nothing about the
island of Java, a kind dispenser of misinformation had told us that the
railway-station of Brambanam was close beside the temple ruins; and we
had believed him. The railway had been completed and formally opened but
a few days before our visit, and our Malay servant was also quite sure
that the road ran past the temples, and that the station was at their
very gates.
When the train had shrieked away from the lone little station building,
we learned that the ruins were a mile distant, with no sort of a vehicle
nor an animal nor a palanquin to be had; and archæological zeal suffered
a chill even in that tropic noonday. The station-master was all courtesy
and sympathy; but the choice for us lay between walking or waiting at the
station four hours for the next train on to Solo.
We strolled very slowly along the broad, open country road under the
deadly, direct rays of the midday sun,—at the time when, as the Hindus
say, “only Englishmen and dogs are abroad,”—reaching at last a pretty
village and the grateful shade of tall kanari-trees, where the people
were lounging at ease at the close of the morning’s busy passer. Every
house, shed, and stall had made use of carved temple stones for its
foundations, and the road was lined with more such recha—artistic remains
from the inexhaustible storehouse and quarry of the neighboring ruins.
Piles of tempting fruit remained for sale, and brown babies sprawled
content on the warm lap of earth, the tiniest ones eating the green edge
of watermelon-rind with avidity, and tender mothers cramming cold sweet
potato into the mouths of infants two and four months old. There was such
an easy, enviable tropical calm of abundant living and leisure in that
Lilliput village under Brobdingnag trees that I longed to fling away my
“Fergusson,” let slip life’s one golden, glowing, scorching opportunity
to be informed on ninth-century Brahmanic temples, and, putting off
all starched and unnecessary garments of white civilization, join that
lifelong, happy-go-lucky, care-free picnic party under the kanari-trees
of Brambanam; but—
A turn in the road, a break in the jungle at one side of the highway,
disclosed three pyramidal temples in a vast square court, with the ruins
of three corresponding temples, all fallen to rubbish-heaps, ranged in
line facing them. These ruined piles alone remain of the group of twenty
temples dedicated to Loro Jonggran, “the pure, exalted virgin” of the
Javanese, worshiped in India as Deva, Durga, Kali, or Parvati. Even the
three temples that are best preserved have crumbled at their summits
and lost their angles; but enough remains for the eye to reconstruct the
symmetrical piles and carry out the once perfect lines. The structures
rise in terraces and broad courses, tapering like the Dravidian gopuras
of southern India, and covered, like them, with images, bas-reliefs,
and ornamental carvings. Grand staircases ascend from each of the four
sides to square chapels or alcoves half-way up in the solid body of the
pyramid, and each chapel once contained an image. The main or central
temple now remaining still enshrines in its west or farther chamber an
image of Ganesha, the hideous elephant-headed son of Siva and Parvati.
Broken images of Siva and Parvati were found in the south and north
chambers, and Brahma is supposed to have been enshrined in the great east
chapel. An adjoining temple holds an exquisite statue of Loro Jonggran,
“the maiden with the beautiful hips,” who stands, graceful and serene,
in a roofless chamber, smiling down like a true goddess upon those who
toil up the long carved staircase of approach. Her particular temple is
adorned with bas-reliefs, where the _gopis_, or houris, who accompany
Krishna, the dancing youth, are grouped in graceful poses. One of these
bas-reliefs, commonly known as the “Three Graces” has great fame, and one
and two thousand gulden have been vainly offered by British travelers
anxious to transport it to London. Another temple contains an image of
Nandi, the sacred bull; but the other shrines have fallen in shapeless
ruins, and nothing of their altar-images is to be gathered from the
rubbish-heaps that cover the vast temple court.
[Illustration: CLEARING AWAY RUBBISH AND VEGETATION AT BRAMBANAM
TEMPLES.]
The pity of all this ruined splendor moves one strongly, and one deplores
the impossibility of reconstructing, even on paper, the whole magnificent
place of worship. The wealth of ornament makes all other temple
buildings seem plain and featureless, and one set of bas-reliefs just
rescued and set up in line, depicting scenes from the Ramayan, would be
treasure enough for an art museum. On this long series of carved stones
disconsolate Rama is shown searching everywhere for Sita, his stolen
wife, until the king of the monkeys, espousing his cause, leads him to
success. The story is wonderfully told in stone, the chisel as eloquent
as the pen, and everywhere one reads as plainly the sacred tales and
ancient records. The graceful figures and their draperies tell of Greek
influences acting upon those northern Hindus who brought the religion to
the island; and the beautifully conventionalized trees and fruits and
flowers, the mythical animals and gaping monsters along the staircases,
the masks, arabesques, bands, scrolls, ornamental keystones, and all the
elaborate symbols and attributes of deities lavished on this group of
temples, constitute a whole gallery of Hindu art, and a complete grammar
of its ornament.
[Illustration: KRISHNA AND THE THREE GRACES.]
These temples, it is believed, were erected at the beginning of the ninth
century, and fixed dates in the eleventh century are also claimed; but
at least they were built soon after the completion of Boro Boedor, when
the people were turning back to Brahmanism, and Hindu arts had reached
their richest development at this great capital of Mendang Kumulan, since
called Brambanam. The fame of the Javanese empire had then gone abroad,
and greed for its riches led Khublai Khan to despatch an armada to its
shores; but his Chinese commander, Mengki, returned without ships or
men, his face branded like a thief’s. Another expedition was defeated,
with a loss of three thousand men, and the Great Khan’s death put an end
to further schemes of conquest. Marco Polo, windbound for five months
on Sumatra, then Odoric, and the Arab Ibn Batuta, who visited Java in
the fourteenth century, continued to celebrate the riches and splendor
of this empire, and invite its conquest, until Arab priests and traders
began its overthrow. Its princes were conquered, its splendid capitals
destroyed, and with the conversion of the people to Mohammedanism the
shrines were deserted, soon overgrown, and became hillocks of vegetation.
The waringen-tree’s fibrous roots, penetrating the crevices of stones
that were only fitted together, and not cemented, have done most damage,
and the shrines of Loro Jonggran went fast to utter ruin.
A Dutch engineer, seeking to build a fort in the disturbed country
between the two native capitals, first reported these Brambanam temples
in 1797; but it was left for Sir Stamford Raffles to have them excavated,
surveyed, sketched, and reported upon. Then for eighty years—until the
year of our visit—they had again been forgotten, and the jungle claimed
and covered the beautiful monuments. The Archæological Society of Djokja
had just begun the work of clearing off and rescuing the wonderful
carvings, and groups of coolies were resting in the shade, while others
pottered around, setting bas-reliefs in regular lines around the
rubbish-heaps they had been taken from. This salvage corps chattered and
watched us with well-contained interest, as we, literally at the very
boiling-point of enthusiasm, at three o’clock of an equatorial afternoon,
toiled up the magnificent staircases, peered into each shrine, made the
rounds of the sculptured terraces, or processional paths, and explored
the whole splendid trio of temples, without pause.
Herr Perk, the director of the works, and curator of this monumental
museum, roused by the rumors of foreign invasion, welcomed us to
the grateful shade of his temporary quarters beside the temple, and
hospitably shared his afternoon tea and bananas with us, there surrounded
by a small museum of the finest and most delicately carved fragments,
that could not safely be left unprotected. While we cooled, and rested
from the long walk and the eager scramble over the ruins, we enjoyed too
the series of Cephas’s photographs made for the Djokja Society, and in
them had evidence how the insidious roots of the graceful waringen-trees
had split and scattered the fitted stones as thoroughly as an earthquake;
yet each waringen-gripped ruin, the clustered roots streaming, as if
once liquid, over angles and carvings, was so picturesque that we half
regretted the entire uprooting of these lovely trees.
[Illustration: LORO JONGGRAN AND HER ATTENDANTS.]
When the director was called away to his workmen, we bade our guiding
Mohammedan lead the way to Chandi Sewou, the “Thousand Temples,” or great
Buddhist shrine of the ancient capital. “Oh,” he cried, “it is far, far
from here—an hour to walk. You must go to Chandi Sewou in a boat. The
water is up to here,” touching his waist, “and there are many, many
snakes.” Distrusting, we made him lead on in the direction of Chandi
Sewou; perhaps we might get at least a distant view. When we had walked
the length of a city block down a shady road, with carved fragments and
overgrown stones scattered along the way and through the young jungle at
one side, we turned a corner, walked another block, and stood between the
giant images that guard the entrance of Chandi Sewou’s great quadrangle.
The “Thousand Temples” were really but two hundred and thirty-six
temples, built in five quadrilateral lines around a central cruciform
temple, the whole walled inclosure measuring five hundred feet either
way. Many of these lesser shrines—mere confessional boxes in size—are
now ruined or sunk entirely in the level turf that covers the whole
quadrangle, and others are picturesque, vine-wreathed masses, looking
most like the standing chimneys of a burnt house. This Buddhist sanctuary
of the eleventh century has almost the same general plan as Boro Boedor,
but a Boro Boedor spread out and built all on the one level. The five
lines of temples, with broad processional paths between them, correspond
to the five square terraces of Boro Boedor; and the six superior chapels
correspond to the circles of latticed dagobas near Boro Boeder’s summit.
The empty central shrine at Chandi Sewou has crumbled to a heap of
stones, with only its four stepped-arch entrance-doors distinct; and
the smaller temples, each of them eleven feet square and eighteen feet
high, with inner walls covered with bas-reliefs, are empty as well.
When the British officers surveyed Chandi Sewou, five of the chapels
contained cross-legged images seated on lotus pedestals—either Buddha,
or the _tirthankars_, or Jain saints; but even those headless and
mutilated statues are missing now. Every evidence could be had of wilful
destruction of the group of shrines, and the same mysterious well-hole
was found beneath the pedestal of the image in each chapel—whether as
receptacle for the ashes of priests and princes; a place for the safe
keeping of temple treasures; as an empty survival of the form of the
earliest tree-temples, when the mystery of animate nature commanded man’s
worship; or, as M. de Charnay suggests, the orifice from which proceeded
the voice of the concealed priest who served as oracle.
With these Brambanam temples, when Sivaism or Jainism had succeeded
Buddhism, and even before Mohammedanism came, the decadence of arts
and letters began. The Arab conquest made it complete, and the art of
architecture died entirely, no structures since that time redeeming the
people and religion which in India and Spain have left such monuments of
beauty.
[Illustration: PLAN OF CHANDI SEWOU (“THOUSAND TEMPLES”).
From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”]
The ruins of the “Thousand Temples” are more lonely and deserted in their
grassy, weed-grown quadrangle, more forlorn in their abandonment, than
any other of the splendid relics of Java’s past religions. The glorious
company of saintly images are vanished past tracing, and the rows of
little sentry-box chapels give a different impression from the soaring
pyramids of solid stone, with their hundreds of statues and figures
and the wealth of sculptured ornament, found elsewhere. The vast level
of the plain around it is a lake or swamp in the rainy season, and the
damp little chapels, with their rubbish-heaps in dark corners and the
weed-grown well-hole, furnish ideal homes for snakes. As our Mohammedan
had suggested snakes, we imagined them everywhere, stepping carefully,
throwing stones ahead of us, and thrusting our umbrellas noisily into
each chapel before we ventured within; but the long-anticipated, always
expected great snake did not materialize to give appropriate incident to
a visit to such complete ruins. Only one small wisp of a lizard gave the
least starting-point for a really thrilling traveler’s tale. The only
other moving object in sight at Chandi Sewou was a little girl, with a
smaller sister astride of her hip, who followed us timidly and sat for
a time resting on the knee of one of the hideous gate guardians—one of
the Gog and Magog stone monsters, who, although kneeling, is seven feet
in height, and who, with a club in his right hand, a snake wound around
his left arm, and a ferocious countenance, should frighten any child into
spasms rather than invite familiarity.
Herr Perk pointed out to us, on the common between the two great temples,
a formless green mound which he would excavate the following week, and
showed us also the Chandi Lompang, a temple cleared off eighty years ago,
but covered with a tangle of underbrush and a few tall trees—a sufficient
illustration of what all the Loro Jonggran temples had been when the
Djokja Society began its work of rescue and preservation. The British
engineers could see in 1812 that Chandi Lompang had been a central
shrine surrounded by fourteen smaller temples, whose carved stones
have long been scattered to fence fields and furnish foundation-stones
for the neighborhood. It was hoped that the kind mantle of vegetation
had preserved a series of bas-reliefs of Krishna and the lovely gopis,
wrought with an art equal to that employed by the sculptors of the “Three
Graces” at Loro Jonggran which the British surveyors uncovered. Every
one must rejoice that a period of enlightenment has at last come to the
colony, and that steps are being taken to care for the antiquities of the
island.
[Illustration: FRAGMENT FROM LORO JONGGRAN TEMPLE.]
There are other regions of extensive temple ruins in Java, but none
where the remains of the earlier civilization are so well preserved, the
buildings of such extent and magnificence, their cults and their records
so well known, as at Boro Boedor and Brambanam. The extensive ruins of
the Singa Sari temples, four miles from Malang, near the southeastern end
of the island, are scattered all through a teak and waringen forest, half
sunk and overgrown with centuries of vegetation. Images of Ganesha, and
a colossal Nandi, or sacred bull of Siva, with other Brahmanic deities,
remain in sight; and inscriptions found there prove that the Singa Sari
temples were built at about the same time as the Loro Jonggran temples
at Brambanam. The mutilation and signs of wanton destruction of the
recha suggest that it was not a peaceful conversion from Brahmanism to
Mohammedanism in that kingdom either.
On the Dieng plateau, southwest of Samarang, and not far from Boro
Boedor, there are ruins of more than four hundred temples, and the traces
of a city greater than any now existing on the island. This region has
received comparatively little attention from archæologists, although it
has yielded rich treasures in gold, silver, and bronze objects, a tithe
of which are preserved in the museum of the Batavian Society. For years
the Dieng villagers paid their taxes in rough ingots of gold melted
from statuettes and ornaments found on the old temple sites, and more
than three thousand florins a year were sometimes paid in such bullion.
The Goenoeng Praoe, a mountain whose summit-lines resemble an inverted
praoe, or boat, is the fabled home of the gods; and the whole sacred
height was once built over with temples, staircases of a thousand steps,
great terraces, and embankment walls, now nearly lost in vegetation, and
wrecked by the earthquakes of that very active volcanic region. These
Dieng temples appear to have been solid structures, whose general form
and ornamentation so resemble the ruins in Yucatan and the other states
of Central America that archæologists still revolve the puzzle of them,
and hazard no conjectures as to the worshipers and their form of worship,
save that the rites or sacrifices were very evidently conducted on the
open summits or temple-tops. I could not obtain views of these ruined
pyramid temples from any of the Batavia photographers, to satisfy me as
to their exact lines even in decay. There are other old Siva temples in
that region furtively worshiped still, and the “Valley of Death,” where
the fabled upas grew, was long believed to exist in that region, where
the cult of the destroyer was observed.
[Illustration: GANESHA, THE ELEPHANT-HEADED GOD.]
M. de Charnay did not visit these pyramid temples of the Dieng plateau;
but after seeing the temple of Boro Boedor, and those at Brambanam, he
summed up the resemblances of the Buddhist and Brahmanic temples of Java
to those at Palenque and in Yucatan as consisting: in the same order of
gross idols; the pyramid form of temple, with staircases, like those of
Palenque and Yucatan; the small chapels or oratories, with subterranean
vaults beneath the idols; the same interior construction of temples; the
stepped arches; the details of ornamentation, terraces, and esplanades,
as in Mexico and Yucatan; and the localization of temples in religious
centers far from cities, forming places of pilgrimage, as at Palenque,
Chichen-Itza, and, in a later time, at Cozumel.[5]
XVIII
SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN
As the two native states of Middle Java, the _Vorstenlanden_, or “Lands
of the Princes,” were last to be brought under Dutch rule, Djokjakarta
and Soerakarta are the capitals and head centers of native supremacy,
where most of Javanese life remains unchanged. The Sultan of Djokja,
and the so-called emperor, or _susunhan_, of Solo, were last to yield
to over-sea usurpers, and, as tributary princes enjoying a “protected
and controlled independence,” accept an “advisory elder brother,” in
the person of a Dutch resident, to sit at their sovereign elbows and by
“suggestions” rule their territories for the greater good of the natives
and the Holland exchequer. All the region around Djokja and Solo is
classic ground, and the oldest Javanese myths and legends, the earliest
traditions of native life, have their locale hereabout. These people
are the Javanese, and show plainly their Hindu descent and their higher
civilization, which distinguish them from the Sundanese of West Java; yet
the Sundanese call themselves the “sons of the soil,” and the Javanese
“the stranger people.” The glories of the Hindu empire are declared
by the magnificent ruins so lately uncovered, but the splendor of the
Mohammedan empire barely survives in name in the strangely interesting
city of the susunhan set in the midst of the plain of Solo—a plain which
M. Désiré de Charnay described as “a paradise which nothing on earth can
equal, and neither pen, brush, nor photography can faithfully reproduce.”
At this Solo, second city of the island in size, one truly reaches the
heart of native Java—the Java of the Javanese—more nearly than elsewhere;
but Islam’s old empire is there narrowed down to a kraton, or palace
inclosure, a mile square, where the present susunhan, or object of
adoration, lives as a restrained pensioner of the Dutch government, the
mere shadow of those splendid potentates, his ancestors.
The old susunhans were descended from the Moormen or Arab pirates who
harried the coast for a century before they destroyed the splendid Hindu
capital of Majapahit, near the modern Soerabaya. They followed that act
of vandalism with the conquest of Pajajaran, the western empire, or
Sundanese end of the island; and religious conversion always went with
conquest by the followers of the prophet. There was perpetual domestic
war in the Mohammedan empire, which by no means held the unresisting
allegiance of the Javanese at any time, and the Hindu princes of Middle
Java were never really conquered by them or the Dutch. The Java war of
the last century between the Mohammedan emperor, the Dutch, and the
rebellious native prince, Manko Boeni, lasted for thirteen years; and
in this century the same sort of a revolt cost the Dutch as imperial
allies more than four millions of florins, and made the British rejoice
that their statesmen had wisely handed back such a troublesome and
expensive possession as Java proved to be. The great Mataram war of the
last century, however, established the family of the present susunhan on
the throne, after dividing his empire with a rebellious younger brother,
who then became Sultan of Djokjakarta, and a new capital was built on
the broad plain cut by the Bengawan or Solo River, which is the largest
river of the island. At the death of the susunhan, Pakoe Bewono II
(“Nail of the Universe”), in 1749, his will bequeathed his empire to the
Dutch East India Company, and at last gave Holland control of the whole
island. Certain lands were retained for the imperial family, and its
present head, merely nominal, figurehead susunhan that he is, receives an
annuity of one hundred thousand florins—a sum equal to the salary of the
governor-general of Netherlands India.
[Illustration: THE SUSUNHAN.]
The present susunhan of Solo is not the son of the last emperor, but
a collateral descendant of the old emperors, who claims descent from
both Mohammedan and Hindu rulers, the monkey flag of Arjuna and the
double-bladed sword of the Arab conquerors alike his heirlooms and
insignia. His portraits show a gentle, refined face of the best Javanese
type, and he wears a European military coat, with the native sarong and
Arab fez, a court sword at the front of his belt, and a Solo kris at the
back. Despite his trappings and his sovereign title, he is as much a
puppet and a prisoner as any of the lesser princes, sultans, and regents
whom the Dutch, having deposed and pensioned, allow to masquerade in sham
authority. He maintains all the state and splendor of the old imperialism
within his kraton, which is confronted and overlooked by a Dutch fort,
whose guns, always trained upon the kraton, could sweep and level the
whole imperial establishment at a moment’s notice. The susunhan may have
ten thousand people living within his kraton walls; he may have nine
hundred and ninety-nine wives and one hundred and fifty carriages, as
reported; but he may not drive beyond his own gates without informing
the Dutch resident where he is going or has been, with his guard of
honor of Dutch soldiers, and he has hardly the liberty of a tourist
with a toelatings-kaart. He may amuse himself with a little body-guard
of Javanese soldiers; but there is a petty sultan of Solo, an ancient
vassal, whose military ambitions are encouraged by the Dutch to the
extent of allowing him to drill and command a private army of a thousand
men that the Dutch believe would never by any chance take arms against
them, as allies of the susunhan’s fancy guard. Wherever they have allowed
any empty show of sovereignty to a native ruler, the Dutch have taken
care to equip a military rival, with the lasting grudge of an inherited
family feud, and establish him in the same town. But little diplomacy
is required to keep such jealousies alive and aflame, and the Dutch are
always an apparent check, and pacific mediators between such rivals as
the susunhan and the sultan at Solo, and the sultan and Prince Pakoe Alam
at Djokja.
The young susunhan maintains his empty honors with great dignity
and serenity, observing all the European forms and etiquette at his
entertainments, and delighting Solo’s august society with frequent court
balls and fêtes. Town gossip dilates on his marble-floored ball-room, the
fantastic devices in electric lights employed in illuminating the palace
and its maze of gardens on such occasions, and on the blaze of heirloom
jewels worn by the imperial ladies and princesses at such functions. The
susunhan sometimes grants audiences to distinguished strangers, and one
French visitor has told of some magnificent Japanese bronzes and Chinese
porcelains in the kraton, which were gifts from the Dutch in the early
time when the Japanese and Javanese trade were both Holland monopolies.
No prostrations or Oriental salaams are required of European visitors at
court, although the old susunhans obliged even the crown prince and prime
minister to assume the dodok, and sidle about like any cup-bearer in his
presence. The princes and petty chiefs were so precisely graded in rank
in those days that, while the highest might kiss the sovereign’s hand,
and those of a lower rank the imperial knee, there were those of lesser
pretensions who adoringly kissed the instep, and, last of all, those who
might only presume to kiss the sole, of the susunhan’s foot. The susunhan
is always accompanied on his walks in the palace grounds, and on drives
abroad, by a bearer with a gold pajong, or state umbrella, spreading from
a jeweled golden staff. The array of pajongs carried behind the members
of his family and court officials present all the colors of the rainbow,
and all the variegations a fancy umbrella is capable of showing—each
striped, banded, bordered, and vandyked in a different way, that would
puzzle the brain of any but a Solo courtier, to whom they speak as
plainly as a door-plate.
Solo has the same broad streets and magnificent shade-trees as the other
towns of Java, and some of the streets have deep ditches or moats on
either side of the drive, with separate little bridges crossing to each
house-front, which give those thoroughfares a certain feudal quaintness
and character of their own. At the late afternoon hour of our arrival
we only stopped for a moment to deposit the luggage at the enormously
porticoed Hotel Sleier, and then drove on through and about the imperial
city. The streets were full of other carriages,—enormous barouches,
“milords,” and family carryalls, drawn by big Walers,—with which we
finally drew up in line around the park, where a military band was
playing. We had seen bewildering lines of palace and fort and barrack
walls, marching troops, and soldiers lounging about off duty, until it
was easy to see that Solo was a vast garrison, more camp than court.
Later, when we had returned to the hotel portico, to swing at ease in
great broad-armed rocking-chairs,—exactly the Shaker piazza-chairs of
American summer life,—there was still sound of military music off beyond
the dense waringen shade, and the fanfare of bugles to right and to left.
Solo’s hotel, with its comforts, offered more material inducements for
us to make a long stay, than any hotel we had yet encountered in Java;
and the clear-headed, courteous landlady was a hostess in the most
kindly sense. The usual colonial table d’hôte assembled at nine o’clock
in the vast inner hall or pavilion, looking on a garden; and in this
small world, where every one knows every one, his habitat and all his
affairs, the new-comers were given a silent, earnest attention that would
have checked any appetites save those engendered by our archæological
afternoon at Brambanam. When beefsteak was served with a sauce of
pineapple mashed with potato, and the succeeding beet salad was followed
by fried fish, and that by a sweet pudding flooded with a mixture of
melted chocolate and freshly ground cocoanut, we were oblivious to all
stares and whispers and open comments in Dutch, which these colonials
take it for granted no alien understands or can even have clue to through
its likeness to German. While we rocked on the great white portico we
could see and hear that Solo’s lizards were as gruesome and plentiful
as those of other towns. While tiny fragilities flashed across white
columns and walls, and arrested themselves as instantaneous traceries and
ornaments, a legion of toads came up from the garden, and hopped over the
floor in a silence that made us realize how much pleasanter companions
were the croaking and bemoaning geckos, who keep their ugliness out of
sight.
[Illustration: THE DODOK.]
At sunrise we set out in the company of an American temporarily in
exile at Solo, and drove past the resident’s great garden of palms and
statues and flower-beds, into the outer courts of the emperor’s and
the sultan’s palaces, watching in the latter the guard-mount and drill
of a fine picked body of his troops. The palace of one of the younger
princes of the imperial house was accessible through kind favor, as the
owner is pleased to let uitlanders enjoy the many foreign features of
these pleasure-grounds. This foreign garden did not, however, make us
really homesick by any appealing similarity to the grounds of citizens
or presidents on the American side of the globe; for the progressive
prince has arranged his demesne quite after the style of the gardens of
the cafés chantants of the lower Élysée in Paris—colored-glass globes
and all, marble-rimmed flower-beds, and a cascade to be turned on at
will and let flow down over a marble staircase set with colored electric
bulbs. Colored globes and bulbs hang in festoons and arches about the
bizarre garden, simulate fruits and flowers on the trees and bushes,
glow in dark pools and fountain basins, and play every old fantastic
trick of al-fresco cafés in Europe. A good collection of rare beasts
and birds is disposed in cages in the grounds, and there are countless
kiosks and pavilions inviting one to rest. In one such summer-house, with
stained-glass walls, the attendants showed photographs of the prince, his
father and family, the solemn old faces and the costumes of these elders
almost the only purely Javanese things to be seen in this fantastic
garden, since even the recha, gray old images from Boro Boedor and
Brambanam, have been brightened with red, white, and blue paint and made
to look cheerful and decorative—have been restored, improved, brought
down to modern times, and made to accord better with their café-chantant
surroundings.
Quite unexpectedly, we saw the princely personage himself receive his
early cup of coffee—attracted first to the ceremony by noticing a man
carrying a gold salver and cup, and followed by an umbrella-bearer
and two other attendants, enter an angle of the court in whose shady
arcade we were for the moment resting. Suddenly all four men dropped to
their heels in the dodok, and, crouching, sidled and hopped along for
a hundred feet to the steps of a pavilion. The cup-bearer insinuated
himself up those four steps, still squatting on his heels, and at the
same time balancing his burden on his two extended hands, and proffered
the gold salver to a shadowy figure half reclining in a long chair. We
stood motionless, unseen in our dark arcade, and watched this precious
bit of court comedy through, and saw the cup-bearer retire backward down
the steps, across the court, to the spot where he might rise from his
ignoble attitude and walk like a human being again. While exacting this
much of the old etiquette, this prince of European education and tastes
has the finest ball-room in Solo—a vast white-marble-floored _pringitan_,
or open-sided audience-hall, which is lighted with hundreds of electric
lights, and on whose shining surface great cotillions are danced, and
rich favors distributed to companies blazing with diamonds.
XIX
THE LAND OF KRIS AND SARONG
The stir of camp and court, the state and pomp and pageantry of three
such grandees as emperor, sultan, and resident in the one city, made
such street-scenes in Solo as tempted the kodaker to constant play while
the sun was high. Bands and marching troops were always to be seen in
the street, and the native officials of so many different kinds made
pictures of bewildering variety. The resident, returning from an official
call, dashed past in a coach and four, with pajong-bearers hanging
perilously on behind, and a mounted escort clattering after. Members
of the imperial household staff were distinguished by stiff sugar-loaf
caps or fezzes of white leather; and such privileged ones stalked along
slowly, magnificently, each with a kris at the back of his belt, and
always followed by one or two lesser minions. Those of superior rank went
accompanied by a pajong-bearer balancing the great flat umbrella of rank
above the distinguished one’s head; and the precision with which the
grandee kept his head within the halo of shadow, or the bearer managed
to keep such a true angle on the sun, were something admirable, and only
to be accomplished by generations of the two classes practising their
respective feats. The emperor’s mounted troops were objects of greater
interest, these dragoons wearing huge lacquered vizors or crownless caps
over their turbaned heads, the regulation jackets, sarongs, and heavy
krises, and bestriding fiery little Timor ponies. The native stirrup is a
single upright bar of iron, which a rider holds between the great toe and
its neighbor; and these troopers seemed to derive as much support from
this firm toe-grip as booted riders do from resting the whole ball of the
foot on our stirrups.
There is a labyrinthine passer at Solo, where open sheds and rustic
booths have grown upon one another around several open court spaces,
which are dotted with the huge mushrooms of palm-leaf umbrellas, and
whose picturesqueness one cannot nearly exhaust in a single morning’s
round. The pepper- and fruit- and flower-markets are, of course, the
regions of greatest attraction and richest feasts of color. The horn
of plenty overflowed royally there, and the masses of bananas and
pineapples, durians, nankos, mangosteens, jamboas, salaks, dukus, and
rambutans seemed richer in color than we had ever seen before; and the
brass-, the basket-, the bird-, the spice-, and the gum-markets had
greater attractions too. The buyers were as interesting as the venders,
and a frequent figure in these market groups that tempted the kodaker to
many an instantaneous shot, regardless of the light,—better any muddy
impression of that than none at all,—was the Dutch housewife on her
morning rounds. I braved sunstroke and apoplexy in the hot sunshine, and
trailed my saronged subjects down crowded aisles to open spots, to fix on
film the image of these sockless matrons in their very informal morning
dress. I lurked in booths and sat for endless minutes in opposite shops,
with focus set and button at touch, to get a good study of Dutch ankles,
when certain typical Solo _hausfraus_ should return to and mount their
carriage steps—only to have some loiterer’s back obscure the whole range
of the lens at the critical second.
[Illustration: JAVA, BALI, AND MADURA KRISES.
From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”]
We found pawnshops galore in this city full of courtiers and hangers-on
of greatness, and such array of krises and curious weapons that there was
embarrassment of choice. We left the superior shops of dealers in arms,
where new blades, fresh from Sheffield or German works, were pressed
upon us, and betook ourselves to the junk-shops and pawnshops, where
aggregations of discarded finery and martial trappings were spread out.
Books, silver, crystal, cutlery, jeweled decorations, medals, epaulets,
swords, and krises in every stage of rust and dilapidation were found for
sale.
The kris is distinctively the Malay weapon, and is a key to much of
Malay custom and lore; and if the Japanese sword was “the soul of the
Samurai,” as much may be said for the kris of the Javanese warrior. The
cutler or forger of kris-blades ranked first of all artisans. There
are more than one hundred varieties of the kris known, the distinctive
Javanese types of kris differing from those of the Malay Peninsula and
the other islands, and forty varieties of kris being used in Java and its
immediate dependencies. The kris used in Bali differs from that of Madura
or Lombok, and that of Solo from that used in West or Sundanese Java.
These differences imply many curiously fine distinctions of long-standing
importance in etiquette and tradition; yet the kris is a comparatively
modern weapon—modern as such things go in Asia. No kris is carved on Boro
Boedor or Brambanam walls, and its use cannot be traced further back
than the thirteenth century, despite the legends of mythical Panji, who,
it is claimed, devised the deadly crooked blade and brought it with him
from India. When it was introduced from the peninsula it was instantly
adopted, and all people wearing the kris were counted by that badge as
subjects of Java. The kris is worn by all Javanese above the peasant
class and over fourteen years of age, and is a badge of rank and station
which the wearer never puts aside in his waking hours. Great princes wear
two and even four krises at a time, and women of rank are allowed to
display it as a badge. It is always thrust through the back of the girdle
or belt, a little to the left, and at an angle, that the right hand may
easily grasp the hilt; and its presence there, ready for instant use,
has proved a great restraint to the manners of a spirited, hot-blooded
people, and lent their intercourse that same exaggerated formality,
mutual deference, and high decorum that equally distinguished the old
two-sworded men of Japan. The kris is the warrior’s last refuge, as the
Javanese will run amuck, like other Malays, when anger, shame, or grief
has carried him past all bounds, and, stabbing at every one in the way,
friend or enemy alike, is ready then to take his own life.
The Javanese are still the best metal-workers in the archipelago, and
long displayed wonderful skill in tempering steel, in welding steel
and iron together, and in giving the wavy blade fine veinings and
damascenings. Those beautiful veinings, grained and knotted in wood,
and other curious patternings of the blade, were obtained by soaking
the blades, welded of many strips of hard and soft metal, in lime-juice
and arsenic until the surface iron was eaten out. A wound from such a
weapon is, of course, as deadly as if the kris were dipped in poison for
that purpose solely; and from this arises the common belief that all
kris-blades are soaked in toxic preparations. With the more general use
of firearms, and the arming of the troops with European rifles, the kris
remains chiefly a personal adornment, an article of luxury, and a badge
of rank.
Solo has always been considered a later Toledo for its blades, and in
the search for a really good, typical Solo kris I certainly looked
over enough weapons to arm the sultan’s guard. The most of them were
disappointingly plain as to sheath and hilt, the boat-shaped wooden
hilts having only enough carving on the under part to give the hand a
firm grasp. We could not find a single Madura kris, with the curious
totemic carvings on the handle; and all the finely ornamental krises,
with gold, silver, or ivory handles inlaid with jewels, have long since
gone to museums and private collections. One may now and then chance upon
finely veined blades with mangosteen handles in plain, unpromising wood,
and brass Sundanese sheaths; but after seeing the treasures of krises
in the Batavia museum, one is little satisfied with such utilities,
mere every-day serviceable weapons. Increasing tourist travel will
soon encourage the manufacture of ornamental krises, and in numbers to
meet the certain fixed demand, so that later tourists will have better
souvenirs than can be had now.
There is one whole street of sarong-shops in Solo, each little shop
or open booth glowing with cloths of brilliant colors, and each shop
standing in feudal dignity behind a tiny moat, with a mite of a
foot-bridge quite its own. Solo sarongs presented many designs quite new
to us, and the sarong-painters there employ a rich, dull, dark red and a
soft, deep green in the long diamonds and pointed panels of solid color,
relieved with borders of intricate groundwork, that tempt one to buy by
the dozen. There were many sarongs, painted with four and five colors in
fine, elaborate designs, that rose to ten and twenty United States gold
dollars in value; but one’s natural instincts protested against paying
such prices for a couple of yards of cotton cloth, mere figured calico,
forsooth, despite its artistic and individual merits. Our landlady at the
Sleier had inducted us into much of the sarong’s mysteries, qualities,
and details of desirability, and we had the museum’s rare specimens in
mind; but we were distracted in choice, and the thing I desired, just any
little scrap as an example of the _prang rusa_, or deer-fight, pattern,
which only the imperial ones may wear, was not to be had anywhere in
Solo. We looked in upon many groups of little women tracing out fine,
feathery, first-outline designs in brown dye with their tiny funnel
arrangements that are the paint-brushes of their craft; and we found one
great cement-floored fabrik of sarongs, a regular factory or wholesale
establishment, with many Chinese and native workmen. There whole
sections of the sarong pattern were stamped at a stroke by lean Chinese,
who used the same kind of tin stamping-blocks as are used in stamping
embroidery patterns in Western lands. We knew there was such a factory
for block-printed sarongs on Tenabang Hill in Batavia, but it was a
shock, a disillusionment, to come upon such an establishment of virtually
ready-made, “hand-me-down” sarongs in Solo.
There is a large Chinese population in Solo; and one has sufficient
evidence of the wealth and prosperity of these Paranaks as one sees
them driving past in handsome victorias, wearing immaculate duck suits,
patent-leather shoes, and silk hose, with only the ignoble pigtail,
trailing away from the derby hat and disappearing shamefully inside the
collar, to betray them. These rich Paranaks sit rigid and imperturbable,
with folded arms, the very model of good form, smoking long black
cheroots, and viewing all people afoot with undisguised scorn. One need
not possess a Californian’s bitter anti-Chinese sentiments to have
this spectacle irritate him, and to almost wish to see the plutocrats
pitched out of their “milords” and the Javanese Jehu drive over them.
One easily understands the hatred that Dutch and natives alike entertain
for these small traders, middlemen, and usurers, who have driven out all
competitors, and fatten on the necessities of the people. Although these
island-born Chinese have adopted so many European fashions in dress and
luxurious living, they are still Celestials, never cutting the queue nor
renouncing the tinseled household altars.
Solo’s Chinatown, or Tjina kampong, is a little China complete, barring
its amazing cleanliness and order without odors other than those of the
cook-shops, where sesame-oil sizzles and smells quite as at home in “big
China.” There were three great weddings in progress on one “lucky day” in
Solo, and each house-front was trimmed with flags, lanterns, garlands,
and tinsel flowers; orchestras tinkled and thumped, and great feasts
were spread in honor of the brides’ coming to the new homes. Every one
was bidden to enter and partake; and we were hospitably urged to enter
at each gorgeous door, and rice-wine, champagne, painted cakes, and all
the fruits of two zones were generously pressed upon us. The thumps of an
approaching band drew us from one sarong-shop, and we saw a procession
advancing, with banners and huge lanterns borne aloft. One felt sure the
remarkable train must have issued from the palace gates until the faces
were in range, and there followed the gorgeous red Chinese wedding-chair,
and all the bride’s jewels and gowns and gilded slippers, carried about
on cushions like sovereign regalia. Men in uniform bore palanquins full
of varnished pig, and mountains of the pies and cakes and nameless things
of Chinese high-holiday appetites, that roused the gaping envy of the
street crowds. Urchins cheered and danced and ran with the band much as
they do elsewhere; and the strangers, captivated with the sights, drove
beside the gaudy procession until sated with the Oriental splendors and
Celestial opulence of a Solo marriage feast.
The street life of Solo could well entertain one for many days. Native
life is but the least affected by foreign ways, and the local color is
all one could wish. There are drives of great beauty about the town, with
far views of those two lovely symmetrical peaks, Merapi and Merbaboe, on
one side, and of the massive Mount Lawu on the other. The temple ruins
at Suku, at the foot of Mount Lawu, twenty-six miles southeast of Solo,
are the most puzzling to archæologists, least known and visited of all
such remains in Java. They are of severe form and massive construction,
without traces of any carved ornament, and the solid pylons, truncated
pyramids, and great obelisks, standing on successive platforms or
terraces, bear such surprising resemblance to the monuments of ancient
Egypt and Central America that speculation is offered a wide range and
free field. The images found there are ruder than any other island
sculptures, and everything points to these strange temples having been
the shrines of an earlier, simpler faith than any now observed or of
which there is any record. These Suku temples were discovered in 1814 by
Major Johnson, the British officer residing at the native court of Solo.
They were then unknown to the natives; there were no inscriptions found,
nothing in native records or traditions to lead to any solution of their
mysteries; and no further attempts have been made toward discovering the
origin of these vast constructions since Sir Stamford Raffles’s day.
When M. Désiré de Charnay came to Java, in 1878, to study the temple
ruins whose puzzling resemblance to Central American structures had
puzzled archæologists, all of government assistance was lent him. He had
driven only eight leagues from Solo toward Mount Lawu, when his carriage
broke down; he spent the night at a village, and returned the next
morning to Solo, “sufficiently humiliated with” his “failure,” he wrote.
He did not repeat the attempt, as there was a great fête occurring at the
emperor’s palace which occupied his remaining days. He says that every
one at Solo consoled him for his failure to reach the Suku temples by
saying that the visible ruins there were only the attempted restorations
of an epoch of decadence, and dated only from the fourteenth century. M.
de Charnay quotes all that Sir Stamford Raffles and Fergusson urge as to
the striking and extraordinary resemblance of these particular temples to
those of Mexico and Yucatan; and as ethnologists admit that the Malays
occupied the archipelagos from Easter Island to Madagascar, he thinks it
easy to believe that they or a parent race extended their migrations to
the American continent, and that if this architectural resemblance be an
accident, it is the only one of its kind in the universe.[6]
The three-domed summit of the mountain is visited now by Siva worshipers,
who make offerings and burn incense to the destroying god who manifests
himself there, and the region is one to tempt a scientist across the seas
to exploit it, and should soon invite the attention of the exploring
parties which Mr. Morris K. Jesup has enlisted in the search for proofs
of early Asiatic and American contact.
XX
DJOKJAKARTA
As the heat of Solo was but little less than that of Batavia, and we
had only worse accounts and solemn warnings given of the sickening,
unendurable heat of Soerabaya, where fever and cholera most often abide,
it seemed wisest to give up the visit to that east end of the island,
to forego that torrid shore where first the Arabs landed and conquered
the Hindu rulers of Majapahit, to be succeeded in their turn by the
Portuguese, and then the Dutch. The ruins of Majapahit, and the tombs of
its princes, and the graves of the Arab priests who were the first rulers
of the conquered empire are attractions in Soerabaya’s neighborhood; but
the great object was the Mount Bromo of the Tengger plateau, where the
exhausted residents may take refuge from the steaming plain and breathe
again. Tosari, the great sanatorium, on one of the sharp spurs of the
Tengger, is over five thousand feet in air, and commands one of the most
famous views in Java, with the plains, the sea, and groups of islands
in one direction, and the great Bromo, smoking splendidly, in another.
The great crater of the Bromo, with several smoking cones rising from a
level of rippling, wind-swept “sandy sea,” is three miles in diameter,
and is claimed, despite Kilauea, as the largest crater in the world, as
it is certainly the largest in Java. A colony of Siva worshipers, who
fled to the Tengger that they might pursue their religion unmolested by
Arab rulers, live there in long communal houses, tend the sacred fire
once brought from India, and sacrifice regularly to Brama, the “God of
Fire,” at his smoking temple. In this modern day living sacrifices are
not offered, save of fowl; and priests and people content themselves with
offerings of fruit and foods, and make other great ceremonies of burning
lumps of fragrant benzoin, the “Java frankincense,” at the crater’s edge.
The most serious sacrifices in the Bromo’s neighborhood are of those
unfortunate natives who are seized by tigers as they work in clearings or
walk mountain paths alone. The briefest stay at Tosari equips a visitor
with tiger stories fit for tropical regions; and my envy was roused when
some Tosari tourists told of having seen a child who had been seized
and slightly mangled by a tiger, but a day before, on a road near the
village, over which they themselves had passed.
The short railway ride back from Solo to Djokja, past the familiar ground
of Brambanam, was a morning’s delight. We could see from the train that
the railway did run close past the temple courts; and with the brief
glimpse of the ruined pyramids, we viewed our exploit of walking to Loro
Jonggran’s fane at midday, and clambering over the temples through the
long afternoon, with great complacency—a feat that nothing could induce
us to repeat, however.
[Illustration: THE BRAMBANAM BABY.]
It is all historic and sacred soil in the region around Djokja, and we
returned with the greater interest for our real visit to the city, where
one touches the age of fable in even the geographic names of the place
and its environs, since the modern Dutch rendering of Djokjakarta, and
the older Yugya-Karta of Sir Stamford Raffles, are only variants of the
native Ayogya-Karta, the Ayudya mentioned in the Javanese Parvas, or
Ramayan, as the capital established by Rama. The exploits of Na-yud-ya,
the earliest ruler of Djokja, are described in the same sacred Parvas,
and this was the center of the early Hindu empire, whose princes were
great builders and for ten centuries were busy erecting temples, palaces,
and towers in the region around this their city of Mataram.
Na-yud-ya’s descendants resisted the Arab invaders to the last, and the
Hindu princes of Middle Java retained their independence long after
Islam’s susunhan had declared himself supreme over the eastern empire
of Majapahit[7] and the western empire of Pajajaran.[8] These Hindu or
native princes, as they were considered, resisted susunhan and Dutch
alike, and the Java war of the last century against the two usurpers was
a long and bitter struggle, lasting from 1745 to 1758. The susunhan’s
brother, the second prince, who had joined the native or Hindu princes,
was won back to family allegiance by Dutch intrigue and influence;
and the susunhan, dividing his eastern or Majapahit empire with his
troublesome brother, made the latter a ruler, under the title of Sultan
of Djokjakarta. The Dutch had been given the site of Samarang for their
aid in such wars, and soon after the division of the eastern empire, the
susunhan made that remarkable will of 1749, deeding his empire to the
Dutch East India Company after his decease. The region between Djokja and
Solo remained a seat of war for the rest of the century, the old princes,
different heirs, claimants, and factions, always resorting to arms, and
the Dutch always having an interest in the struggles. Marshal Daendels
had his campaigns against and his sieges of Djokja, and the British had
to besiege and bombard it before it admitted Sepoy occupation. After the
restoration of Java to the Dutch there was a thirteen years’ war with
this eastern empire,—the Mataram or Majapahit war,—and then, by treaty,
the Dutch gained final control of the whole island and became absolute
masters of Java; susunhan and sultan accepted annuities; each paid a
revenue in products of the soil, and admitted Dutch residents to “make
recommendations.” The Sultan of Djokja is only another of the puppet
rulers. He maintains the outward show and trappings of his ancestors’
estate, and, with fine irony, is termed one of the “independent princes.”
The city of Djokja, fifth in size of the cities of the island, and
reputed as more Javanese than Solo, less influenced by Chinese and
European example, is in the center of the residency, and but twelve miles
from the shores of the Indian Ocean. It is approached by railway from
either side over a plain planted chiefly with indigo and tapioca, whose
low, uninteresting plants in myriad rows, and the frequent roofs and
tall chimneys of fabriks, speak of abundant prosperity for all classes.
The broad streets of the provincial capital are beautifully shaded, and
the residency, a great, low, white building with a classical portico,
is set in a luxuriant garden, where Madagascar palms and splendid trees
make halos and shadow for the grim stone images, the pensive Buddhas and
fine bas-reliefs, brought from neighboring ruins. The government offices
adjoin, and on any court day one may see the crowds of litigants and
witnesses sitting around on their heels beneath a shadowing waringen-tree
that would be fit bench for Druids’ justice. The majority of the cases
tried before the assistant resident, who there balances the scales, are
of petty thieving; for notwithstanding the severity of the penalties for
such offenses, the inherent bias of the Malay mind is toward acquiring
something for nothing—transmuting _tuum_ into _meum_. The death sentence
is pronounced upon the burglar caught with a weapon on his person, and
twenty years in chains is prescribed for the unarmed burglar; for in this
eternal summer, where people must live and sleep with open doors and
windows, or at most with flimsy lattices, some protection must be assured
to those who own portable properties and valuables. But with the great
advances made in the security of property, the innate propensities of
the race are not to be eradicated by even three centuries of stern Dutch
justice; and there is the same mass-meeting of witnesses and lookers-on
squatting under the big waringen-tree at Djokja, when the scales are to
be balanced by the blind lady, as before every petty court-room on the
island. An ingenious little firefly lamp, taken from a Djokja burglar,
was given me as a souvenir of one such a court day. It was a veritable
fairy’s dark lantern—a half of a nutshell, with a flat cover sliding on
a pivot and concealing at will the light of two fireflies struggling in
a dab of pitch. The burglar carried a reserve supply of fireflies in a
bit of hollow bamboo stoppered at the ends, and added a fresh illuminator
whenever the dark lantern’s living glow diminished.
The Djokja passer is a large and important daily gathering, but
corrugated-iron and tiled sheds in formal rows have pretty nearly robbed
it of all a passer’s picturesqueness. Model municipal government,
Dutch system and order, are too pronounced to please one whose eye has
seen what a few palm-thatched booths and umbrellas, and a few tons of
scattered fruits and peppers, can produce in that picnic encampment by
Boro Boedor’s groves or in the open common at Tissak Malaya.
We had been promised great finds in the way of old silver and krises in
a street of Chinese pawnshops opening from one corner of the passer; but
the promises were not realized. The betel-boxes, buckles, and clasps in
charge of these wily “uncles” of Djokja were plain and commonplace, and
not a jeweled nor a fancy kris of any kind was to be seen, after all the
repute of Djokja’s riches in these lines of native metal-work. Hundreds
of sarongs, each with a dangling ribbon of a ticket, were stowed away on
the shelves of these pawnshops, proofs of the improvidence and small
necessities of these easy-going, chance-inviting people; and while we
were haggling over a veined kris-blade with the most obdurate Chinese
that ever kept a pawn-shop, a timid little woman stole in and offered her
sarong to the arrogant, blustering old rascal. He scowled and scolded
and stormed at the frightened little creature, shook out and snapped the
finely patterned battek as if it were a dust-cloth, and still muttering
as if making threats of blood and vengeance, made out a ticket, and threw
it at her with a few silver cents. We wanted nothing more from that shop,
save the head of the “uncle” on a trencher or impaled on a kris’s point.
With a shameless eye to revenue only, the government has long continued
to sell pawnbrokers’ licenses at auction to the highest bidder, after a
brief relapse from the year 1869 to 1880, when the experiment was tried
of selling licenses to any one at a moderate rate. The great income from
such licenses fell away so amazingly that the auctions were resumed,
and the improvident natives handed over again to the merciless Chinese
pawnbrokers, who charge interest even up to ninety per cent., and usually
retain everything that crosses their counters. M. Emile Metzger, in a
communication to the “Scottish Geographic Magazine” (vol. iv., 1888),
gives fifty thousand florins a year as the annual revenue during the
eleven years when the other system prevailed, which soon increased to as
much as one million, sixty-five thousand florins a year when licenses
were again auctioned to the highest bidder.
The Sultan of Djokja has a kraton, or palace inclosure, a mile square in
the very heart of the city, the great entrance-gates fronting on a vast
_plein_ or _platz_, where waringen-trees have been clipped and trained
to the shape of colossal state umbrellas, great green pajongs planted in
permanence in the outer court or approach to the throne, as a badge of
royalty. The huge Burmese elephants, that play an important part in state
processions, trumpet in one corner; and strangely costumed retainers
are coming and going, some of them as gaily uniformed as parrakeets,
and others reminding one of the picadors and matadors in the chorus of
“Carmen.” Surrounded by this indoor army of gorgeous musicians, singers,
dancers, bearers of fan and pajong, pipe and betel-boxes, the sultan’s
court is as splendidly staged as in the last century; and when this
“regent of the world” and “vicegerent of the Almighty,” as his titles
translate, goes abroad in state procession, the spectacle is worth going
far to see, the Djokjans assure one. Twenty different kinds of pajongs
belong to this court—those flat umbrellas that are the oldest insignia
of royalty in all the East, and are sculptured on Boro Boedor’s walls
through all the centuries pictured there. From the sultan’s own golden
pajong with orange border, the gold-bordered pajong of the crown prince,
the white pajongs of sultanas and their children and of concubines’
children, down to the green, red, pink, blue, and black pajongs of the
lesser officials and nobles, all pajongs are exactly ordered by court
heraldry—the pajong the definite symbol of rank, a visiting-card that
announces its owner’s consequence from afar. Strange accompaniments
these, however, for a sultan who plays billiards at the club and a
sultana who takes a hand at whist.
The old Taman Sarie, or Water Kastel, in the suburbs, built by a
Portuguese architect in the middle of the last century for the great
sultan Manko Boeni, is an Oriental Trianon, a paradise garden of the
tropics, where former greatness spent its hours of ease in cool,
half-underground chambers and galleries such as Hindu princes have made
for themselves in every part of India. The Taman Sarie is sadly deserted
now. The most important buildings were shaken to formless mounds by
earthquakes—the last great Djokja earthquake of 1867, when so many lives
were lost, making the complete ruins that are covered with vines and
weeds. The ornamental waters are choked with weeds and rubbish; the
carved stonework is black with mold and lichens; the caves, grottoes,
tunnels, staircases, and galleries around the wells are dripping and
slippery with green mosses; and the rose-gardens and shrubberies are fast
going to jungle. A few pavilions remain, whose roof gables are as deeply
recurved as those of Burmese temples, but for the most part all the once
splendid carved and gilded constructions are but wrecks and refuges for
bats and lizards. The Water Kastel in its better days stood in the midst
of a lake, reached only by boat or a secret tunnel; and here the old
sultan Hamanku Bewono IV and his harem whiled away their leisure hours,
even when an army thundered at the gates.
On one unfortunate day he kept Marshal Daendels waiting in the outer
court for an hour beyond the time appointed for an interview, while the
sultan and his women made merry, and the gamelan sounded gaily from
the Water Kastel’s galleries. Daendels, growing weary, suddenly pushed
through the retainers to the mouth of the tunnel, and appeared to the
dallying sultan in the Water Kastel without announcement or further
ceremony, and with still less ceremony seized the sultan by the arm and
led him back to Dutch headquarters, where the interview took place.
Another version of this Water Kastel tradition describes the mad marshal
as making a dash down terraces and staircases to a water-pavilion
sunk deep in foliage at the edge of a tank, where, in a shady cellar
of a sleeping-room, shielded and cooled by a water curtain falling in
front of it, he dragged the sultan from his bed, and carried him off
to headquarters. The _opas_ and the chattering old guardian, who led
us about the Kastel’s labyrinths, plunged into the green gloom of a
long, mossy staircase that led to the platform on which the sultan’s
sleeping-room opened, to show us the “unlucky bed” and prove by it their
particular or favored version of the irruption of Marshal Daendels. The
bedstead or couch is an elaborately carved affair, and must once have
been the chief ornament of this cool cave-like retreat; but in the reek
and gloom of the late afternoon this water boudoir seemed too suggestive
of rheumatism, malaria, and snakes by wholesale to invite one to linger,
or to suggest repose on the “unlucky bed,” which insures an early death
to the one who touches it.
Another water-chamber was provided in the Sumoor Gamelan (“Musical
Spring”), a deep circular well or tank near the ruined banquet-hall,
with vaulted chambers opening around it—just such echoing places of
green twilight, where it must be cool on the hottest noonday, as one may
see in the old palaces at Lucknow, Futtehpore Sikri, and Ahmedabad, in
the fatherland whence the ruling princes of Java came. There is, too,
a great oval tank with beautiful walls, parapets, and pavilions, well
worthy of a Hindu palace; and in this secluded place there lived for many
decades a sacred white or dingy yellow turtle with red eyes, an albino
to whom the people made offerings and paid homage. The Taman Sarie has
great fascination for one, and at sunset something of romance seems to
linger in the old gardens and grottoes, the picturesque courtyards and
galleries; and one could imagine scores of legends and harem’s mysteries
belonging there—that anything and everything had happened there by that
lake that burns a rose-red when the palms are silhouetted against the
high sunset sky. A group of children played hide-and-seek about the once
august court, supple, nimble little bronze fauns, with the carefully
folded kerchiefs on their heads their only garments—kerchiefs that they
arrange with the greatest care and deliberation many times a day, holding
the ends of the cloth with agile toes while they pat and crease and coax
the fine folds into the prescribed order of good form. These children
dashed through the shrubberies, leaped balusters and walls as lightly and
easily as wild creatures, and ran up tall trees like squirrels, to gather
tasseled orchids and some strange blue flowers that we pointed to with
suggestive coppers, and they hailed us as old friends when we came again.
There were delightful drives to be taken in and around Djokja in the cool
of the afternoon, the tamarind- and waringen-shaded streets leading to
bowery suburbs, that gave wider views out over the fertile plain with the
winding Oepak River, or toward the beautiful blue mountain cones that
slumbered to northward. There were always the most decorative palm-trees
in the right place to outline themselves against the rosy sunset sky,
and the drives back to the hotel through the quick twilight and sudden
darkness gave many views into lamp-lighted huts and houses—genre pictures
of native life, Dutch-Indies interiors, where candle-light or firelight
illuminated family groups and women at their homely occupations, that
should inspire a new, a tropical school of Dutch painters. The graves of
the old Hindu princes of Mataram crown a beautiful wooded hill south of
the city near the sea-shore, and are still worshiped and garlanded by
their people.
Through our now near friend, august patron, and protector, the kindly
assistant resident, we received word at sunrise that the independent
Prince Pakoe Alam V (“Axis of the Universe”) and his family would
graciously receive us the next morning at nine o’clock; and that
meanwhile our patronage was invited for a topeng, or lyric dance, to
be given by Prince Pakoe Alam’s palace troupe on that evening for the
benefit of the widows and orphans of the soldiers killed in the Lombok
war. This Lombok war had been brought to a close that week by the
capture of the treacherous Balinese sultan who had so tyrannized over
the Sassaks, and was then on his way to be paraded with the victorious
soldiers before the governor-general in a grand triumph or review at
Batavia.
[Illustration: TYING THE TURBAN.]
I had a long, quiet afternoon at the Hotel Toegoe to give again to the
enormous folios of Wilsen’s drawings of Boro Boedor, while my companions
napped, the palm-branches hung motionless in the garden, and only a few
barefooted servants moved without sound—that deathly silence of tropic
afternoon life that is sometimes a boon, and sometimes an exasperation
and irritation to one accustomed to doing his sleeping by dark and not
turning day into night. Finally the pale skeleton of an invalid, who
was my next neighbor on the long porch, lifted his pitiful voice, and
was helped out to his chair, and then our imperturbable Amat stirred
from his leisured sleep on the flags beyond, meditated for a while,
twisted his kerchief turban anew, disappeared, and returned with the
tea-tray, silent, impassive, and automatic, as if under some spell.
A graceful little woman peddler came to the porch’s edge—a pretty,
gentle creature with dark, starry Hindu eyes, clear-cut features, even
little white teeth, and crinkly hair. It was delight enough to watch
this pretty creature’s flash of eyes and teeth, and her manners were
most beguiling as she proffered her sarongs—intricately figured batteks
from Cheribon and Solo, silk plaided ones from Singapore, and those of
Borneo shot through with glittering threads. Nothing could have been
more graceful and charming than the naïve appeals of the little peddler
woman, and nothing could have presented more extreme and unfortunate
contrast than to have the sockless and waistless young Dutch matron of
the opposite portico step down and run to the garden gate at sound of
a military band. Few women since Atalanta’s time have been able to run
gracefully; and this thick-ankled young matron, with her flapping mule
slippers, scant sarong, and shapeless jacket, outdid all descriptions
and caricatures of “the woman who runs.” A friendly cavalier in gaudy
battek pajamas, who had been talking to the lady, and blowing clouds of
pipe-smoke into her face the while, gaily danced an elephantine fandango
as the band went sounding down the street to give its sunset concert in
the park.
When tea was taken to the lady’s porch after this divertisement, she took
a banana to the edge, and called, “Peter! Peter!” There was a rustle and
crash of boughs overhead, and a great ape, nearly the size of a man,
swung from one tree-branch to another, snatched the banana, and bounded
back into the tree, where it peered cunningly at us while he ate. After
that every rustle in the shrubbery made us jump; we kept umbrellas at
hand for defense, and made solemn compact that no one of us should be
left asleep unguarded while doors and windows were open to this dreadful
reminder of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
XXI
PAKOE ALAM: THE “AXIS OF THE UNIVERSE”
As the lines of the topeng-players are always delivered in the ancient
Kawi, or classic language of Java, one has need to brush up beforehand,
and to wish for a libretto, a book of the opera, to keep in hand as
the lyric drama progresses. Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java”
furnishes one a general glimpse of the ancient literature of the island,
and by many translations acquaints one with the great epics. This old
literature is Hindu in form and origin; and Kawi, the classic or literary
language of the past, in which all the history, early records, epic and
legendary poems, and the books of religion and the law are written, is
closely related to Sanskrit and Pali. The famous myths and legends of
India are included in this literature, and the Ramayan and Mahabharata
appear, incomplete but unaltered, in the Javanese epics known as the
Kandas and the Parvas. Besides these two great works, there is the
“Arjuna Vivaya,” giving an account of the exploits of the Indian Arjuna,
the real hero of the Mahabharata; and there is still another romantic
legendary poem, the “Bharata Yuddha,” in which many of the incidents
and the heroes of the Mahabharata are presented in Javanese settings
with Javanese names. All these Kawi books are known to the people by
translations in modern Javanese, and by their frequent presentation in
the common dramatic entertainments, the wayang-wayang, or shadow-plays,
of even the smallest villages.
Many “Books of Wisdom” and of exhortation to pious and righteous living
survive in Kawi literature; but with all that Hindu civilization
brought, it bequeathed nothing that could be called Buddhist literature,
and the bulk of ancient Javanese literature is decidedly secular and
profane—sentimental and romantic poems, love-tales in verse, that
continue to extreme lengths. The Arab conquest has left almost no impress
upon the language. Although schools were established, and a considerable
body of Arabic literature came with the Mohammedan conquerors, but little
save _bababs_, romantic chronicles of the loves of imaginary princes and
heroes, have been added to Javanese literature in the four centuries
since Islam’s conquest. The spoken language of the Javanese shows few
traces of Arabic, and the written language is also unchanged—a neater,
more beautiful and graceful system of ornamental characters than either
Arabic or Persian.
[Illustration: WAYANG-WAYANG.]
The old Kawi epics are popularized by the theater, the topeng, and
the common wayang-wayang, or shadow-dance of puppets, where a manager
delivers the well-known lines. Of these three dramatic forms the topeng
is the highest, the most classic and refined presentation, a lyric drama
very like the No dance of Japan, and doubtless, like the No dance, had
a religious origin. A topeng troupe has its _dalang_, or manager, who
prompts, sometimes explains, and often delivers all the lines for the
masked actors; and there is a gamelan, or orchestra, of four or more
musicians, and a chorus which chants accompanying and explanatory verses
as the action proceeds. Great princes maintain their own private topeng
troupes, and in their palace presentations, and always in the presence
of native royalties, the actors go without masks. The topeng’s gamelan
consists of two sets of the circles of tiny gongs (_gong_ or _agong_,
a pure Javanese word and instrument), that are struck with wooden
sticks, and two wood and two metal gambang kayu (wood and metal bars of
different length and thickness mounted on a boat-shaped frame), or native
xylophones, to which single instrument the name “gamelan” is so often
given in the West.
The common wayang-wayang of the people is a modification of the same
masked or puppet drama that was in vogue long before the Mohammedan
conquest. As the religion of Islam forbade the representation of the
human figure, the susunhan ordered the puppets to be so distorted that
the priests could not call them images of human beings, and that even
then only their shadows, thrown on a curtain, should be seen. Hence the
exaggerated heads, the beaks and noses, of the cardboard jumping-jacks
which, pulled by unseen strings, serve to maintain an interest in the
national history and legends, and by preludes and lines, chanted in
classic Kawi, preserve acquaintance with the literary language among
the common people. There is a form of wayang-wayang half-way between
this puppet-show and the real drama, in which the actors themselves are
visible, wearing distorted masks; but the plays are of modern times,
in the common dialect, and the manager often improvises his lines and
scenes as the play progresses. With these popular dramas there rank the
performances of the graceful _bedaya_, or dancing-girl, whose tightly
folded sarong, floating scarf-ends, measured steps, outward sweep
of the hand, and charming play of arm and wrist recall the Japanese
_maiko_. Although the winsome bedaya is sculptured on Boro Boedor’s
recording walls, there is nothing there to indicate the puppet-play, nor
anything from which it might have evolved, although from other records
ethnologists claim that the Javanese possessed this dramatic art when
the Hindus came. A love of the drama in the form of the topeng and the
wayang-wayang was so ingrained in the tastes and fixed in the customs
of the people that the Mohammedan conquerors could not suppress those
popular amusements, and were finally content to modify them in trifling
points. The Dutch were also wise enough never to interfere with these
harmless pleasures of the people, the greatest distraction and delight of
these sensitive, emotional, innately esthetic and refined Javanese, who
will sit through shadow-plays for half the night, and are moved to frenzy
and tears by the martial and romantic exploits of their national heroes.
All of society,—the two hundred of Djokja’s superior circle,—European and
native together, gathered at the Societeit’s marble hall on the night
of the topeng. That exalted being, the resident, entered in his modestly
gilded uniform; and all the company rose, and stood until he and Prince
Pakoe Alam had advanced and seated themselves in the two arm-chairs
placed in front of the chairs of the rest of the audience. “Our best
people are all here to-night,” said our amiable table d’hôte acquaintance
of the Hotel Toegoe; and we looked around the lofty white hall, where row
upon row of robust, prosperous-looking Europeans sat in state attire. All
the men wore heavy cloth coats, either richly frogged military jackets
or the civilian’s frock or cutaway, only a few wearing conventional
black dress-coats, and none the rational white duck clothes of the
tropics. The Dutch ladies were dressed in rich silks, brocades, and even
velvets, and fanned vigorously as a natural consequence, while more of
mildew fumes than of sachet odors came from these heavy cloth and silk
garments, whose care and preservation are so difficult in the tropics.
One was reminded of those tropical burghers in crimson velvet coats who
received Lord Macartney and Staunton in a red velvet council-room at
Batavia just one century before. The native officers and their families
were naturally more interesting to a stranger—splendid-looking Javanese
men, who stood and walked like kings, all wearing the battek kerchief or
turban folded in myriad fine plaitings, richly patterned sarongs, and
the boat-handled kris showing at the back of the short black military
jacket. Many of these native officials had constellations of stars and
decorations pinned to their breasts, and their finely cut features,
noble mien, and graceful manners declared them aristocrats and the fine
flower of an old race. Their wives, shy, slender, graceful women in
clinging sarongs and the disfiguring Dutch jacket, wore many clasps and
buckles and jeweled knobs of ear-rings. They seemed to have inherited all
the Hindu love of glittering, glowing jewels, and the Buddhist love of
flowers and perfumes, each little starry-eyed, flower-like woman redolent
of rose or jasmine attar, and wearing some brilliant blossom in the knot
of satin-black hair. The women had thrust their pretty brown feet into
gold-heeled mule slippers, that clicked musically on the tiles as they
walked, while the children comfortably rubbed their bare feet on the cool
white floor.
A few Chinese families, nearly all of them Paranaks, or half-castes,
to the island born, were there; the women in gay embroidered satins,
jeweled and diamonded out of all reason, and the children gay as
cockatoos and parrakeets in their bright little coats and caps and
talismanic ornaments. Rows of shadowy, silent natives, opas, lantern- and
pajong-bearers, and attendants of every kind, crouched in rows among the
great columns of the portico—gallery gods who squatted spellbound, rapt,
and freely tearful in their enjoyment of the splendid topeng produced
that night.
[Illustration: TOPENG TROUPE WITH MASKS.]
Prince Pakoe Alam’s artists rendered for the sake of military charities
a four-act lyric drama, dealing with the adventures of mythical Panji,
a hero of Hindu times, who is said to have introduced the kris to Java.
The gamelan’s music was all soft harmonies, tender, weird, sad melodies
in plaintive minor key, that accompanied the action throughout. The
high-pitched nasal recitatives, the squeaks and squawks and stamps of
fencing warriors, the slow posing, the stilted and automatic movements
of all the actors, were enough like the No dance of Japan to confuse one
greatly. All the actors were magnificently costumed and accoutred, their
dresses, armor, and weapons being historic properties of the Pakoe Alam
family, that had figured on festal occasions in the topengs of a century
and more. In the first act four women in silk sarongs and velvet jackets
did a regular Delsarte dance, with all those theatrical poses, sweeps,
and gestures with the devitalized arm and wrist that the trainers of
the would-be beautiful are teaching in America. Dark-robed attendants,
identical with the mutes and invisible supers of the Japanese stage,
crawled around behind the principals, arranging costumes, handing and
carrying away weapons, as needed. Then deliberate mortal combat raged to
slow music; and after it the harmless automatic dance was resumed. There
was one tedious act where warriors in modern military jackets, worn with
sarongs, indulged in long-drawn recitatives in Kawi; there were prolonged
fan, spear, and bow drills; and one fine final act, where heroes,
stripped to the waist in old style, with bodies powdered yellow, and half
protected by gorgeously gilded breast-plates, fenced with fury and some
earnest.
At the end of the first act nearly every man in the audience rose and
went out, each mopping his brows and whewing great breaths of air from
his lungs. Some few returned with cups of coffee, glasses of pink
lemonade, and tall beakers of soda-water for the perspiring ladies wedged
in their chairs. These men stayed outside after that act, declaring
themselves only during intermissions, when they rushed cooling drinks to
their partners at the front. At the end of three hours Panji triumphed
over all his enemies, the performance ended, chairs scraped loudly as the
audience stirred, the applause was long, and the sighs of relief profound.
After the resident had made the tour of the room and honored the most
distinguished ones, and the European dancing was about to begin, the
native ladies withdrew; and as we saw these most interesting figures
leaving, we, who had risen at five o’clock that morning, and expected to
repeat the act the next morning, followed the beauties in golden slippers
out to the picturesque confusion of lantern- and pajong-bearers at the
carriage entrance. Dancing as it is done in Djokja could not keep us
longer awake that night, though we have regretted ever since that we did
not wait to see how many of the broadcloth-coated men and their partners
in winter gowns survived one vigorous continental waltz on a marble
floor, or if an anteroom was converted into an emergency hospital for
treating heat prostrations.
With the exemplary early rising the tropics enjoin, we had been up
for hours—had enjoyed the dash of a dipper-bath, breakfasted, written
letters, visited the passer, the pawnshops, and the photographer—before
it was time to join the assistant resident’s party and drive to the
palace of Prince Pakoe Alam. The carriages went through several gateways,
past a guard house and sentries, before they drew up in an inner court
before an open pringitan, or audience-hall, eighty feet square, whose
great, low-spreading roof, resting only on heavy teak columns, was all
open to the air. The prince, his crown prince, and his second son, who
is the father’s aide-de-camp, were waiting to receive us as we alighted,
all three dressed in conventional European military uniforms, with many
medals and orders illuminating their coat fronts, and only the native
turban on the old prince’s head suggesting anything Javanese in attire.
The prince spoke Dutch, his sous English and French as well as Dutch; and
each gave us cordial welcome and courteous greetings before they offered
an arm to conduct us back to the cool inner part of the pringitan, where
the young princesses were waiting. We went far in over the shining marble
floor, away from all glare and reflection of the vast sanded court, to
a region of tempered shadow, where the wife, a daughter-in-law, and a
granddaughter of the prince stood beside a formal semicircle of chairs.
The ladies spoke only Dutch and Malay, but they did the honors most
gracefully, and with the two princes to interpret, conversation moved
along smoothly. These princesses wore sarongs and jackets and gilded
mule slippers, but their simple costumes were brightened by many jeweled
clasps and brooches and great, glittering knobs of ear-rings, and both
had coronals of pale-yellow flowers around the knot of black hair drawn
low at the back of the head, in foreign style. Their complexions were the
pure pale yellow of the true Javanese aristocracy, not the pasty greenish
yellow of the higher-class women of China. They had very pretty manners,
combining gentleness and dignity, and they put the conventional questions
as to our homes and journeys with great earnestness and seeming interest.
The old prince, whose high military rank makes him an offset and check
upon the Sultan of Djokja, and who, by his lineage and connections with
the imperial house of Solo, almost ranks the sultan, is very literally
a serene highness, a most gracious and courtly host, whose dignity and
charming address befit his rank and exalted name. His lands and mills and
highly improved estates bring him a large private income; and progressive
as he may be, I am sure his people speak of him admiringly as a gentleman
of the old school—and that old school must have been an admirable one
in Java, where the native manners are as fine as in Japan. Prince Pakoe
Alam received a foreign military education in his youth, and his sons
have enjoyed still greater advantages to fit them for the still newer
order. They are the most charming, natural, and unaffected young men,
unspoiled and with truly princely mien and manners. To be told hereafter
that a young man has the manners of a prince will mean a great deal in
simple courtesy, fine finish, and perfection, to those who remember these
Javanese princes, the handsome young Pakoe Alams. The natural refinement
and charm that one is sensible of in even the lowliest Javanese have
their fullest and finest flowering in these princely ones; and that
delightful hour spent in the vast shady white pringitan offset many
misadventures in Java.
Rows of red-coated and -cowled servitors sat around the edges of the
pringitan’s shining floor, holding the state pajongs and hooded spears
of ceremony; and a full gamelan and a group of singers, in the same
bright court livery, squatted in rows facing us at the far front of the
hall, awaiting the signal to begin. The artists of the previous night,
all the singers and musicians of the full topeng troupe, lifted up their
voices to the tinkling, softly booming, sonorous airs of the gamelan
and delighted us with a succession of chants throughout our stay. The
young princes led us “down front,”—for the whole strange scene in which
we found ourselves was very like a theater,—and, in the strong glare of
the footlights of daylight, explained the several instruments of the
native orchestra. Then in from the wings—“enter right,” as the play-books
would say—came a procession of servants, swinging racks of decanters and
glasses, and bearing bowls of ice, trays of fruits, wafers, and sweets.
Abject minions sidled over the floor, and mutely offered us iced wines or
aërated waters, moving awkwardly about in the ignominious attitude of the
dodok, like so many land-crabs. “Light-boys” crouched and crawled behind
each smoker, handing cigars, holding burning punk-sticks, or extending
trays to receive the ashes, maintaining their abject position during all
our stay. One never gets used to this abasement of the dodok, often as
he may see it; and after the first absurdity and humor of it wears off,
it is irritating and humiliating to see one human being thus belittle
himself before another. One suspects that there was more of fear than
reverence in its first observance, and that it comes from centuries of
tyranny and oppression rather than from any spontaneous expressions of
humility and admiration. This group of household retainers, sidling and
jerking over the floor with something between the gait of a toad and a
crab, seemed to mar the perfect dignity and decorum of the occasion.
These same attendants strode into the sunlit court with the free,
splendid tread of Javanese men, only to crouch to their heels at the
pringitan’s edge, make the simbah’s imploring obeisance with clasped
hands to the forehead, repeating the simbah if they caught a princely
eye, while they sidled grotesquely over the pringitan floor and crouched
like dogs at the master’s feet.
There was a carved screen behind us, closing off an inner space, where
broad divans invited to informal ease, and many beautiful objects
were disposed. We were taken there by the old prince to see the great
gold-bound “Menac,” or family record of the Pakoe Alams—an immense volume
with jeweled covers, resting on a yellow satin cushion. This family
history was put in this splendid form a hundred years ago by Prince Pakoe
Alam II, a literary highness who possessed considerable artistic talent,
and maintained a staff of artists and writers in his palace, who were
busied for years in tracing and illuminating, under his instructions,
this one precious manuscript. Javanese calligraphy, which is even more
decorative and ornamental than Arabic or Persian, makes beautiful pages;
and each page, gracefully written in black, gold, or colors, is also
bordered and illuminated more lavishly than any old Flemish missal. The
beautiful ornamental letters, medallions, and miniatures, the tangle of
graceful arabesques, and the glow of soft colors and gold, relieved with
touches and dashes of black, make the Pakoe Alam’s “Menac” a treasure
of delight for a whole morning’s inspection; but we had only time to
turn its leaves, see the more remarkable pages, and obtain a general
dazzling idea of its quality. The “Axis of the Universe” is a bibliophile
and collector by inheritance, and there were many precious manuscript
books, unique éditions de luxe in jeweled bindings, that we could have
given hours to inspecting. There is one particular book of Arabian
tales, rivaling the family “Menac” in the beautiful lettering and rich
illumination, that was sent to the Amsterdam Colonial Exposition some
years ago, and naturally excited surprise and admiration among European
book-collectors.
Conversation never lagged during this morning call, and the little second
prince was regretful that we had given up a trip to the sweltering end
of the island, where the Bromo smokes. “The Bromo is the only ‘lake of
fire’ in the world, you know,” said the prince, proudly. And soon after,
in answer to a question, he said, “No, I have never been in Europe, but
I have been all over Java”—this last with an emphasis that became one to
the island born, and appreciative of all its wonderful beauties.
When we praised and extolled the scenery of Java, he asked naïvely,
“Is America not beautiful, then? Have you no mountains, no beautiful
scenery there?” And when we answered patriotically to the facts,—Niagara,
the Yellowstone, the Yosemite, Mount Rainier, and Alaska,—he asked in
amazement, “Then why do you travel to other countries?”
The old prince announced the approaching marriage of his granddaughter
to the son of the Prince of Malang, and asked that we would attend the
fêtes which he would give in celebration of the affair a fortnight
later; but with all of the other India beckoning, we could not prolong
our stay in Java; and we took leave of our princely hosts then, to hasten
to the train, promising, as one always does in every pleasant place, to
come again when time would allow for a fuller enjoyment of this Javanese
Djokja, that we had only begun to know as we were leaving.
XXII
“TJILATJAP,” “CHALACHAP,” “CHELACHAP”
“Tjilatjap! Tjilatjap!” Often as one may sound those syllables aloud,
they seem absurd; and the very idea of spending the night in a town of
such name, of buying a railway ticket with that name printed on it, and
asking to have one’s luggage labeled to that destination, was enough to
tickle the fancy. Could there be solemn men and serious women living
there? and had the station a sign-board? and could the pale, grave little
Dutch children keep their faces straight and glibly pronounce the name of
that town without sneezing?
Whether it is printed “Tjilatjap,” “Chalachap,” or “Chelachap,” it at
once suggests enough puns to spare one printing them, and surely no town
on the north side of the equator could support such a name with any
dignity.
But Tjilatjap is one of the oldest foreign settlements in Java, the one
good harbor on the whole south coast; and the “Tjilatjap fever” is a
distinguished specialty of the region that surpasses all the deadly forms
of fever in Java. The place proved to be such a cemetery for European
troops that the government was finally forced to abandon the extensive
barracks, magazines, and fortifications it had once constructed there.
A considerable white population remains, however, and the passer is one
of great local importance to the natives. The completion of the railway
brought new life to the old settlement; and with such easy access,
Tjilatjap is well worth visiting, if it were only to see its shade-trees.
All the post-roads running into the town, every street and lane, are
such continuous isles, arcades, and tunnels of living green that one is
repaid for coming, even after all the other teak and tamarind, kanari
and waringen avenues he may have seen elsewhere in Java. Not the allées
of Versailles, nor the _cryptomeria_ avenues of Japan, can surpass these
tree-lined streets of Tjilatjap, the endless vistas of straight trunks
and arching branches, the lofty canopies of solid, impenetrable shade,
rejoicing one in every part of the town. Tamarind may be the coolest and
waringen the densest shade, but kanari-trees give the most splendid and
inspiring effect, and Tjilatjap is the place of their greatest perfection.
We drove during the late afternoon and until dusk through kanari avenues,
whose great green cathedral aisles, with fretted arches a hundred feet
overhead, dwarfed everything that moved or stood beneath them; and then
under cool, feathery tamarind bowers, and past arrays of noble teak,
everywhere exclaiming with delight. The use of the big-leaved teak for
street and post-road shade-trees seemed to me the acme of botanical
extravagance,—as ill ordered as putting Pegasus to a cart,—since we of
the temperate zone are used to even speaking of that expensive timber
with respect. While we drove through the magnificent avenues in the late
afternoon light, past parade-grounds and parks, over canals and along
their embankments, the rising mists and the solid blue vapors massing
in the distances were so much actual, visible evil—malaria almost in
tangible form. One felt that he should dine on so many courses of quinine
only, taking the saving sulphate first with a soup-spoon, if he expected
to survive the mad venture into Tjilatjap’s fever-laden air. A crowded,
neglected cemetery gave one further creeps and gruesome thoughts; and
the evil-smelling sugar and copra warehouses on the harbor front seemed
to seal our doom—that old ignorant instinct or idea asserting itself
that the bad smell must necessarily be the bad air. There is a beautiful
view from the old military encampment out over the land-locked harbor,
with a glimpse of the open ocean through a narrow entrance. The dark
mass of Noesa Kambangan (“Floating Island”) rises beyond the silvery
waters—a tropical paradise deliberately depopulated by the Dutch as a
strategic measure, that there might be no temptation of sustenance to
induce an attack or siege from that quarter. The island is mountainous,
and contains much fine scenery, many floral marvels, curious stalactite
caverns of holy repute where Siva is secretly worshiped, hot springs, and
even gold-mines, and is famous in the old Javanese poems and legends. The
great surf of the Indian Ocean beats upon its precipitous south shore,
where the clefts and caves in the bold cliffs are inhabited by myriads
of sparrows, who build there their edible nests. Nest-hunting furnishes
employment to the few islanders, and, like everything else, is strictly
regulated and taxed by the colonial government. The nest-hunters only
pursue their perilous quest after the young sparrows are well grown each
season, as only new, fresh, one-season-old nests serve to make the “bad
vermicelli” soup Celestial gourmets adore; and the hunters are often
suspended over the cliffs by ropes in order to reach their carefully
hidden homes. The glutinous white lumps are as much esteemed in Java as
in China, and this rare dainty commands a high price from the moment it
is secured.
There is a typical little country colonial hotel at Tjilatjap—a large
building containing the offices, drawing-room, and dining-room in the
center of a garden, with long, low buildings at either side of it, where
rows of bedrooms open upon the long arcade or bricked porch, which is a
general corridor, screened off into as many little open sitting-rooms,
each with its table, lamp, and lounging-chairs. After our malarial drive
we were served an excellent dinner, which concluded with a dessert course
of kanari _ambon_, the “Java almond,” or nut of the kanari-tree, soaked
in brandy. The kanari ambon has the shape and shell of a butternut; but
the long, solid white kernel is finer and firmer than even an almond,
and of a richer, more distinct and delicate flavor. These nuts of the
Tjilatjap region are superior to those grown elsewhere in Java, but we
learned this too late, when we tried to buy them elsewhere.
After the sun fell the air grew heavier and hotter—a stifling, sodden,
steaming, reeking atmosphere of evil that one could hardly force in and
out of the lungs. We gasped at intervals all through the long evening,
and wondered if some vast vacuum bell had not been dropped down over
Tjilatjap, while we batted flying things from our faces and swept them
from the writing-table. Lizards ran over the walls, of course; and one
pale-gray, clammy thing was picked from the bed-curtains, and thrown out
with a sickening “ugh!” The invisible one, in agony, called for “_Becky!
Becky! Becky!_” and a hoarser voice cried for “_Tokee! Tokee! Tokee!_” of
whom we had never heard before.
Wearily, without rustle of leaves, stir, or any provocation, a sullen
rain began to fall, and saturating the atmosphere, made it that much
heavier. The rain ceased as wearily as it had begun, and the awful,
sodden stillness was only broken by the slow, heavy drip of the listless
foliage, and the occasional thud of a falling mango. Far, far away,
faintly in the air was heard a smothered booming, moaning sound—the
ceaseless surf of the Indian Ocean. Overhead there was darkness, profound
and intense, beyond even heat-lightning’s illumining, with a more
impenetrable blackness where the double rows of ancient kanari-trees
shaded the street beyond the hotel garden. The possibilities of its
effects, the awful, desperate depression that loneliness in such
surroundings would surely cause, made me wonder how great was the
proportion of suicides’ graves in that damp, weedy cemetery we had driven
past in the gloaming.
Then three guests came over from the other part of the hotel, and,
spreading themselves out on chairs in the section of porch beyond our
partition screen, began conversation, all in Dutch consonants and palatal
garglings, with a volume and lung-power, a fervor and emphasis, that made
the languid air vibrate and the mangos fall in showers. Their voices
could have easily been heard at the harbor’s edge or the railway-station,
in a stamp-mill or in a boiler factory; and the humor of it—the three
Dutchmen in the stilly night bellowing away as if conversing through a
half-mile of fog—greatly relieved the sodden melancholy of the malarial
evening. Clouds of dense, rank, Sumatra tobacco-smoke rose from the
talkers’ mouths in volumes to match their voices, and until long past
midnight those three men on a silent porch conversed _more Hollandico_,
the roar of voices and the pungent smoke sending us dreams of Chicago
fires and riots, passing freight-trains, and burning forests.
We had been warned betimes that there would be no opportunity to lunch at
wayside stations or from compartment baskets during the long ride from
Tjilatjap to Garoet, and we planned accordingly. Our gentle Moslem, who
made such inconsequent, irresponsible child’s play at waiting on us, was
shown the bread and the cold buffalo beef, and bidden make sandwiches in
plenty. I even went into details as to salt and pepper, the “mustard” and
“no mustard” varieties, and insisted on white paper only for wrapping,
before leaving him to the task.
After all Tjilatjap’s evil name, we never had any ill effects from
venturing into it, and we had a sense of complacent rejoicing when we
took train, that next morning, for Maos on the main line of the railway,
and knew that a few hours would put us beyond the _terra ingrata_.
Nearly always, in our railway rides in Java, we had the first-class
compartments to ourselves; and we often looked longingly, despite the
heat, at the crowded second-class compartments, where many Europeans,
nice, intelligent-looking people and interesting families, traveled in
sociable numbers. The only companions ever of our first-class solitude
were, once, the chief constructor of the railways, who for a sudden
short trip had dispensed with his official car; and, again, a young
Holland geologist and mining expert returning from a season’s survey in
Borneo—both traveling at government expense. Only the more extravagant
planters, native princes, tourists, and officials with passes or under
orders seem to use the first-class cars, although the additional
comforts and the extra space are actual necessaries of travel in the
tropics. That the second-class carriages were always well filled with
Europeans showed that at least one thrifty notion of the Hollanders’ home
survived transplantation in this matter of railway fares. From the two
chance fellow-passengers whom we had the fortune to meet on the train
I derived enough, by a day’s steady questioning and comment, to atone
for the dearth of travelers’ talk I had suffered before. Both men were
cyclopedias of things Javanese, geologic and botanical, and those were
very red-letter days in the guide-bookless land.
There was always interest enough in watching the people by the way; and
as the through railway-trains were then novelties of a few days’ and
weeks’ experience in that section of Middle Java, the station platforms
were crowded with native sight-seers. Native officials and their trains
of attendants, Mohammedan women with gorgeous head-gear and the thinnest
pretenses of veils, stolid planters with obsequious, groveling servants,
and planters’ wives, barefooted, wrapped in scant sarongs, and as often
wearing red velvet jackets and other traveling toilets of eccentric
combination, the costume of the tropics and a Northern winter at the same
time—processions of these entertained us not a little as they went their
way to the other compartments of the long train.
After the scorching hours spent running through swamp and jungle, we drew
near the mountains; life became more bearable, and we beckoned our Moslem
at the next stopping-place.
“Bring the sandwiches; they are not in this basket.” He looked
blankness, as if a little vaguer and more becalmed in mind than usual.
“The sandwiches that you made at the Tjilatjap hotel this morning,” I
explained slowly. “Where are they?”
“Oh, I eat them—jus’ now,” said the soft-voiced one, naïvely, his hand
unconsciously traveling to the digestive region and comfortably stroking
it.
Language was useless at such a crisis, and sadly, silently, I resigned
myself to the rest of the ten hours’ empty ride. An hour later we reached
Tjiawi, near which the finest pineapples of the island are grown; and we
bought them on the platform, great fragrant, luscious globes of delight,
regardless of the almost prayerful requests made to us on arrival, that
we would not touch a pineapple in Java. We did a tourist’s whole duty to
specialties of strange places for that one day, buying the monster nanas
in most generous provision; and we made up for all previous denials and
lost pineapple opportunities as we tore off the ripe diamonds of pulp in
streaming sections that melted on the tongue; nor did we feel any sinking
at heart nor dread of the future for such indulgence. Then, at Tissak
Malaya, we bought strings of mangosteens through the car-windows. But
after the light, evanescent, six-o’clock breakfast of the country, these
noonday feasts of juicy fruits did not satisfy one for long, and soon we
hungered again.
At Tjipeundeui, in the shadow of the great volcanic range that walls the
west, a local chief, or village head man, was foremost on the station
platform, that was crowded with cheerful, chattering groups of natives,
hung over with bundles as if come from a fair. With great excitement the
chief announced that the Goenoeng Galoengoeng, or “Great Gong Mountain,”
was in eruption again. Two weeks before it had rumbled, as its name
indicates it has a habit of doing, and sent out a shower of stones
that ruined a large coffee-plantation, scorching and half burying the
budding trees in the hot rocks, pebbles, and sand. It had begun rumbling
and shaking again, the village wells had emptied, and the people had
fled, remembering too well the eruption of 1822, when one hundred and
fifteen villages were destroyed, twenty thousand people were killed, and
plantations ruined for twenty miles around by the rain of hot stones and
ashes, and the hot water and mud overflowing from the blown-out crater.
But such a gentle, happy, cheerful, chattering lot of refugees as they
were, saving their best sarongs and finery by wearing them, and tying the
rest of their treasures in shapeless bundles, as they went picnicking
forth to visit relatives until the volcanic disturbance might subside!
They were not a whit more care-worn or anxious than the crowd on the
next station platform, where two or three hundred pleasure-seekers were
returning from a famous country passer, whose rare meetings attract
people from afar. Even the chief of the volcanic village radiated joy
and pride all over his wrinkled old brown face as he related the moving
events occurring in his bailiwick. Eruptions were evidently his pastime,
a diversion quite in his line, since he had only come down to the railway
to see his family off to a place of safety, while he would return, play
Casabianca on his burning heath, and have it out with the resounding
Galoengoeng at his leisure.
We had an hour to wait at Tjibatoe station before the Garoet train
left, and the refreshment-room keeper offered tea and biscuits—the
inevitable, omnipresent Huntley & Palmer biscuits, that are the mainstay
and salvation, the very prop and stay and staff, of tourist life in
Netherlands as well as British India, and for whose making the great
Reading bakers buy the entire tapioca-crop of Java each year. After
a short wait in the room, redolent of gin and schnapps and colonial
tobacco, a boy sauntered in the back door with an iron tea-kettle, and
the proprietor was about to make the tea with that warm water, when we
chorused a protest. He good-naturedly allowed me to gather up tea-pot,
tea-kettle, small boy, and all, and go a hundred yards down the road,
climb a bamboo ladder laid against a bank, and restore the cooling kettle
to its place on the home fire in the airiest, dearest little fancy
basket of a home, in which one could imagine grown people playing “keep
house.” A bright-eyed little woman stirred the fire, gave me a box to sit
upon, and herself crouched before the sullen tea-kettle, chattering and
crooning like a child at play. “_Bodedit? Bodedit?_” (“Does it boil? Does
it boil?”) she asked seriously, putting her ear to the spout, or sliding
the lid and peering into the still interior; but it finally did boil
energetically. We made the tea; and, at risk of every bone, I descended
that slanting half-ladder in a gentle rain, and returned to enjoy quite
a feast that the kind refreshment-room keeper had conjured up in the
meantime.
XXIII
GAROET AND PAPANDAYANG
Rain blurred the landscape for all of the half-hour run from Tjibatoe
down to Garoet, and we lost the panorama of splendid mountains that
surround the great green Garoet plain, embowered in the midst of which is
the town of Garoet, a favorite hill and pleasure-resort of the island. We
did catch glimpses now and then, however, of dark mountain masses looming
above and through the clouds, and of flooded rice-fields and ripening
crops, with scarecrows and quaint little baskets of outlooks perched
high on stilts, where young Davids with slings lay in wait for birds.
Boys leading flocks of geese, and boys astride of buffaloes made other
pictures afield, and in the drizzling rain of the late afternoon we were
whirled through the dripping avenues to the Hotel Hork, home of Siamese
royalties and lesser tourists, health- and pleasure-seekers, who visit
this volcanic and scenic center of the Preanger regencies.
Our sitting-room porch at this summer hotel, with an endless season,
looked on a garden, whose formal flower-beds, bordered with stones and
shells, classic vases, and other conventions of their kind, reminded one
at once of by-places in Europe; and so also did the bust of Mozart and
the copy of Thorwaldsen’s “Venus,”—until one noted their protecting palm-
and mango-trees. This Garoet hotel is one of the institutions of Java,
and the Vrouw van Hork and her excellent Dutch housekeeping are famed
from Anjer Head to Banjoewangi. All the colonial types were represented
at the long table d’hôte, and every language of Europe was heard. There
were always nice neighbors at table, able and anxious to talk English,
and the cheery Dutch ladies were kindness and friendliness personified.
At no other resort on the island did we receive such a pleasant
impression of the simplicity, refinement, and charm of social life in the
colony. But, although two thousand feet above sea-level, in a climate of
mildly tempered eternal spring, the ladies all wore the sarong and loose
dressing-sacque in the morning, as in scorching Batavia or lowland Solo.
Even on damp and chilly mornings, when a light wrap was a comfortable
addition to our conventional muslin gowns, the Garoet ladies were
bare-ankled and as scantily clad as the Batavians; and there were shock
and real embarrassment to me in seeing in sarong and sacque the dignified
elderly matron who had been my charming dinner neighbor the night before.
There is an interesting passer at Garoet, and besides the lavish display
of nature’s products, there are curious baskets brought from a farther
valley, which visitors compete for eagerly. The town square, or overgrown
village green, is faced by the homes of the native regent and the Dutch
resident, and by the quaint little messigit, or Mohammedan mosque. The
last mufti, or head priest of the prophet, at Garoet was a man of such
intelligence and liberality that he had but one wife, and allowed her to
go with face uncovered, to learn Dutch, and to meet and freely converse
with all his foreign visitors, men as well as women. Travelers brought
letters to this mufti and quoted him in their books, but since his death
the more regular, illiberal order has ruled at Mohammedan headquarters.
The great excursion from Garoet is to the crater of Papandayang, a
mountain whose extended lines (fifteen miles in length by six in
breadth) match its syllables; which has been in vigorous eruption within
a century; and which still steams and rumbles, and, like the Goenoeng
Goentor, or “Thunder Mountain,” across the plain, may burst forth again
at any moment. At the last eruption of Papandayang, in 1772, there was
a great convulsion, a solid mass of the mountain was blown out into the
air, streams of lava poured forth, and ashes and cinders covered the
earth for seven miles around with a layer five feet thick, destroying
forty villages and engulfing three thousand people in one day. The scar
of the great crater, or “blow-out hole,” near the summit of the mountain,
is still visible from the plain, and the plumes and clouds of steam
ascending from it remind one of its unpleasant possibilities. We made a
start early one rainy morning, and drove twelve miles across the plain,
along hard, sandy white roads, continuously bordered with shade-trees.
The frequent villages were damp and cheerless, and the little basket
houses, that the people weave as they would a hat, were anything but
enviable dwellings then. The sling-shooters’ sentry-boxes throughout the
fields—perches where men or boys sat to pull sets of strings that reached
to scarecrows far away—suggested too much of clammy, rheumatic discomfort
to seem as picturesque as usual—strange little Malay companion pieces
to the same boxes on stilts that one sees perched in the rice-fields of
Hizen and the other southern provinces of Japan.
[Illustration: TRANSPLANTING RICE.]
At Tjisoeroepan, at the foot of the mountain, we changed to clumsy
djoelies, or sedan-chairs, each borne by four coolies, whose
go-as-you-please gait, not one of them keeping step with any other,
was especially trying so soon after coming from the enjoyment of the
swift, regular, methodical slap-slap tread of the chair-bearers of
South China. Despite their churning motion, the way was enjoyable;
and, beginning with a blighted and abandoned coffee-plantation at the
base of the mountain, we passed through changing belts of vegetation,
as by successive altitudes we passed botanically from the tropic to
the temperate zone. The bleached skeletons of the old coffee-trees,
half-smothered in undergrowth and vines, interested one more than the
beautifully ordered and carefully tended young coffee-trees in newer
plantations—sad reminders of those good old days before the war (the
Achinese war), the deficit, and the blight. Beyond kina limits there were
no more clearings, and then the tree-fern appeared—wan skeletons of trees
at first, where much thinning out had left them in range of scorching
sunlight; but in the shade of greater trees in the thick of the jungle
they stood superb—great, splendid, soft, drooping, swaying, gigantic
green fronds, a refined, effeminate, delicate, sensitive sort of palm,
the tropic’s most tropical, exquisite, wonderful tree. The upper regions
of Papandayang are all clothed with real jungle, the forest primeval,
with giant creepers writhing and looping serpent-like about the trees,
and doing all the extravagant things they are expected to do. Ratans,
or climbing palms, enveloped whole trees with their pendant, gracefully
decorative leaves; orchids swung in tasseled sprays, starred mossy trunks
and branches, and showed in all the green wonderland overhead and around;
and in each ravine, where warm streams sprayed the air, a whole hothouse
full of blooming, green, and strange loveliness delighted the eye.
We met strings of coolies descending with baskets of sulphur on their
backs, the path was yellow with the broken fragments of years’ droppings,
and infragrant, murky sulphur-streams crossed and ran beside the path, in
promise of the stifling caldrons we were fast approaching.
We had a magnificent view back over the Garoet plain, with its
checker-board of green and glinting fields, marked with the network of
white post-roads and dotted with the clumps of palms that bespoke the
hidden villages, and then we passed in through a natural gateway or
cutting in the solid mountain-side made by the last eruption. The broad
passage or defile led to the _kawa_, or crater, a bowl or depression deep
sunk in rocky walls, with pools of liquid sulphur bubbling all over the
five-acre floor and sending off clouds of nauseous steam. These pools,
vats of purest molten gold, boiled violently all the time, scattering
golden drops far and wide from their fretted, honey-combed edges. There
was always suggestion of the possibility of their suddenly shooting into
the air like geysers, and deluging one with the column of molten gold; or
of the soft filigree edges of the pools crumbling and precipitating one
untimely into the lakelet of fire and brimstone. Steam jets roared and
hissed from all parts of the quaking solfatara, and from the rumblings
and strange underground noises one could understand the native legends
of chained giants groaning inside of the mountain, and their name for
Papandayang, “The Forge.” The sulphur coolies stepped warily along the
paths between the pools; our shoe-soles were not proof against the steam
and scorch of the heaving ground beneath us; and carbonic-acid gas and
sulphureted hydrogen were all that one could find to breathe down there
on the crater’s floor—the undoubted Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison.”
It is said that one can see the shores both of the Indian Ocean and the
Java Sea from the summit of Papandayang, which is seven thousand feet
above their level. Although the skies were cloudy and doubtful around the
horizon edges, we were willing to take the brilliant noonday sun overhead
as augury, and attempt the climb. As there was no path beyond the
crater’s rest-sheds for the coolies to carry us in djoelies, we started
on foot straight up the first steep slope of the crater’s ragged wall,
through tangles of bushes and the rank bamboo-grass. We drove our servant
on ahead, and the poor indolent creature, cheated of his expected lounge
after his arduous pony-ride up the mountain and his midday rice-feast,
turned plaintive countenance backward, as he picked his reluctant way
barefooted through this prickly underbrush.
“What for go here?” he bleated.
“To get to the top of the mountain and see the two oceans.”
“Dis mountain no got top,” wailed the unconscionable one; but we
remembered the waist-deep water he had conjured up to discourage us from
Chandi Sewou; nor had we forgotten the Tjilatjap sandwiches with which he
had comforted himself such a few days before, and we said, “Go on!”
Then, remembering our perpetual hunt for and expectation of great snakes,
he turned mournful countenance and wailed: “_Slanga! slanga!_ [”Snakes!
snakes!“] always live dis kind grass.”
“Very well. That’s just what we want to find. Be sure you tell us as soon
as you step on one or see it moving.”
But, after pushing and tearing our way through bamboo-grass and bushes to
the first ridge, we saw only other and farther ridges to be surmounted,
with great ravines and stony hollows between. We took such view of
the cloudy plains and ranges to northward and southward as we could,
seeing everywhere the murky, blue, misty horizon of the rainy season,
and nowhere the silver sea-levels, nor the lines of perpetual surf that
fringe the Indian Ocean. We saw again the mosaic of rice-fields and dry
fields covering the Garoet plain; and looking down upon the foot of an
opposite mountain spur, we could study, like a relief-map or model tilted
before us, a vast plantation cultivated from tea to highest coffee and
kina level.
Nowhere in the slopes below could we see the vale of the deadly
upas-tree, that was last supposed to occupy a retired spot on
Papandayang’s remote heights. The imaginative Dr. Foersch, surgeon of
the Dutch East India Company at Samarang in 1773, made the blood of all
readers of the last century run cold with his description of himself
standing alone, “in solitary horror,” on a blasted plain covered with
skeletons, with another solitary horror of a deadly upas the only larger
object in sight. The Guevo Upas, or “Valley of Poison,” was first said to
be on the plain southeast of Samarang, but that region was explored in
vain; then it was put upon the Dieng plateau, and found not there; and
last the valley was said to be on the side of a high mountain far away in
the almost unexplored Preanger regencies. Dr. Horsfield, in his search
for volcanic data, routed the upas myth from the Papandayang region and
exploded it for all time, and the Guevo Upas has gone to that limbo where
the maelstrom and other perils of ante-tourist times are laid away. There
is a deadly tree in Java, the antiar (_Antiaris toxicaria_), whose sap
is as poisonous as serpent venom if it enters a wound, and will produce
deep, incurable ulcers if dropped on the skin; and skeletons of animals
may have been found beneath and near it. Erasmus Darwin immortalized
the deadly upas, or antiar, in his poem, “The Botanic Garden,” and this
antiar is the only actual and accepted upas-tree of the tropics. It is
quite possible that some valley or old crater on the mountain-side, where
the carbonic-acid and sulphurous gases from the inner caldron could
escape, would be strewn with skeletons of birds and animals, a valley of
death to man and beast, and as deadly a place, for the same reasons, as
the celebrated grotto at Naples; but no tree could live in those fumes
either; and the solitary tree on the “blasted plain” of skeletons, and
the Dutch doctor in his “solitary horror,” have to be abandoned entire—a
last disillusionment in Java.
When we returned from above, our djoelie coolies were squatted under
the tiled shed of refuge built for visitors and sulphur-miners, and
were as curious a lot of mixed types and races as one could find in an
ethnological museum. While the Malays have, as a rule, but scanty beards
and no hair on breast or limbs, two of these men were as whiskered
and hairy as the wild men of Borneo, or the hirsute ones of Ceylon,
the faces narrowed to the countenance of apes by the thick growth of
hair, and their breasts shaggy as a spaniel’s back. These wild men
came from some farther district, but our medium could not or would not
comprehend our queries and establish the exact spot of their birthplace
by cross-questioning the man-apes themselves; and the missing links sat
comfortably the while, submitting their disheveled heads to one and
another’s friendly search and attentions.
We were reluctant to descend Papandayang at the rapid gait the coolies
struck for going down hill, but they whisked us through the different
belts of vegetation and down to the serried rows of coffee-trees in
seemingly no time at all. The head man of Tjisoeroepan had posted the
village gamelan, or orchestra, in the little rustic band-stand of the
green, and their tinkling, mild, and plaintive melodies reached us
through the trees long before we were in sight of them. The musicians
played a long program while the djoelies were put away, carts and horses
brought round, and the very moderate bill itemized and paid—too modest a
bill altogether to need an accompaniment of slow music.
We reached Garoet as the delayed afternoon shower began falling; but the
lovely moonlight evening under the shade-trees of Garoet streets was to
be remembered, as were the later hours on the porch, with the iron bust
of Mozart looking at us from his tropical garden bower. In the middle of
the night we heard commotion on our porch, as of bamboo-chairs thrown
over and dragged about. “The snake!—at last!” was the first thought and
cry; and as the thrashing continued, it was evident that a whole den of
pythons must be contorting outside. “A tiger!” and we peered through a
crack of the latticed door and saw our Tissak Malaya basket scattered in
sections over the garden path, and monkeys capering off with our store
of Boro Boedor cocoanut-palm sugar. And this petty larceny of the garden
monkeys was our only adventure with wild beasts in the tropics!
XXIV
“SALAMAT!”
The return from the hill-country to Buitenzorg and Batavia was all
too hurried, and the soft Malay “_Salamat_” (“Farewell”) found much
regretfully left undone. We lingered at the Sans Souci by Salak until the
last hour of grace for the necessary steamer preparations at Batavia, as
we dreaded the reeking sea-coast with its scorching noondays and stifling
nights.
The shady avenues, the wonder-garden, the picturesque passer, and the
veranda view of the great blue mountain rising from the valley of palms
below were more enchanting than at first. I had come to appreciate and
accept the tropics then, to be aware of many fine distinctions unnoted
in the first enjoyment of their beauty. I fancied that I could detect
greater coolness in the shade of the tamarind than in that of any other
tree; the milk of a fresh cocoanut had become the most refreshing and
delicious drink; and the palm had established itself in my affections
and all associations with the outer world. There had come to be a sense
of attachment, almost comradeship, in the constant companion tree, the
graceful, restless creature that the natives say will not live beyond the
sound of the human voice—dying if the village or habitation it guards is
deserted. So nearly human and appealing are these waving cocoas that it
is fitting that there should be a census of palms quite as much as of
people, and that in the last enumeration it appeared that the people and
the palms existed in even numbers—one palm apiece for every one of the
millions of inhabitants of the island.
The drives and the scenery about Buitenzorg, the sunset and twilight
band-concerts under the great aisles of kanari-trees, had fresh interest,
and it was indeed a penance to leave without taking train around to
the Preanger side of Mount Gedeh, and driving up to the sanatorium of
Sindanglaya, over three thousand feet above sea-level. The cool mountain
air at that elevation is cure and tonic for all tropic ills, and with
the mercury always 20° lower than at sea-level, Sindanglaya is the one
sure refuge for all Malaysia and Cochin China, French officers from
Saigon reaching it more quickly than Japan or the highlands of Ceylon.
From Sindanglaya one may go to the Gedeh’s crater, and to the summit of
its twin peak, Pangerango, the highest mountain of the island, where,
surrounded by primroses and violets,—the flora of the European temperate
zone, islanded there after the period of great cold had retreated
northward,—one may look down upon all the Batavia Residency, and out upon
the Java Sea, and southward across Preanger hills to the greater Indian
Ocean.
There was always some new or strange thing to pique one’s interest
and implore delay, and the promise of the great talipot-palm of the
gardens bursting into its magnificent flower, or the great creeper, the
_Rafflesia_, producing one of its gigantic six-foot flowers, the biggest
blossom known to the world,—was an inducement not put away without a
pang. There were bird’s-nest caves near by on a mountain-side, and over
in the highlands toward Bantam a strange colony of “Badouins,” more
than a thousand refugees from religious persecution, who continue there
unhindered the practice of a religion part pagan and part Buddhist,
which commands the most severely upright lives. The anthropologist and
economist have passed these people by, and one can find little concerning
them in English print. Every day held its wonder and surprise, and rumor
of more and of greater ones.
Although we were living and walking on the line of one of the great
fissures of the earth’s crust all that time, and eleven of the forty-five
volcanoes of the island are gently active, we did not once feel the
tremor of an earthquake. Table d’hôte talk often turned upon the volcanic
phenomena one and another guest had experienced, and the eruption of
Krakatau—by no means an old story to these colonials—was a topic for
which I had an insatiable appetite. They told one thrilling stories of
that summer of Krakatau’s prolonged activity, of Batavian folk running
frequent excursion-steamers to the Strait of Sunda to witness the
spectacle of a volcano in eruption; and of that August Sunday of horror
when the very end of the world seemed to have come to all that part of
Java. A dense pall of smoke covered all of Buitenzorg’s sky that day;
Salak was lost in the darkness, and it was thought that it or Gedeh was
in eruption when crashes and roars beyond those of the most terrific
thunderstorms, the bang and boom of the heaviest artillery’s bombardment,
and the sound of frightful explosions filled the air, shook and rocked
the ground, and rattled houses until conversation was impossible.
Compass-needles spun around and around, barometers rose and fell, clouds
of sulphurous vapors half strangled the people in the gloom of that awful
Sabbath night, and no one slept with this dread cannonading and the end
of the world seemingly close at hand. The next daylight brought the
climax, a series of prolonged and awful roars, and then the very crack
and crash of doom, when half of Krakatau’s island was torn away with
the final explosion. None who endured those days of terror can tell of
them without excitement; and those whose plantations were near the Sunda
Strait had yet more gruesome times during the days of darkness and of
greenish, horrid twilight, when the heavens seemed to be falling about
them in the rain of ashes and hot stones. Batavian folk had as terrifying
experiences, and each entering ship brought more awful tales of being
caught by the waves or the eddies of that sickening sea, with hot stones
setting decks and rigging afire, and the weight of hot ashes threatening
to sink the vessels in the sea of pumice before they could be shoveled
away. Pumice covered the ocean for miles away from Krakatau; and it
drifted into Batavia harbor in a surface-layer so deep that planks were
laid on it and men walked even a mile to shore, they say.
A Dutch scientific commission investigated and collected reports upon
the phenomenal events, and its report, “Krakatau,” edited by R. D.
M. Verbeek, the eminent geologist and director of mines to the Dutch
government, was published at Batavia in 1885, in a quarto volume of 500
pages, in Dutch and French editions, accompanied by charts and an atlas
of colored plates that make clear the whole course of the spectacular
phenomena.
The Royal Society of Great Britain appointed a “Krakatoa Committee,”
composed of thirteen of its most eminent geologists, meteorologists,
seismists, and specialists in such lines, to collect data concerning this
most remarkable eruption of the century, and its report, a quarto volume
of 475 pages, edited by G. J. Symons, and published in London in 1888,
embodies the result of their inquiries.
M. René Breon’s report to the French Minister of Public Instruction was
published by his government, and he contributed papers to “La Nature,”
in the April and May numbers for the year 1885. Mr. H. O. Forbes, the
naturalist, was in Batavia in the first weeks of Krakatau’s activity, and
the record of his excursion to the island and his observations was read
to the Royal Geographic Society, and afterward published in vol. vi. of
“Proceedings” (1884, pp. 129, 142).
The many official reports and accounts of the Krakatau eruption are best
epitomized in Findlay’s “Sailing Directory for the Indian Archipelago and
China” (p. 78):
In an old Dutch work there is an account of a violent eruption
on Krakatau in 1680, since which time it appears to have been
quiescent until May 21, 1883, when smoke was observed rising
from it, and it quickly became very active. On the 23d a vessel
encountered a large accumulation of pumice off Flat Cape,
Sumatra; and on the 24th volcanic cinders fell on the island of
Timor, twelve hundred miles distant.
For the next eight or nine weeks the eruption continued with
great vigor, increasing in activity on August 21st, preparatory
to its final great effort. On the evening of the 26th some
violent explosions took place, audible at Batavia, eighty miles
distant; and between 5 and 7 A. M. on the 27th there was a
still more gigantic explosion, followed about 10 A. M. by a
detonation so terrific as to be heard even in India, Ceylon,
Manilla, and the west coast of Australia, over two thousand
miles away. Following on these came a succession of enormous
waves, which completely swept the shores of the strait, utterly
destroying Anjer, Telok Betong, and numerous villages, the loss
of life being officially estimated at over thirty-six thousand
souls. The coasts and islands in the vicinity were buried under
a layer of mud and ashes.
The effects of this eruption were felt all over the world.
Ashes fell at Singapore, 519 miles distant, Bengkalis, 568
miles distant, and the Cocos Islands, 764 miles to the
southwestward; and undulations of the sea were recorded at
Ceylon, Aden, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, and in
the Pacific. A wave of atmospherical disturbance was also
generated, which has been traced three times completely round
the world, traveling at the speed of sound. Many months
afterward pumice was cast ashore on Zanzibar Island and
Madagascar, supposed to have drifted from the Strait of Sunda.
The height of the column of steam and smoke given off by the
volcano is estimated at from nine to twelve miles,[9] the
consequence being that large quantities of fine dust were
discharged into the upper regions of the atmosphere, giving
rise to those beautiful sunset effects observed all over the
world for several months afterward. The amount of solid matter
ejected has been computed at over four and a quarter cubic
miles.
Such a convulsion has naturally greatly altered the features
of the surrounding sea and islands. The northern portion of
Krakatau has completely disappeared, and several banks and
shoals have been formed between it and Bezee Island, rendering
the passage between almost impracticable. It has not otherwise
affected the navigation of Sunda Strait, and its activity has
now ceased (1889)....
Krakatau Island, lying in the middle of Sunda Strait, has been
reduced in size from thirteen to six square miles, the site
of the northern part of the island now being covered by deep
water, no bottom being obtained at 164 fathoms at one spot.
The island is now three and a half miles in length, east and
west, and two miles wide at its east end. Mount Radaka, its
fine conical peak, which still remains, rising boldly up to the
height of 2657 feet, may be seen at a considerable distance,
and serves as a fairway mark for ships entering the strait
from the westward. It is in latitude 6° 9′ S., longitude 105°
27′ E., and its northern side is now a sheer precipice about
2550 feet high.... The island was uninhabited, but visited
occasionally by fishermen....
Verlaten Island has increased in size from about one and a
half to four and a half square miles. Lang Island has altered
somewhat in shape, but not much in size. The round islet named
Polish Hat has disappeared, but another islet now lies three
quarters of a mile west a half-mile from its south point, with
deep water between.
Bezee or Tamarind Island, lying ten and a half miles north by
east from Krakatau peak, has altered a little in shape, but not
in size, and appears to be the northern limit of the volcanic
disturbance.... Bezee Island formerly produced pepper.... The
village was on the east side opposite Little Tamarind Island,
but the volcanic eruption smothered the island with mud and
ashes.
Although we traveled on the island through all the November weeks, we
did not experience any of the sensational downpours promised for the
beginning of the rainy season, nor the terrific thunderstorms warranted
to rend the heavens at the turn of the monsoon, nor any inconvenience
or disarrangement of plans through the first instalments of the annual
precipitation. The black clouds of the Java Sea did not suddenly envelop
our ship in such sheets of rain that the vessel was forced to lay to,
the lookout in the bows unable to see ten feet ahead of him, and the
double sail-cloth awnings over the decks serving no more purpose than so
much gauze. The rain did not descend in a flood or cloud-burst’s fury at
precisely three o’clock every afternoon, penetrating carriage-curtains
and -aprons, filling the carriage-boxes like tanks, and saturating every
garment and article. Nor any more did we play billiards by lightning,
without lamps, like that British planter who eventually scared away a
party of Americans by his account of thunderstorms in Java. This British
resident assured the tourists that at his Preanger plantation the
thunder-claps shook the house, rocked the furniture, and stopped clocks,
and that he had often turned out the reeling lamps for safety’s sake, and
continued his games of billiards by the lightning’s incessant, blinding
green glare. And the Americans believed it, and remained away from
Java—British humor and American credulity matched to equally surprising
extremes.
There were gentle, intermittent drizzles and light showers on several
days; many days when the gray skies sulked and seemed about to weep;
but the only hard showers were at night. The one vaunted sensational,
tropical downpour, with blue-and-green lightning’s illumination, made
my last Batavian midnight memorable, and put me at last in line with
my climatic expectations. Yet that was at the end of November, when the
monsoon was supposed to have sent off its irregular fireworks and settled
down to the fixed program of a three-o’clock shower every afternoon, in
order to precipitate its annual eighty inches of rain.
Even the thermometer disappointed one in this land comprised between the
parallels of 5° and 8° south of the equator. Not once in my stay did it
register as great a heat as I have once seen it register in Sitka in
July—94° Fahrenheit; but as the column of mercury is often small gage or
warrant for one’s own sensations, he must believe, even if with mental
reservations, that Batavia’s mean temperature was but 78.69° for twelve
years, with a monthly mean range of but two degrees. If one has been
out in the sun at that hour, he feels skeptical about Batavia’s annual
average noonday temperature being but 83°, all of four degrees cooler
than Samarang’s and Sourabaya’s average noon temperature. He may believe
that the thermometer very seldom falls below 70° or rises above 90°, but
a quality in the air, a weight and appreciable humidity, make Batavia’s
mean, exhausting, lifeless 83° noondays the climax of one’s discomfort.
With the upas-tree, the great snakes, the tigers, the pirates, and
the good coffee exposed as myths; the white ants never eating out the
contents of a trunk overnight; mildew ignoring the luggage left for
over a fortnight at Buitenzorg; and the trunks left at Singapore for
more than a month equally innocent of fungus-mold, I felt that the
tropics had defrauded me a bit—or else that I had lent too willing an
ear to returned travelers’ imaginations. Taking my own experience as
proof, there might be written a brief chapter about snakes to match that
famous one in Horrebow’s “History of Iceland.” But the disillusionment
of disillusionments awaited us on the borders of Bantam, when the last
Batavian day brought information that our so-called tiny bantam cock
is not from Bantam at all. It was first seen on board a Japanese junk
trading at Bantam in the long ago, and the Malays, who are natural and
long-descended cock-fighters, saw in these little fowls combatants more
spirited than any of their own breed, and of more manageable size. The
true bantam cocks to the province born are nearly as large as turkeys;
long ago Dr. Marsden told of their being as large as Norfolk bustards,
and of their standing high enough to peck off the dinner-table, and said
that when they sat down on the first joint of the leg they were taller
than any common fowls. The introduction of the pretty Japanese fowls
revolutionized cock-fighting, and the Dutch imported them through their
Nagasaki factory, and introduced them to Europe.
The equator was proved not such a terrible thing as it had been made
out to be—a thing that might be spoken of very disrespectfully because
of that misplaced awe and veneration; and the tropics not at all as
astonishing as they used to be, when illustrated books of travel, museum
collections and models, and exposition villages had not made their life
and scenery so familiar; when hothouses had not brought even orchids to
common acquaintance, and Northern markets to displaying oranges and
bananas as commonly and regularly as apples or potatoes.
With the other India—the whole continent of the real, the greater, or
British India—before us, we could not delay on the Netherlands isle;
and that strange, haunting, indefinite fear, the dread of some unknown,
undefinable evil, that shadows and oppresses one so in the tropics,
asserted itself more strongly as we approached Batavia. One is not sure
whether this vague fear which possesses one under the line is due to
the sense of extreme distance, to dread of the many diseases that lie
in wait, to fear of the sudden deaths of so many kinds that may snatch
one in the lands where the sun swings nearest, or to the peril of
volcanic forces that may instantly overwhelm one in some disaster like
that of Krakatau. At least, there was always a sensation of oppression,
a dread of some impending danger in the midst of one’s enjoyment, and
an unconscious looking-forward to free breathing and the sensation of
safety, when once across the line again, back to the grand route and the
world again, safe under the British flag at friendly Singapore, at home
again with the English language.
Yet Java, the peerless gem in “that magnificent empire of Insul-Inde
which winds about the equator like a garland of emeralds,” is the
ideal tropical island, the greenest, the most beautiful, and the most
exquisitely cultivated spot in the East, the most picturesque and
satisfactory bit of the tropics anywhere near the world’s great routes of
travel. Now that the dark days of Dutch rule are ended and enlightened
modes prevail; now that the culture system has developed the island’s
resources and made it all one exquisite, fruitful garden, and the
colonists have begun to take an interest in uncovering and protecting the
ancient monuments, the interest and attractions of Java are greater each
year. It is alike the scientist’s greatest storehouse and the traveler’s
unequaled tropical pleasure-resort and playground in the East. The
antiquities have been merely scratched, explorations in that line are
only well begun, leaving to archæologists and anthropologists a field
of incalculable richness—more especially to those bent upon arriving at
some solution of the great puzzle, some proof of Asiatic and American
contact in pre-Columbian times. The puzzling resemblance of the older
Javanese ruins to those of Central America has yet to be explained, and
the alluring theory of migration from the rich “food-ponds” of the waters
within the archipelago to other and farther inclosed seas teeming with
fishes, until the Malays had followed with the great currents up one
shore of the Pacific Ocean and down the other, must be proved. Dutch
scientists naturally desire to explore and exploit this treasure-house
of Java for themselves; but with a questioning world and many eager
inquirers bent on solving all the mysteries and problems of race origin
and migrations, the prize must be won by the swiftest.
If Baedeker or Murray would only go to Java and kindly light the
tourist’s way; if the Dutch government would relax the useless vexations
of the toelatings-kaart system, and the colonists welcome the visitor
in more kindly spirit, Java would rank, as it deserves to, as a close
second to Japan, an oasis in travel, an island of beauty and delight
to the increasing number of round-the-world travelers, who each year
are discouraged from visiting the country by less heedful ones who have
ventured there.
Whether, as pessimists foretell, a Mohammedan rebellion shall desolate
the isle; whether it remains in Dutch leading-strings, arrives at even
the limited independence of a British colony, or succumbs to Germany’s
colonial ambitions, as the French so freely prophesy, Java is certain
soon to loom larger in the world’s view, and for a time at least to
occupy the stage.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java,” Appendix A.
[2] “Max Havelaar,” by Edouard Douwes Dekker (Multatuli); translation by
Baron Nahuys (Edinburgh, 1868).
[3] See “A Visit to Java,” W. Basil Worsfold, London, 1893.
[4] Holland has a population of 359 to the square mile (December 31,
1892), and Belgium a population of 540 to the square mile. French
statisticians are confident that Java will soon surpass Belgium in the
density of its population.
[5] Vide “Six Semaines à Java,” par Désiré de Charnay (“Le Tour du
Monde,” volume for 1880).
[6] “Le Tour du Monde,” “Six Semaines à Java,” par M. Désiré de Charnay,
volume for 1880.
[7] Majapahit, capital of the eastern empire, was near the modern
Soerabaya.
[8] Pajajaran, capital of the western empire, was near the modern Batavia.
[9] The Royal Society gives an estimate of seventeen miles as the height
of this great column of smoke.
INDEX
Achin, 4, 10.
Antiar. See UPAS.
Arabs, 37, 38, 227, 265.
Ashantee, 10, 72.
Asoka, 194.
Ayudya, 269.
Badouins, 326.
Baloeboer-Baloeboer-Limbangan, 154.
Bananas, 8, 80.
Bandong, 150.
Bantam, 42, 333.
Banteng, 133.
Batavia, 21, 25-48.
Batavian Society, Museum of, 34, 35, 36.
Baths, 60, 131.
Battek, 42, 45, 46.
Betel-nut, 42.
Bilimbi, 84.
Birds’ nests, 304.
Birds, tropic, 13, 130.
Block-printing, 261.
Boro, Boedor, 167-169, 182-202.
Botanical Garden, 66-70.
Brambanam, 218.
Breadfruit, 85.
Breon, M. René, 328.
Bromo, Mount, 265, 299.
Brumund, Herr, 169, 197.
Buddhism, 168, 169, 187, 190, 193, 194.
Buddhist art, 36, 167, 190, 223, 224.
Buffalo, water-, 55.
Buitenzorg, 49, 62-76, 79, 324.
Burglary, 271.
Cacao, 58, 129.
Carambola, 84.
Central America, 186, 232, 238, 263.
Chandi Sewou, 228-234.
Chicago Exposition, 143, 144, 145.
Chinese, 22, 37, 38, 39, 40, 80, 261, 262, 290.
Christianity, 55, 56.
Cinchona-culture, 70, 104, 150.
Climate, 21, 49, 127, 331, 332.
Coffee, 65, 115, 116.
Coffee-culture, 95, 103, 104, 142, 317.
Coinage, 20.
Courts of law, 271.
Culture system, 94-125.
Daendels, Marshal, 22, 95, 97, 270, 275, 276.
Dancing-girls, 188, 288.
De Charnay, M. Désiré, 186, 232, 238, 263, 264.
Delsarte, 293.
Depok, 65.
Dhyani, 193.
Dieng plateau, 237, 238.
Dishabille, 26, 66.
Djokjakarta, 170, 213, 269-282.
Dodok, 132, 156, 163, 246, 252, 297.
Duku, 83.
Durian, 85, 86.
Education, 56, 57.
Egypt, 263.
Fergusson’s “History of Indian and Eastern Architecture,” 169, 189,
220, 264.
Ferns, tree-, 317.
Findlay’s “Sailing Directory,” 328-330.
Forbes, H. O., 328
Frangipani, 68, 92, 93.
Fruits, 80-91.
Gamelan, 143, 287, 290, 297, 322.
Garoet, 312, 313.
Gautama Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, 187.
Gecko, 59, 212.
Gedeh, 325.
Government, colonial, 31, 32, 119, 120.
Gulden, 20.
Heyden, General Van der, 11.
Hotel life, 25, 26, 29, 58, 59, 61, 313.
Indigo-culture, 104.
Jamboa, 84.
Kalaidon, 151, 152, 153.
Kali, Goddess. See LORO JONGGRAN.
Kanari-trees, 67, 158, 302, 304.
Kawi language, 72, 283, 284, 293.
Khublai Khan, 227.
Kina. See CINCHONA.
Krakatau, 11, 326-330.
Kris, 35, 154, 242, 257, 258, 259, 272, 289.
Land laws, 119.
Laundering, 60.
Lawu, Mount, 263.
Leemans, Dr., 197.
Leles, plain of, 152, 153.
Literature, native, 283, 284.
Lizards, 59, 212, 248, 305.
Lombok, 278.
Loro Jonggran, 220, 223.
Macartney, Lord, 21, 289.
Mahabharata, 283, 284.
Majapahit, 241, 265, 269.
Malacca, Straits of, 1, 3, 8.
Malays, 2, 3, 41, 42, 121.
Mangosteen, 30, 87, 88.
Marco Polo, 227.
Mataram, 269, 278.
“Max Havelaar,” 110.
McKinley Bill, 77.
“Menac,” 298, 299.
Mendoet, 209, 210.
Merapi, 180, 263.
Merbaboe, 180, 263.
Metzger, Emile, 273.
Missions, 55.
Mohammedans, 38.
Money, J. W. B., 113, 114.
Monkeys, 224, 282, 323.
Monsoon, 18.
Mortality, 21.
Music, 143, 287, 290.
Nanko, 85.
No dance, 293.
Noesa Kambangan, 303.
North, Marianne, 126, 186.
Opium, 107.
Pajajaran, 241, 269.
Pajong, 174, 209, 246, 253, 254, 274, 296.
Pakoe Alam, Prince, 278, 290, 294-300.
Palaces, 36, 67, 246, 249.
Palms, 62, 72, 91, 205.
Pangerango, 325.
Panji, 258, 290.
Papandayang, 314, 319.
Papaya, 86, 87.
Parakan Salak, 128, 136.
Paranaks, 39, 261, 290.
Passer, 42, 79, 161, 176, 206, 254, 272, 313.
Passports. See TOELATINGS-KAART.
Pawnshops, 257, 273.
Perk, Herr, 228.
Pineapple, 87, 308.
Polo, Marco, 227.
Pomelo, 87.
Population, 17, 21, 22, 176.
Raden Saleh, 47, 71.
Raffles, Lady, 69, 75.
Raffles, Sir Stamford, 1, 3, 96, 97, 168, 169, 227, 264, 269, 283.
Railway, 5, 50, 51, 52, 164, 307.
Ramayan, 283.
Rambutan, 83.
Rice-fields, 52, 53, 147, 312.
Riz tavel, 30.
Royal Society of Great Britain, 328.
Sadoe, 19.
Salak (fruit), 84.
Salak, Mount, 18, 62, 127, 128.
Salt monopoly, 105.
Sarong, 26, 45, 46, 66, 257, 260, 281, 289, 312.
Siddhartha, Prince, 187.
Sinagar, 128-146.
Sindanglaya, 325.
Singapore, 1.
Singa Sari, 237.
Slavery, 101.
Snakes, 165, 166, 320.
Social life, 30, 33, 66, 129, 289, 294, 295, 313.
Soembung, 180.
Soerabaya, 265.
Soerakarta. See SOLO.
Solo, 240-264.
Staunton, 21, 289.
Steamships, 7.
Stirrup, 254.
Sugar-culture, 98, 115, 205.
Suku, 263, 264.
Sultan of Djokja, 274.
Sumatra, 9-11.
Susunhan, 241-246, 269, 270.
Tailors, 79, 162.
Tandjon Priok, 18, 19.
Tapioca, 310.
Tea-culture, 102, 103, 137, 138, 141.
Tengger, 265.
_Terra ingrata_, 163, 164.
“Thousand Temples.” See CHANDI SEWOU.
Tissak Malaya, 156-162.
Tjilatjap, 301, 302.
Toekoe Oemar, 11.
Toelatings-kaart, 23, 170, 211, 215.
Topeng, 278.
Tosari, 265.
Upas, 319, 321.
Verbeek, R. D. M., 328.
Volcanoes, 18, 67, 150, 180, 265, 309, 314, 318.
Vorstenlanden, 240.
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 12, 23, 114, 126, 169.
“Wandering Jew,” 47.
Water Kastel, 257, 277.
Wayang-wayang, 143, 287, 288.
Wilsen, Herr, 198.
Ylang-ylang, 92.
Yucatan, 238, 239, 264.
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