In the Golden Chersonese

In the Golden ChersoneseA Peep at the City of SingaporeCould an American boy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights, be taken by a genie from his warm bed in San Francisco or New York and awakened in the centre of Raffles Square, in Singapore, I will wager that he would be sadly puzzled to even give the name of the continent on which he had alighted.Neither the buildings, the people, or the vehicles would aid him in the least to decide.Enclosing the four sides of the little banian-tree shaded park in which he stands are rows of brick, white-faced, high-jointed go-downs. Through their glassless windows great whitepunkahsswing back and forth with a ceaseless regularity. Standing outside of each window, a tall, gracefulpunkah-wallahtugs at a rattan withe, his naked limbs shining like polished ebony in the fierce glare of the Malayan sun.For a moment, perhaps, the boy thinks himself in India, possibly at Simla, for he has read some of Rudyard Kipling’s stories.Back under the portico-like verandas, whose narrow breadths take the place of sidewalks, are little booths that look like bay windows turned inside out. On the floor of each sits a Turk, cross-legged, or an Arab, surrounded by a heterogeneous assortment of wares, fez caps, brass finger-bowls, a praying rug, a few boxes of Japanese tooth-picks, some rare little bottles of Arab essence, a betel-nut box, and a half dozen piles of big copper cents, for all shopkeepers are money-changers.The merchant gathers his flowing party-colored robes about him, tightens the turban head, and draws calmly at his water-pipe while a bevy of Hindu and Tamilwomen bargain for a new stud for their noses, a showy amulet, or a silver ring for their toes.Squatting right in the way of all passers is a Chinese travelling restaurant that looks like two flour barrels, one filled with drawers, the other containing a small charcoal fire. The oldcookee, with his queue tied neatly up about his shaven head, takes a variety of mixtures from the drawers,—bits of dried fish, seaweed, a handful of spaghetti, possibly a piece of shark’s fin, or better still a lump of bird’s nest, places them in the kettle, as he yells from time to time, “Machen, machen” (eating, eating).Next to the Arab booth is a Chinese lamp shop, then a European dry-goods store, an Armenian law office, a Japanese bazaar, a foreign consulate.A babble of strange sounds and a jargon of languages salute the astonished boy’s ears.In the broad well-paved streets about him a Malaysyce, or driver, is trying to urge hisspotted Deli pony, which is not larger than a Newfoundland dog, in between a big, lumbering two-wheeled bullock-cart, laden with oozing bags of vile-smelling gambier, and a great patient water buffalo that stands sleepily whipping the gnats from its black, almost hairless hide, while its naked driver is seated under the trees in the square quarrelling and gambling by turns.Thegharry, which resembles a dry-goods box on wheels, set in with latticed windows, smashes up against the ponderous hubs of the bullock-cart. The meek-eyed bullocks close their eyes and chew their cuds, regardless of the fierce screams of the Malay or the frenzied objurgations of their driver.But no one pays any attention to the momentary confusion. A party of Jews dressed in robes of purple and red that sweep the street pass by, without giving a glance at the wild plunging of the half-wild pony. A Singhalese jeweller is showing his rubies andcat’s-eyes to a party of Eurasian, or half-caste clerks, that are taking advantage of their master’s absence from the godown to come out into the court to smoke a Manila cigarette and gossip. The mottled tortoise-shell comb in the vender’s black hair, and his womanish draperies, give him a feminine aspect.An Indianchitty, or money-lender, stands talking to a brother, supremely unconscious of the eddying throng about. Thesechittiesare fully six feet tall, with closely shaven heads and nude bodies. Their dress of a few yards of gauze wound about their waists, and red sandals, would not lead one to think that they handle more money than any other class of people in the East. They borrow from the great English banks without security save that of their caste name, and lend to the Eurasian clerks just behind them at twelve per cent a month. If achittyfails, he is driven out of the caste and becomes a pariah. The caste make up his losses.Dyaks from Borneo idle by. Parsee merchants in their tall, conical hats, Chinese rickshaw runners and cart coolies, Tamil road-menders, Bugis, Achinese, Siamese, Japanese, Madras serving-men, negro firemen, Lascar sailors, throng the little square,—the agora of the commercial life of the city.Such is Singapore, embracing all the races of Asia and Europe. Is it any wonder that the American boy is bewildered, standing there under the great banian tree with a Malay insarongandkrisby his side, singing with hissyrah-stained lips the glorious promises of the Koran?Look on the map of Asia for the southernmost point of the continent, and you will find it at the tip of the Malay Peninsula,—a giant finger that points down into the heart of the greatest archipelago in the world. At the very end of this peninsula, like a sort of cut-off joint of the finger, is the little islandof Singapore, which is not over twenty-five miles from east to west, and does not exceed fifteen miles in width at its broadest point.The famous old Straits of Malacca, which were once the haunts of the fierce Malayan pirates, separate the island from the mainland and the Sultanate of Johore.The shipping that once worked its way through these narrow straits, in momentary fear that its mangrove-bound shores held a long, swift pirateprau, now goes further south and into the island-guarded harbor before Singapore.Nothing can be more beautiful than the sea approach to Singapore. As you enter the Straits, the emerald-green of a bevy of little islands obstructs the vision, and affords a grateful relief to the almost blinding glare of the Malayan sky, and the metallic reflections of the ocean.Some seem only inhabited by a graceful waving burden of strange, tropical foliage, andby a band of chattering monkeys; on others you detect a Malaykampong, or village, its umbrella-like houses ofattap, close down to the shore, built high up on poles, so that half the time their boulevards are but vast mud-holes, the other half—Venice, filled with a moving crowd ofsampansand fishingpraus. A crowd of bronzed, naked little figures sport within the shadow of a maze of drying nets, and flee in consternation as the black, log-like head and cruel, watchful eyes of a crocodile glide quietly along the mangrove roots.On another island you discern the grim breastworks and the frowning mouth of a piece of heavy ordnance.Soon the island of Singapore reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and the fan-shapedoutlines of the traveller’s palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling hills, the monotony of the foliage is relieved in places by objects which it all but hid from view. The granite minaret of the Mohammedan mosque, the carved dome of a Buddhist temple, the slender spire of an English cathedral, the bold projections of Government House, and the wide, white sides of the Municipal buildings all hold the eye.Then a maze of strange shipping screens the nearing shore—the military masts and yards of British and Dutch men-of-war, the high-heeled, shoe-like lines of Chinese junks, innumerable Malay and Klingsampans, and great, unwieldy Borneotonkangs.For six miles along the wharves and for six miles back into the island extend the municipal limits of the city. Two hundred thousand people live within these limits; while outside, over the rest of the islandalong the sea-coast, in fishing villages, and in the interior on plantations of tapioca and pepper, live a hundred thousand more. Of these three hundred thousand over one hundred and seventy thousand are Chinese and only fifteen hundred are Europeans.Grouped about Raffles Square, and facing the Bund, are the great English, German, and Chinese houses that handle the three hundred million dollars’ worth of imports and exports that pass in and out of the port yearly, and make Singapore one of the most important marts of the commercial world.Beyond, and back from the Square, is Tanglin, or the suburbs, where the government officials and the heads of these great firms live in luxurious bungalows, surrounded by a swarm of retainers.Let us drive from Raffles Square through this cosmopolitan city and out to Tanglin. Beginning at Cavanagh Bridge, at one end of which stands the great Singapore Cluband the Post Office, is the ocean esplanade,—the pride of the city. It encloses a public playground of some fifteen acres, reclaimed from the sea at an expense of over two hundred thousand dollars. Every afternoon when the heat of the day has fallen from 150° to 80°, the European population meets on this esplanade park to play tennis, cricket, and football, and to promenade, gossip, and listen to the music of the regimental or man-of-war band.The drive from the sea, up Orchard Road to the Botanic Gardens, carries you by all the diversified life of the city. The Chinese restaurant is omnipresent. By its side sits a naked little bit of bronze, with a basket of sugar-cane—each stick, two feet long, cleaned and scraped, ready for the hungry and thirsty rickshaw coolies, who have a few quarter cents with which to gratify their appetites. On every veranda and in every shady corner are the Kling andChinese barbers. They carry their barber-shops in a kit or in their pockets, and the recipient of their skill finds a seat as best he may. The barber is prepared to shave your head, your face, trim your hair, braid your queue, and pull the hairs out of your nose and ears.There is no special quarter for separate trades. Madras tailor shops rub shoulders with Malay blacksmith shops, while Indian wash-houses join Manila cigar manufactories.Once past the commercial part of the ride, the great bungalows of the European and Chinese merchants come into view. The immediate borders of the road itself reveal nothing but a dense mass of tropical verdure and carefully cut hedges, but at intervals there is a wide gap in the hedge, and a road leads off into the seeming jungle. At every such entrance there are posts of masonry, and a plate bearing the name of the manor and its owner.At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of wide-spreading veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, black interior. Acres of closely shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs of the brightest reds, deepest purples, and fieriest solferinos, beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green masses of ferns meet your eye.Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players, and bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. Red-turbaned Malaykebuns, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously clean Chinese “boys” are passing silently among the guests with trays of eatables.Dozens ofgharriesdodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way.A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a Malaysyce, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation,dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze of wheels.Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first cart. Thesycesprings down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,—pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,—urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shadedroad. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,”—we children pronounce it “Dom-i-stick,”—how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these “twenty fat bullocks” time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our extravagant colors.The color of the Indian bullock varies. Some are a dirty white, some a cream color, some almost pink, and a few are of the darker shades. They are about the size of our cows, seldom as large as a full-grownox. Their horns, which are generally tipped with curiously carved knobs, and often painted in colors, are as diversified in their styles of architecture as are the horns of our cattle, though they are more apt to be straight and V-shaped. Their necks are always “bowed to the yoke,” to once more use biblical phraseology, and seem almost to invite its humiliating clasp. Above their front legs is the mark of their antiquity, the great clumsy, flabby, fleshy, tawny hump, always swaying from side to side, keeping time to every plodding step of its sleepy owner. This seemingly useless mountain of flesh serves as a cushion against which rests a yoke. Not the natty yoke of our rural districts, but a simple pole, with a pin of wood through each end, to ride on the outside of the bullocks’ necks. The burden comes against the projecting hump when the team pulls. To the centre of this yoke is tied, with strong withes of rattan,the pole of a cart, that in this nineteenth century is generally only to be seen in national museums, preserved as a relic of the first steps in the art of wagon building. And yet as a cart it is not to be despised: all the heavy traffic of the colonies is done within its rude board sides. It has two wheels, with heavy square spokes that are held on to a ponderous wooden axle-tree by two wooden pins. A platform bottom rests on the axle-tree, and two fence-like sides.The genie of the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bitof ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed Mudd. They have cold weather up in Simla, and he knows of a certain gown he is going to buy of a Chinaman in the bazaar. But his bullocks lag, and he saws on thegamootyrope that is attached to their noses, and beats them half consciously with his rattan whip. Ofttimes he will stand stark upright in the cart for a full half-hour, with his rattan held above his head in a threatening attitude, and talk on and on to his animals, apotheosizing their strength and patience, telling them how they are sacred to Buddha, how they are the companions of man, and how they shall have an extrachupaof paddy when the sun goes down, and he has delivered to the merchantsahibon the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the rod, and tells them to look how heholds it above them. If in the course of the harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of younglallanggrass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of denunciation.The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, shows him the rattan, rubs it against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed the pieces to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of the offender, that seem to have little more effect than to raise a cloud of tiger gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs.As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this description, shambles along down the shady road, and out of the reach of thesyce’sarms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests oneither hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to his team. Oursycetranslates. “He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their souls will no become men. He say he sorry that they make the great Americansahibangry.”The singular trio passes on, the driver praising and reprimanding by turns in the soft, musical tongue of his people, the historic beasts swinging lazily along, regardless of their illustrious past, all unconscious of the fact that their names are embalmed in sacred writ and Indian legend, and rounding a corner of the broad, red road, are lost to view amid the olive-green shadows of a clump of gently swaying bamboo. To me, for the moment, they seem to disappear, like phantoms, into the mists of the dim centuries, from out of which my imagination has called them forth.Soon you are at the wide-open gates of the Botanic Garden. A perfect riot of strange tropical foliage bursts upon the view. The clean, red road winds about and among avenues of palms, waringhans, dark green mangosteens, casuarinas, and the sweet-smelling hibiscus, all alike covered with a hundred different parasitic vines and ferns. Artificial lakes and moats are filled with the giant pods of the superb Victoria regia, and the flesh-colored cups of the lotus.In the translucent green twilight of the flower-houses a hundred varieties of the costly orchids thrive—not costly here. A shipload can be bought of the natives for three cents apiece.Walks carry you out into the dim aisles of the native jungle. Monkeys, surprised at your footsteps, spring from limb to limb, and swing, chattering, out of sight in a mass of rubber-vines. Splendid macadamized roads, that are kept in perfect repair by aforce of naked Hindus and an iron roller drawn by six unwilling, hump-backed bullocks, spread out over the island in every direction. Leave one at any point outside the town, and plunge into the bordering jungle, and you are liable to meet a tiger or a herd of wild boar. The tigers swim across the straits from the mainland, and occasionally strike down a Chinaman. It is said that if a Chinaman, a Malay, and a European are passing side by side through a field, the tiger will pick out the Chinaman to the exclusion of the other two.Acres upon acres of pineapples stretch away on either hand, while patches of bananas and farms of coffee are interspersed with spice trees and sago swamps.This road system is the secret of the development of the agriculture, and one of the secrets of the rapid growth of the great English colonies. Were it not for the great black python, that lies sleeping in the roadin front of you, or the green iguana that hangs in atimbosotree over your head, or a naked runner pulling a rickshaw, you might think you were travelling the wide asphaltum streets of Washington.The home of the European in Singapore is peculiar to the country. The parks about their great bungalows are small copies of the Botanic Gardens—filled with all that is beautiful in the flora of the East. From five to twenty servants alone are kept to look after its walks and hedges and lawns.A bungalow proper may consist of but a half-dozen rooms, and yet look like a vast manor house. It is the generous sweep of the verandas running completely around the house that lends this impression. Behind its bamboochicksyou retire on your return from the office. The Chinese “boy” takes your pipe-clayed shoes and cork helmet, and brings a pair of heelless grass slippers. If a friend drop in, you never think of invitinghim into your richly furnished drawing-room, but motion him to a long rattan chair, call “Boy, bring the master a cup of tea,” and pass a box of Manila cigars.Bungalows are one story high, with a roof of palm thatch, and are raised above the ground from two to five feet by brick pillars, leaving an open space for light and air beneath. Nearly every day it rains for an hour in torrents. The hot, steaming earth absorbs the water, and the fierce equatorial sun evaporates it, only to return it in a like shower the next day. So every precaution must be taken against dampness and dry-rot.In every well-ordered bungalow seven to nine servants are an absolute necessity, while three others are usually added from time to time. The five elements, if I may so style them, are the “boy,” or boys, the cook and his helpers, the horseman, the water-carrier, the gardener, and the maid. The adjunctsare the barber, the wash man, the tailor, and the watchman. In a mild way, you are at the mercy of these servants. Their duties are fixed by caste, one never intruding on the work of another. You must have all or none. Still this is no hardship. Only newcomers ever think, of trying to economize on servant bills. The record of the thermometer is too appalling, and you speedily become too dependent on their attentions.The Chinese “boy”—he is always the “boy” until he dies—is the presiding genius of the house. He it is who brings your tea and fruit to the bedside at 6A.M., and lays out your evening suit ready for dinner, puts your studs in your clean shirt, brings your slippers, knows where each individual article of your wardrobe is kept, and, in fact, thinks of a hundred and one little comforts you would never have known of, had he not discovered them. He is yourvalet de chambre, yourbutler, your steward and your general agent, your interpreter and your directory. He controls the other servants with a rod of iron, but bows to the earth before the mem, or the master. For his ten Mexican dollars a month he takes all the burdens from your shoulders, and stands between you and the rude outside polyglot world. He is a hero-worshipper, and if you are aTuan Besar—great man—he will double his attentions, and spread your fame far and wide among his brother majordomos.But a description of each member of theménageand their duties would be in a large measure the description of the odd, complex life of the East.The growth of Singapore since its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 would do honor to the growth of one of our Western cities.Within three months after the purchase of the ground from the Sultan of Johore,Raffles wrote to Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor:—“We have a growing colony of nearly five thousand souls,” and a little later one of his successors wrote apologetically to Lord Auckland, discussing some project relating to Singapore finance;—“These details may appear to your Lordship petty, but then everything connected with these settlements is petty, except their annual surplus cost to the Government of India.”To-day the city and colony has a population of over one million, and a revenue of five million dollars—a magnificent monument to its founder’s foresight!From a commercial and strategic stand-point, the site of the city is unassailable. When the English and the Dutch divided the East Indies by drawing a line through the Straits of Malacca,—the English to hold all north, the Dutch all south,—the craftyDutchman smiled benignly, with one finger in the corner of his eye, and went back to his coffee and tobacco trading in the beautiful islands of Java and Sumatra, pitying the ignorance of the Englishman, who was contented with the swampy jungles of an unknown and savage neck of land, little thinking that inside of a half century all his products would come to this same despised district for a market, while his own colonies would retrograde and gradually pass into the hands of the English.Singapore is one of the great cities of the world, the centre of all the East Indian commerce, the key of southern Asia, and one of the massive links in the armored chain with which Great Britain encircles the globe.A Fight with Illanum PiratesThe Yarn of a Yankee SkipperTheDaily Straits Timeson the desk before me contained a vivid word picture of the capture of the British steamshipNamoaby three hundred Chinese pirates, the guns of Hong Kong almost within sight, and the year of our Lord 1890 just drawing to a close. The report seemed incredible.I pushed the paper across the table to the grizzled old captain of theBunker Hilland continued my examination of the accounts of a half-dozen sailors of whom he was intent on getting rid. By the time I had signed the last discharge and affixed the consular seal he had finished the article and put it aside with a contemptuous“Humph!” expressive of his opinion of the valor of the crew and officers. I could see that he was anxious for me to give him my attention while he related one of those long-drawn-out stories of perhaps a like personal experience. I knew the symptoms andsometimestook occasion to escape, if business or inclination made me forego the pleasure. To-day I was in a mood to humor him.There is always something deliciously refreshing in a sailor’s yarn. I have listened to hundreds in the course of my consular career, and have yet to find one that is dull or prosy. They all bear the imprint of truth, perhaps a trifle overdrawn, but nevertheless sparkling with the salt of the sea and redolent of the romance of strange people and distant lands. In listening, one becomes almost dizzy at the rapidity with which the scene and personnel change. The icebergs and the aurora borealis of the Arctic give place to the torrid waters and the SouthernCross of the South Pacific. A volcanic island, an Arabian desert, a tropical jungle, and the breadth and width of the ocean serve as the theatre, while a Fiji Islander, an Eskimo, and a turbaned Arab are actors in a half-hour’s tale. In interest they rival Verne, Kingston, or Marryat. All they lack is skilled hands to dress them in proper language.IThe Captain’s YarnThe captain helped himself to one of my manilas and began:—I’ve nothing to say about the fate of the poor fellows on theNamoa, seeing the captain was killed at the first fire, but it looks to me like a case of carelessness which was almost criminal. The idea of allowing three hundred Chinese to come aboard as passengers without searching them for arms. Why! it is an open bid to pirates. Goes to showpretty plain that these seas are not cleared of pirates. Sailing ships nowadays think they can go anywhere without a pound of powder or an old cutlass aboard, just because there is an English or Dutch man-of-war within a hundred miles. I don’t know what we’d have done when I first traded among these islands without a good brass swivel and a stock of percussion-cap muskets.Let me see; it was in ’58, I was cabin boy on the shipBangor. Captain Howe, hale old fellow from Maine, had his two little boys aboard. They are merchants now in Boston. I’ve been sailing for them on theElmiraever since. We were trading along the coast of Borneo. Those were great days for trading in spite of the pirates. That was long before iron steamers sent our good oaken ships to rot in the dockyards of Maine. Why, in those days you could see a half-dozen of our snug little crafts in any port of the world, and I’ve seen moreAmerican flags in this very harbor of Singapore than of any other nation. We had come into Singapore with a shipload of ice (no scientific ice factories then), and had gone along the coast of Java and Borneo to load with coffee, rubber, and spices, for a return voyage. We were just off Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and about loaded, when the captain heard that gold had been discovered somewhere up near the head of the Rejang. The captain was an adventurous old salt, and decided to test the truth of the story; so, taking the long-boat and ten men, he pulled up the Sarawak River to Kuching and got permission of Rajah Brooke to go up the Rejang on a hunting expedition. The Rajah was courteous, but tried to dissuade us from the undertaking by relating that several bands of Dyaks had been out on head-hunting expeditions of late, and that the mouth of the Rejang was infested by Illanum pirates.The captain only laughed, and jokingly told Sir James that if the game proved scarce he might come back and claim the prize money on a boat-load of pirate heads.We started at once,—for the captain let me go; we rowed some sixty miles along the coast to the mouth of the Rejang; then for four days we pulled up its snakelike course. It was my first bit of adventure, and everything was strange and new. The river’s course was like a great tunnel into the dense black jungle. On each side and above we were completely walled in by an impenetrable growth of great tropical trees and the iron-like vines of the rubber. The sun for a few hours each day came in broken shafts down through the foliage, and exposed the black back of a crocodile, or the green sides of an iguana. Troops of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches above, and at intervals a grove of cocoanut broke the monotony of the scenery. Among themwe would land and rest for the day or night, eat of their juicy fruit, and go on short excursions for game. A roasted monkey, some baked yams, and a delicious rice curry made up a royal bill of fare, and as the odor of our tobacco mixed with the breathing perfume of the jungle, I would fall asleep listening to sea-yarns that sometimes ran back to the War of 1812.IIAt the end of the fifth day we arrived at the head of the Rejang. Here the river broke up into a dozen small streams and a swamp. A stockade had been erected, and the Rajah had stationed a small company of native soldiers under an English officer to keep the head-hunting Dyaks in check. I don’t remember what our captain found out in regard to the gold fields, at least it was not encouraging; for he gave up the search and joined the English lieutenantin a grand deer-hunt that lasted for five days, and then started back accompanied by two native soldiers bearing despatches to the Rajah.It was easy running down the river with the current. One man in each end of the boat kept it off roots, sunken logs, and crocodiles, and the rest of us spent the time as best our cramped space allowed. Twice we detected the black, ugly face of a Dyak peering from out the jungle. The men were for hunting them down for the price on their heads, but the captain said he never killed a human being except in self-defence, and that if the Rajah wanted to get rid of the savages he had better give the contract to a Mississippi slave-trader. Secretly, I was longing for some kind of excitement, and was hoping that the men’s clamorous talk would have some effect. I never doubted our ability to raid a Dyak village and kill the head-huntersand carry off the beautiful maidens. I could not see why a parcel of blacks should be such a terror to the good Rajah, when Big Tom said he could easily handle a dozen, and flattered me by saying that such a brawny lad as I ought to take care of two at least.In the course of three days we reached the mouth of the river, and prepared the sail for the trip across the bay to theBangor. Just as everything was in readiness, one of those peculiar and rapid changes in the weather, that are so common here in the tropics near the equator, took place. A great blue-black cloud, looking like an immense cartridge, came up from the west. Through it played vivid flashes of lightning, and around it was a red haze. “A nasty animal,” I heard the bo’s’n tell the captain, and yet I was foolishly delighted when they decided to risk a blow and put out to sea. The sky on all sides grewdarker from hour to hour. A smell of sulphur came to our nostrils. It was oppressively hot; not a breath of wind was stirring. The sail flapped uselessly against the mast, and the men labored at the oars, while streams of sweat ran from their bodies.The captain had just taken down the mast, when, without a moment’s warning, the gale struck us and the boat half filled with water. We managed to head it with the wind, and were soon driving with the rapidity of a cannon-ball over the boiling and surging waters. It was a fearful gale; we blew for hours before it, ofttimes in danger of a volcanic reef, again almost sunk by a giant wave. I baled until I was completely exhausted. But the long-boat was a stanch little craft, and there were plenty of men to manage it, so as long as we could keep her before the wind, the captain felt no great anxiety as to our safety.IIIAt about six bells in the afternoon, the wind fell away, and the rain came down in torrents, leaving us to pitch about on the rapidly decreasing waves, wet to the skin and unequal to another effort. We were within a mile of a rocky island that rose like a half-ruined castle from the ocean. The Dyak soldiers called it Satang Island, and I have sailed past it many a time since. Without waiting for the word, we rowed to it and around it, before we found a suitable beach on which to land. One end of the island rose precipitous and sheer above the beach a hundred feet, and ended in a barren plateau of some two dozen acres. The remainder comprised some hundred acres of sand and rocks, on which were half a dozen cocoanut trees and a few yams. Along the beach we found a large number of turtles’ eggs.The captain, remembering the Rajah’s caution in regard to pirates, decided not to make a light, but we were wet and hungry and overcame his scruples, and soon had a huge fire and a savory repast of coffee, turtles’ eggs, and yams. At midnight it was extinguished, and a watch stationed on top of the plateau. Toward morning I clambered grumblingly up the narrow, almost perpendicular sides of the rift that cut into the rocky watch-tower. I did not believe in pirates and was willing to take my chances in sleep. I paced back and forth, inhaling deep breaths of the rich tropical air; below me the waves beat in ripples against the rugged beach, casting off from time to time little flashes of phosphorescent light, and mirroring in their depths the hardly distinguishable outline of the Southern Cross. The salt smell of the sea was tinged with the spice-laden air of the near coast. Drowsiness came over me. I picked up amusket and paced around the little plateau. The moon had but just reached its zenith, making all objects easily discernible. The smooth storm-swept space before me reflected back its rays like a well-scrubbed quarter-deck; below were the dark outlines of my sleeping mates. I could hear the light wind rustling through the branches of the casuarina trees that fringed the shore. I paused and looked over the sea. Like a charge of electricity a curious sensation of fear shot through me. Then an intimation that some object had flashed between me and the moon. I rubbed my eyes and gazed in the air above, expecting to see a night bird or a bat. Then the same peculiar sensation came over me again, and I looked down in the water below just in time to see the long, keen, knife-like outline of a pirateprauglide as noiselessly as a shadow from a passing cloud into the gloom of the island. Its great, wide-spreading, dark redsails were set full to the wind, and hanging over its sides by ropes were a dozen naked Illanums, guiding the sensitive craft almost like a thing of life. Within theprauwere two dozen fighting men, armed with their alligator hide buckler, long, steel-tipped spear, and ugly, snake-likekris. A thirdpraufollowed in the wake of the other two, and all three were lost in the blackness of the overhanging cliffs.With as little noise as possible, I ran across the plain and warned my companion, then picked my way silently down the defile to the camp. The captain responded to my touch and was up in an instant. The men were awakened and the news whispered from one to another. Gathering up what food and utensils we possessed, we hurried to get on top of the plateau before our exact whereabouts became known. The captain hoped that when they discoveredwe were well fortified and there was no wreck to pillage, they would withdraw without giving battle. They had landed on the opposite side of the island from our boat and might leave it undisturbed. We felt reasonably safe in our fortress from attacks. There were but two breaks in its precipitous sides, each a narrow defile filled with loose boulders that could easily be detached and sent thundering down on an assailant’s head. On the other hand, our shortness of food and water made us singularly weak in case of siege. But we hoped for the best. Two men were posted at each defile, and as nothing was heard for an hour, most of us fell asleep.IVIt was just dawn, when we were awakened by the report of two muskets and the terrific crashing of a great boulder, followed by groans and yells. With one accord we rushed to the head of the cañon. TheIllanums, naked, with the exception of party-coloredsarongsaround their waists, with their bucklers on their left arms and their gleaming knives strapped to their right wrists, were mounting on each other’s shoulders, forcing a way up the precipitous defile, unmindful of the madly descending rocks that had crushed and maimed more than one of their number. They were fine, powerful fellows, with a reddish brown skin that shone like polished ebony. Their hair was shorn close to their heads; they had high cheek bones, flat noses,syrah-stained lips, and bloodshot eyes. In their movements they were as lithe and supple as a tiger, and commanded our admiration while they made us shudder. We knew that they neither give nor take quarter, and for years had terrorized the entire Bornean coast.We were ready to fire, but a gesture from the captain restrained us; our ammunition was low, and he wished to save it until weactually needed it. By our united efforts we pried off two of the volcanic rocks, which, with a great leap, disappeared into the darkness below, oftentimes appearing for an instant before rushing to the sea. Every time an Illanum fell we gave a hearty American cheer, which was answered by savage yells. Still they fought on and up, making little headway. We were gradually relaxing our efforts, thinking that they were sick of the affair, when the report of a musket from the opposite side of the island called our attention to the bo’s’n, who had been detailed to guard the other defile.The bo’s’n and one native soldier were fighting hand to hand with a dozen pirates who were forcing their way up the edge of the cliff. Half of the men dashed to their relief just in time to see the soldier go over the precipice locked in the arms of a giant Illanum. One volley from our muskets settled the hopes of the invaders.Our little party was divided, and we were outnumbered ten to one. One of the sailors in dislodging a boulder lost his footing and went crashing down with it amid the derisive yells of the pirates. Suddenly the conflict ceased and the pirates withdrew. In a short time we could see them building a number of small fires along the beach, and the aroma of rice curry came up to us with the breeze. The captain, I could see, was anxious, although my boyish feelings did not go beyond a sense of intoxicating excitement. I heard him say that nothing but a storm or a ship could save us in case we were besieged; that it was better to have the fight out at once and die with our arms in our hands than to starve to death.Giving each a small portion of ship biscuit and a taste of water, he enjoined on each a careful watchfulness and a provident use of our small stock of provisions.I took mine in my hand and walked outon the edge of the cliff somewhat sobered. Directly below me were the pirates, and at my feet I noticed a fragment of rock that I thought I could loosen. Putting down my food, I foolishly picked up a piece of timber which I used as a lever, when, without warning, the mass broke away, and with a tremendous bound went crashing down into the very midst of the pirates, scattering them right and left, and ended by crushing one of theprausthat was drawn up on the sand.In an instant the quiet beach was a scene of the wildest confusion. A surging, crowding mass of pirates with theirkrisesbetween their teeth dashed up the cañon, intent on avenging their loss. I dropped my lever and rushed back to the men, nearly frightened to death at the result of my temerity. There was no time for boulders; the men reached the brink of the defile just in time to welcome the assailants with a broadside. Their lines wavered, but fresh men took theplaces of the fallen, and they pushed on. Another volley from our guns, and the dead and wounded encumbered the progress of the living. A shower of stones and timbers gave us the light, and they withdrew with savage yells to open the siege once more. Only one of our men had been wounded,—he by an arrow from a blowpipe.VAll that night we kept watch. The next morning we were once more attacked, but successfully defended ourselves with boulders and our cutlasses. Yet one swarthy pirate succeeded in catching the leg of the remaining native soldier and bearing him away with them. With cessation of hostilities, we searched the top of the island for food and water. At one side of the tableland there was a break in its surface and a bench of some dozen acres lay perhaps twenty feet below our retreat. We cautiously workedour way down to this portion and there to our delight found a number of fan-shaped traveller’s palms and monkey-cups full of sweet water, which with two wild sago palms we calculated would keep us alive a few days at all events.We were much encouraged at this discovery, and that night collected a lot of brush from the lower plain and lit a big fire on the most exposed part of the rocks. We did not care if it brought a thousand more pirates as long as it attracted the attention of a passing ship. Two good nine-pounders would soon send our foes in all directions. We relieved each other in watching during the night, and by sunrise we were all completely worn out. The third day was one of weariness and thirst under the burning rays of the tropical sun. That day we ate the last of our ship biscuit and were reduced to a few drops of water each. Starvation was staring us in the face. There was but onealternative, and that was to descend and make a fight for our boat on the beach. The bo’s’n volunteered with three men to descend the defile and reconnoitre. Armed only with their cutlasses and a short axe, they worked their way carefully down in the shadow of the rocks, while we kept watch above.All was quiet for a time; then there arose a tumult of cries, oaths, and yells. The captain gave the order, and pell-mell down the rift we clambered, some dropping their muskets in their hurried descent, one of which exploded in its fall. The bo’s’n had found the beach and our boat guarded by six pirates, who were asleep. Four of these they succeeded in throttling. We pushed the boat into the surf, expecting every moment to see one of theprausglide around the projecting reef that separated the two inlets. We could plainly hear their cries and yells as they discovered our escape, and with a “heigh-ho-heigh!” our long-boat shot out into theplacid ocean, sending up a shower of phosphorescent bubbles. We bent our backs to the oars as only a question of life or death can make one. With each stroke the boat seemed almost to lift itself out of the water. Almost at the same time a long dark line, filled with moving objects, dashed out from the shadow of the cliffs, hardly a hundred yards away.It was a glorious race over the dim waters of that tropical sea. I as a boy could not realize what capture meant at the hands of our cruel pursuers. My heart beat high, and I felt equal to a dozen Illanums. My thoughts travelled back to New England in the midst of the excitement. I saw myself before the open arch fire in a low-roofed old house, that for a century had withstood the fiercest gales on the old Maine coast, and from whose doors had gone forth three generations of sea-captains. I saw myself on a winter night relating this very story of adventureto an old gray-haired, bronzed-faced father, and a mother whose parting kiss still lingered on my lips, to my younger brother, and sister. I could feel their undisguised admiration as I told of my fight with pirates in the Bornean sea. It is wonderful how the mind will travel. Yet with my thoughts in Maine, I saw and felt that the Illanums were gradually gaining on us. Our men were weary and feeble from two days’ fasting, while the pirates were strong, and thirsting for our blood.The captain kept glancing first at the enemy and then at a musket that lay near him. He longed to use it, but not a man could be spared from the oars. Hand over hand they gained on us. Turning his eyes on me as I sat in the bow, the captain said, while he bent his sinewy back to the oar, “Jack, are you a good shot?”I stammered, “I can try, sir.”“Very well, get the musket there in thebow. It is loaded. Take good aim and shoot that big fellow in the stern. If you hit him, I’ll make you master of a ship some day.”Tremblingly I raised the heavy musket as directed. The boat was unsteady, I hardly expected to hit the chief, but aimed low, hoping to hit one of the rowers at least. I aimed, closed my eyes, and fired. With the report of the musket the tall leader sprang into the air and then fell head fore-most amid his rowers. I could just detect the gleam of the moonlight on the jewelled handle of hiskrisas it sank into the waters. I had hit my man. The sailors sent up a hearty American cheer and a tiger, as they saw thepraucome to a standstill.Our boat sprang away into the darkness. We did not cease rowing until dawn,—then we lay back on our oars and stretched our tired backs and arms. I had taken my place at the oar during the night.Away out on the northern horizon we saw a black speck; on the southern horizon another. The captain’s glass revealed one to be the pirateprauwith all sails set, for a wind had come up with the dawn. The other we welcomed with a cheer, for it was theBangor. Enfeebled and nearly famishing, we headed toward it and rowed for life. How we regretted having left our sails on the island. Theprauhad sighted us and was bearing down in full pursuit; we soon could distinguish its wide-spreading, rakish sails almost touching the water as it sped on. Then we made out the naked forms of the Illanums hanging to the ropes, far out over the water, and then we could hear their blood-curdling yell. It was too late; their yell was one of baffled rage. It was answered by the deep bass tones of the swivel on board theBangorsending a ball skimming along over the waters, which, although it went wide of its mark, caused thenatives on the ropes to throw themselves bodily across theprau, taking the great sail with them.In another instant the red sail, the long, keen, black shell, the naked forms of the fierce Illanums, were mixed in one undefinable blot on the distant horizon.And that was the skipper’s yarn.

In the Golden ChersoneseA Peep at the City of SingaporeCould an American boy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights, be taken by a genie from his warm bed in San Francisco or New York and awakened in the centre of Raffles Square, in Singapore, I will wager that he would be sadly puzzled to even give the name of the continent on which he had alighted.Neither the buildings, the people, or the vehicles would aid him in the least to decide.Enclosing the four sides of the little banian-tree shaded park in which he stands are rows of brick, white-faced, high-jointed go-downs. Through their glassless windows great whitepunkahsswing back and forth with a ceaseless regularity. Standing outside of each window, a tall, gracefulpunkah-wallahtugs at a rattan withe, his naked limbs shining like polished ebony in the fierce glare of the Malayan sun.For a moment, perhaps, the boy thinks himself in India, possibly at Simla, for he has read some of Rudyard Kipling’s stories.Back under the portico-like verandas, whose narrow breadths take the place of sidewalks, are little booths that look like bay windows turned inside out. On the floor of each sits a Turk, cross-legged, or an Arab, surrounded by a heterogeneous assortment of wares, fez caps, brass finger-bowls, a praying rug, a few boxes of Japanese tooth-picks, some rare little bottles of Arab essence, a betel-nut box, and a half dozen piles of big copper cents, for all shopkeepers are money-changers.The merchant gathers his flowing party-colored robes about him, tightens the turban head, and draws calmly at his water-pipe while a bevy of Hindu and Tamilwomen bargain for a new stud for their noses, a showy amulet, or a silver ring for their toes.Squatting right in the way of all passers is a Chinese travelling restaurant that looks like two flour barrels, one filled with drawers, the other containing a small charcoal fire. The oldcookee, with his queue tied neatly up about his shaven head, takes a variety of mixtures from the drawers,—bits of dried fish, seaweed, a handful of spaghetti, possibly a piece of shark’s fin, or better still a lump of bird’s nest, places them in the kettle, as he yells from time to time, “Machen, machen” (eating, eating).Next to the Arab booth is a Chinese lamp shop, then a European dry-goods store, an Armenian law office, a Japanese bazaar, a foreign consulate.A babble of strange sounds and a jargon of languages salute the astonished boy’s ears.In the broad well-paved streets about him a Malaysyce, or driver, is trying to urge hisspotted Deli pony, which is not larger than a Newfoundland dog, in between a big, lumbering two-wheeled bullock-cart, laden with oozing bags of vile-smelling gambier, and a great patient water buffalo that stands sleepily whipping the gnats from its black, almost hairless hide, while its naked driver is seated under the trees in the square quarrelling and gambling by turns.Thegharry, which resembles a dry-goods box on wheels, set in with latticed windows, smashes up against the ponderous hubs of the bullock-cart. The meek-eyed bullocks close their eyes and chew their cuds, regardless of the fierce screams of the Malay or the frenzied objurgations of their driver.But no one pays any attention to the momentary confusion. A party of Jews dressed in robes of purple and red that sweep the street pass by, without giving a glance at the wild plunging of the half-wild pony. A Singhalese jeweller is showing his rubies andcat’s-eyes to a party of Eurasian, or half-caste clerks, that are taking advantage of their master’s absence from the godown to come out into the court to smoke a Manila cigarette and gossip. The mottled tortoise-shell comb in the vender’s black hair, and his womanish draperies, give him a feminine aspect.An Indianchitty, or money-lender, stands talking to a brother, supremely unconscious of the eddying throng about. Thesechittiesare fully six feet tall, with closely shaven heads and nude bodies. Their dress of a few yards of gauze wound about their waists, and red sandals, would not lead one to think that they handle more money than any other class of people in the East. They borrow from the great English banks without security save that of their caste name, and lend to the Eurasian clerks just behind them at twelve per cent a month. If achittyfails, he is driven out of the caste and becomes a pariah. The caste make up his losses.Dyaks from Borneo idle by. Parsee merchants in their tall, conical hats, Chinese rickshaw runners and cart coolies, Tamil road-menders, Bugis, Achinese, Siamese, Japanese, Madras serving-men, negro firemen, Lascar sailors, throng the little square,—the agora of the commercial life of the city.Such is Singapore, embracing all the races of Asia and Europe. Is it any wonder that the American boy is bewildered, standing there under the great banian tree with a Malay insarongandkrisby his side, singing with hissyrah-stained lips the glorious promises of the Koran?Look on the map of Asia for the southernmost point of the continent, and you will find it at the tip of the Malay Peninsula,—a giant finger that points down into the heart of the greatest archipelago in the world. At the very end of this peninsula, like a sort of cut-off joint of the finger, is the little islandof Singapore, which is not over twenty-five miles from east to west, and does not exceed fifteen miles in width at its broadest point.The famous old Straits of Malacca, which were once the haunts of the fierce Malayan pirates, separate the island from the mainland and the Sultanate of Johore.The shipping that once worked its way through these narrow straits, in momentary fear that its mangrove-bound shores held a long, swift pirateprau, now goes further south and into the island-guarded harbor before Singapore.Nothing can be more beautiful than the sea approach to Singapore. As you enter the Straits, the emerald-green of a bevy of little islands obstructs the vision, and affords a grateful relief to the almost blinding glare of the Malayan sky, and the metallic reflections of the ocean.Some seem only inhabited by a graceful waving burden of strange, tropical foliage, andby a band of chattering monkeys; on others you detect a Malaykampong, or village, its umbrella-like houses ofattap, close down to the shore, built high up on poles, so that half the time their boulevards are but vast mud-holes, the other half—Venice, filled with a moving crowd ofsampansand fishingpraus. A crowd of bronzed, naked little figures sport within the shadow of a maze of drying nets, and flee in consternation as the black, log-like head and cruel, watchful eyes of a crocodile glide quietly along the mangrove roots.On another island you discern the grim breastworks and the frowning mouth of a piece of heavy ordnance.Soon the island of Singapore reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and the fan-shapedoutlines of the traveller’s palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling hills, the monotony of the foliage is relieved in places by objects which it all but hid from view. The granite minaret of the Mohammedan mosque, the carved dome of a Buddhist temple, the slender spire of an English cathedral, the bold projections of Government House, and the wide, white sides of the Municipal buildings all hold the eye.Then a maze of strange shipping screens the nearing shore—the military masts and yards of British and Dutch men-of-war, the high-heeled, shoe-like lines of Chinese junks, innumerable Malay and Klingsampans, and great, unwieldy Borneotonkangs.For six miles along the wharves and for six miles back into the island extend the municipal limits of the city. Two hundred thousand people live within these limits; while outside, over the rest of the islandalong the sea-coast, in fishing villages, and in the interior on plantations of tapioca and pepper, live a hundred thousand more. Of these three hundred thousand over one hundred and seventy thousand are Chinese and only fifteen hundred are Europeans.Grouped about Raffles Square, and facing the Bund, are the great English, German, and Chinese houses that handle the three hundred million dollars’ worth of imports and exports that pass in and out of the port yearly, and make Singapore one of the most important marts of the commercial world.Beyond, and back from the Square, is Tanglin, or the suburbs, where the government officials and the heads of these great firms live in luxurious bungalows, surrounded by a swarm of retainers.Let us drive from Raffles Square through this cosmopolitan city and out to Tanglin. Beginning at Cavanagh Bridge, at one end of which stands the great Singapore Cluband the Post Office, is the ocean esplanade,—the pride of the city. It encloses a public playground of some fifteen acres, reclaimed from the sea at an expense of over two hundred thousand dollars. Every afternoon when the heat of the day has fallen from 150° to 80°, the European population meets on this esplanade park to play tennis, cricket, and football, and to promenade, gossip, and listen to the music of the regimental or man-of-war band.The drive from the sea, up Orchard Road to the Botanic Gardens, carries you by all the diversified life of the city. The Chinese restaurant is omnipresent. By its side sits a naked little bit of bronze, with a basket of sugar-cane—each stick, two feet long, cleaned and scraped, ready for the hungry and thirsty rickshaw coolies, who have a few quarter cents with which to gratify their appetites. On every veranda and in every shady corner are the Kling andChinese barbers. They carry their barber-shops in a kit or in their pockets, and the recipient of their skill finds a seat as best he may. The barber is prepared to shave your head, your face, trim your hair, braid your queue, and pull the hairs out of your nose and ears.There is no special quarter for separate trades. Madras tailor shops rub shoulders with Malay blacksmith shops, while Indian wash-houses join Manila cigar manufactories.Once past the commercial part of the ride, the great bungalows of the European and Chinese merchants come into view. The immediate borders of the road itself reveal nothing but a dense mass of tropical verdure and carefully cut hedges, but at intervals there is a wide gap in the hedge, and a road leads off into the seeming jungle. At every such entrance there are posts of masonry, and a plate bearing the name of the manor and its owner.At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of wide-spreading veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, black interior. Acres of closely shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs of the brightest reds, deepest purples, and fieriest solferinos, beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green masses of ferns meet your eye.Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players, and bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. Red-turbaned Malaykebuns, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously clean Chinese “boys” are passing silently among the guests with trays of eatables.Dozens ofgharriesdodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way.A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a Malaysyce, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation,dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze of wheels.Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first cart. Thesycesprings down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,—pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,—urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shadedroad. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,”—we children pronounce it “Dom-i-stick,”—how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these “twenty fat bullocks” time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our extravagant colors.The color of the Indian bullock varies. Some are a dirty white, some a cream color, some almost pink, and a few are of the darker shades. They are about the size of our cows, seldom as large as a full-grownox. Their horns, which are generally tipped with curiously carved knobs, and often painted in colors, are as diversified in their styles of architecture as are the horns of our cattle, though they are more apt to be straight and V-shaped. Their necks are always “bowed to the yoke,” to once more use biblical phraseology, and seem almost to invite its humiliating clasp. Above their front legs is the mark of their antiquity, the great clumsy, flabby, fleshy, tawny hump, always swaying from side to side, keeping time to every plodding step of its sleepy owner. This seemingly useless mountain of flesh serves as a cushion against which rests a yoke. Not the natty yoke of our rural districts, but a simple pole, with a pin of wood through each end, to ride on the outside of the bullocks’ necks. The burden comes against the projecting hump when the team pulls. To the centre of this yoke is tied, with strong withes of rattan,the pole of a cart, that in this nineteenth century is generally only to be seen in national museums, preserved as a relic of the first steps in the art of wagon building. And yet as a cart it is not to be despised: all the heavy traffic of the colonies is done within its rude board sides. It has two wheels, with heavy square spokes that are held on to a ponderous wooden axle-tree by two wooden pins. A platform bottom rests on the axle-tree, and two fence-like sides.The genie of the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bitof ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed Mudd. They have cold weather up in Simla, and he knows of a certain gown he is going to buy of a Chinaman in the bazaar. But his bullocks lag, and he saws on thegamootyrope that is attached to their noses, and beats them half consciously with his rattan whip. Ofttimes he will stand stark upright in the cart for a full half-hour, with his rattan held above his head in a threatening attitude, and talk on and on to his animals, apotheosizing their strength and patience, telling them how they are sacred to Buddha, how they are the companions of man, and how they shall have an extrachupaof paddy when the sun goes down, and he has delivered to the merchantsahibon the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the rod, and tells them to look how heholds it above them. If in the course of the harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of younglallanggrass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of denunciation.The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, shows him the rattan, rubs it against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed the pieces to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of the offender, that seem to have little more effect than to raise a cloud of tiger gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs.As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this description, shambles along down the shady road, and out of the reach of thesyce’sarms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests oneither hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to his team. Oursycetranslates. “He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their souls will no become men. He say he sorry that they make the great Americansahibangry.”The singular trio passes on, the driver praising and reprimanding by turns in the soft, musical tongue of his people, the historic beasts swinging lazily along, regardless of their illustrious past, all unconscious of the fact that their names are embalmed in sacred writ and Indian legend, and rounding a corner of the broad, red road, are lost to view amid the olive-green shadows of a clump of gently swaying bamboo. To me, for the moment, they seem to disappear, like phantoms, into the mists of the dim centuries, from out of which my imagination has called them forth.Soon you are at the wide-open gates of the Botanic Garden. A perfect riot of strange tropical foliage bursts upon the view. The clean, red road winds about and among avenues of palms, waringhans, dark green mangosteens, casuarinas, and the sweet-smelling hibiscus, all alike covered with a hundred different parasitic vines and ferns. Artificial lakes and moats are filled with the giant pods of the superb Victoria regia, and the flesh-colored cups of the lotus.In the translucent green twilight of the flower-houses a hundred varieties of the costly orchids thrive—not costly here. A shipload can be bought of the natives for three cents apiece.Walks carry you out into the dim aisles of the native jungle. Monkeys, surprised at your footsteps, spring from limb to limb, and swing, chattering, out of sight in a mass of rubber-vines. Splendid macadamized roads, that are kept in perfect repair by aforce of naked Hindus and an iron roller drawn by six unwilling, hump-backed bullocks, spread out over the island in every direction. Leave one at any point outside the town, and plunge into the bordering jungle, and you are liable to meet a tiger or a herd of wild boar. The tigers swim across the straits from the mainland, and occasionally strike down a Chinaman. It is said that if a Chinaman, a Malay, and a European are passing side by side through a field, the tiger will pick out the Chinaman to the exclusion of the other two.Acres upon acres of pineapples stretch away on either hand, while patches of bananas and farms of coffee are interspersed with spice trees and sago swamps.This road system is the secret of the development of the agriculture, and one of the secrets of the rapid growth of the great English colonies. Were it not for the great black python, that lies sleeping in the roadin front of you, or the green iguana that hangs in atimbosotree over your head, or a naked runner pulling a rickshaw, you might think you were travelling the wide asphaltum streets of Washington.The home of the European in Singapore is peculiar to the country. The parks about their great bungalows are small copies of the Botanic Gardens—filled with all that is beautiful in the flora of the East. From five to twenty servants alone are kept to look after its walks and hedges and lawns.A bungalow proper may consist of but a half-dozen rooms, and yet look like a vast manor house. It is the generous sweep of the verandas running completely around the house that lends this impression. Behind its bamboochicksyou retire on your return from the office. The Chinese “boy” takes your pipe-clayed shoes and cork helmet, and brings a pair of heelless grass slippers. If a friend drop in, you never think of invitinghim into your richly furnished drawing-room, but motion him to a long rattan chair, call “Boy, bring the master a cup of tea,” and pass a box of Manila cigars.Bungalows are one story high, with a roof of palm thatch, and are raised above the ground from two to five feet by brick pillars, leaving an open space for light and air beneath. Nearly every day it rains for an hour in torrents. The hot, steaming earth absorbs the water, and the fierce equatorial sun evaporates it, only to return it in a like shower the next day. So every precaution must be taken against dampness and dry-rot.In every well-ordered bungalow seven to nine servants are an absolute necessity, while three others are usually added from time to time. The five elements, if I may so style them, are the “boy,” or boys, the cook and his helpers, the horseman, the water-carrier, the gardener, and the maid. The adjunctsare the barber, the wash man, the tailor, and the watchman. In a mild way, you are at the mercy of these servants. Their duties are fixed by caste, one never intruding on the work of another. You must have all or none. Still this is no hardship. Only newcomers ever think, of trying to economize on servant bills. The record of the thermometer is too appalling, and you speedily become too dependent on their attentions.The Chinese “boy”—he is always the “boy” until he dies—is the presiding genius of the house. He it is who brings your tea and fruit to the bedside at 6A.M., and lays out your evening suit ready for dinner, puts your studs in your clean shirt, brings your slippers, knows where each individual article of your wardrobe is kept, and, in fact, thinks of a hundred and one little comforts you would never have known of, had he not discovered them. He is yourvalet de chambre, yourbutler, your steward and your general agent, your interpreter and your directory. He controls the other servants with a rod of iron, but bows to the earth before the mem, or the master. For his ten Mexican dollars a month he takes all the burdens from your shoulders, and stands between you and the rude outside polyglot world. He is a hero-worshipper, and if you are aTuan Besar—great man—he will double his attentions, and spread your fame far and wide among his brother majordomos.But a description of each member of theménageand their duties would be in a large measure the description of the odd, complex life of the East.The growth of Singapore since its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 would do honor to the growth of one of our Western cities.Within three months after the purchase of the ground from the Sultan of Johore,Raffles wrote to Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor:—“We have a growing colony of nearly five thousand souls,” and a little later one of his successors wrote apologetically to Lord Auckland, discussing some project relating to Singapore finance;—“These details may appear to your Lordship petty, but then everything connected with these settlements is petty, except their annual surplus cost to the Government of India.”To-day the city and colony has a population of over one million, and a revenue of five million dollars—a magnificent monument to its founder’s foresight!From a commercial and strategic stand-point, the site of the city is unassailable. When the English and the Dutch divided the East Indies by drawing a line through the Straits of Malacca,—the English to hold all north, the Dutch all south,—the craftyDutchman smiled benignly, with one finger in the corner of his eye, and went back to his coffee and tobacco trading in the beautiful islands of Java and Sumatra, pitying the ignorance of the Englishman, who was contented with the swampy jungles of an unknown and savage neck of land, little thinking that inside of a half century all his products would come to this same despised district for a market, while his own colonies would retrograde and gradually pass into the hands of the English.Singapore is one of the great cities of the world, the centre of all the East Indian commerce, the key of southern Asia, and one of the massive links in the armored chain with which Great Britain encircles the globe.

Could an American boy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights, be taken by a genie from his warm bed in San Francisco or New York and awakened in the centre of Raffles Square, in Singapore, I will wager that he would be sadly puzzled to even give the name of the continent on which he had alighted.

Neither the buildings, the people, or the vehicles would aid him in the least to decide.

Enclosing the four sides of the little banian-tree shaded park in which he stands are rows of brick, white-faced, high-jointed go-downs. Through their glassless windows great whitepunkahsswing back and forth with a ceaseless regularity. Standing outside of each window, a tall, gracefulpunkah-wallahtugs at a rattan withe, his naked limbs shining like polished ebony in the fierce glare of the Malayan sun.

For a moment, perhaps, the boy thinks himself in India, possibly at Simla, for he has read some of Rudyard Kipling’s stories.

Back under the portico-like verandas, whose narrow breadths take the place of sidewalks, are little booths that look like bay windows turned inside out. On the floor of each sits a Turk, cross-legged, or an Arab, surrounded by a heterogeneous assortment of wares, fez caps, brass finger-bowls, a praying rug, a few boxes of Japanese tooth-picks, some rare little bottles of Arab essence, a betel-nut box, and a half dozen piles of big copper cents, for all shopkeepers are money-changers.

The merchant gathers his flowing party-colored robes about him, tightens the turban head, and draws calmly at his water-pipe while a bevy of Hindu and Tamilwomen bargain for a new stud for their noses, a showy amulet, or a silver ring for their toes.

Squatting right in the way of all passers is a Chinese travelling restaurant that looks like two flour barrels, one filled with drawers, the other containing a small charcoal fire. The oldcookee, with his queue tied neatly up about his shaven head, takes a variety of mixtures from the drawers,—bits of dried fish, seaweed, a handful of spaghetti, possibly a piece of shark’s fin, or better still a lump of bird’s nest, places them in the kettle, as he yells from time to time, “Machen, machen” (eating, eating).

Next to the Arab booth is a Chinese lamp shop, then a European dry-goods store, an Armenian law office, a Japanese bazaar, a foreign consulate.

A babble of strange sounds and a jargon of languages salute the astonished boy’s ears.

In the broad well-paved streets about him a Malaysyce, or driver, is trying to urge hisspotted Deli pony, which is not larger than a Newfoundland dog, in between a big, lumbering two-wheeled bullock-cart, laden with oozing bags of vile-smelling gambier, and a great patient water buffalo that stands sleepily whipping the gnats from its black, almost hairless hide, while its naked driver is seated under the trees in the square quarrelling and gambling by turns.

Thegharry, which resembles a dry-goods box on wheels, set in with latticed windows, smashes up against the ponderous hubs of the bullock-cart. The meek-eyed bullocks close their eyes and chew their cuds, regardless of the fierce screams of the Malay or the frenzied objurgations of their driver.

But no one pays any attention to the momentary confusion. A party of Jews dressed in robes of purple and red that sweep the street pass by, without giving a glance at the wild plunging of the half-wild pony. A Singhalese jeweller is showing his rubies andcat’s-eyes to a party of Eurasian, or half-caste clerks, that are taking advantage of their master’s absence from the godown to come out into the court to smoke a Manila cigarette and gossip. The mottled tortoise-shell comb in the vender’s black hair, and his womanish draperies, give him a feminine aspect.

An Indianchitty, or money-lender, stands talking to a brother, supremely unconscious of the eddying throng about. Thesechittiesare fully six feet tall, with closely shaven heads and nude bodies. Their dress of a few yards of gauze wound about their waists, and red sandals, would not lead one to think that they handle more money than any other class of people in the East. They borrow from the great English banks without security save that of their caste name, and lend to the Eurasian clerks just behind them at twelve per cent a month. If achittyfails, he is driven out of the caste and becomes a pariah. The caste make up his losses.

Dyaks from Borneo idle by. Parsee merchants in their tall, conical hats, Chinese rickshaw runners and cart coolies, Tamil road-menders, Bugis, Achinese, Siamese, Japanese, Madras serving-men, negro firemen, Lascar sailors, throng the little square,—the agora of the commercial life of the city.

Such is Singapore, embracing all the races of Asia and Europe. Is it any wonder that the American boy is bewildered, standing there under the great banian tree with a Malay insarongandkrisby his side, singing with hissyrah-stained lips the glorious promises of the Koran?

Look on the map of Asia for the southernmost point of the continent, and you will find it at the tip of the Malay Peninsula,—a giant finger that points down into the heart of the greatest archipelago in the world. At the very end of this peninsula, like a sort of cut-off joint of the finger, is the little islandof Singapore, which is not over twenty-five miles from east to west, and does not exceed fifteen miles in width at its broadest point.

The famous old Straits of Malacca, which were once the haunts of the fierce Malayan pirates, separate the island from the mainland and the Sultanate of Johore.

The shipping that once worked its way through these narrow straits, in momentary fear that its mangrove-bound shores held a long, swift pirateprau, now goes further south and into the island-guarded harbor before Singapore.

Nothing can be more beautiful than the sea approach to Singapore. As you enter the Straits, the emerald-green of a bevy of little islands obstructs the vision, and affords a grateful relief to the almost blinding glare of the Malayan sky, and the metallic reflections of the ocean.

Some seem only inhabited by a graceful waving burden of strange, tropical foliage, andby a band of chattering monkeys; on others you detect a Malaykampong, or village, its umbrella-like houses ofattap, close down to the shore, built high up on poles, so that half the time their boulevards are but vast mud-holes, the other half—Venice, filled with a moving crowd ofsampansand fishingpraus. A crowd of bronzed, naked little figures sport within the shadow of a maze of drying nets, and flee in consternation as the black, log-like head and cruel, watchful eyes of a crocodile glide quietly along the mangrove roots.

On another island you discern the grim breastworks and the frowning mouth of a piece of heavy ordnance.

Soon the island of Singapore reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and the fan-shapedoutlines of the traveller’s palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling hills, the monotony of the foliage is relieved in places by objects which it all but hid from view. The granite minaret of the Mohammedan mosque, the carved dome of a Buddhist temple, the slender spire of an English cathedral, the bold projections of Government House, and the wide, white sides of the Municipal buildings all hold the eye.

Then a maze of strange shipping screens the nearing shore—the military masts and yards of British and Dutch men-of-war, the high-heeled, shoe-like lines of Chinese junks, innumerable Malay and Klingsampans, and great, unwieldy Borneotonkangs.

For six miles along the wharves and for six miles back into the island extend the municipal limits of the city. Two hundred thousand people live within these limits; while outside, over the rest of the islandalong the sea-coast, in fishing villages, and in the interior on plantations of tapioca and pepper, live a hundred thousand more. Of these three hundred thousand over one hundred and seventy thousand are Chinese and only fifteen hundred are Europeans.

Grouped about Raffles Square, and facing the Bund, are the great English, German, and Chinese houses that handle the three hundred million dollars’ worth of imports and exports that pass in and out of the port yearly, and make Singapore one of the most important marts of the commercial world.

Beyond, and back from the Square, is Tanglin, or the suburbs, where the government officials and the heads of these great firms live in luxurious bungalows, surrounded by a swarm of retainers.

Let us drive from Raffles Square through this cosmopolitan city and out to Tanglin. Beginning at Cavanagh Bridge, at one end of which stands the great Singapore Cluband the Post Office, is the ocean esplanade,—the pride of the city. It encloses a public playground of some fifteen acres, reclaimed from the sea at an expense of over two hundred thousand dollars. Every afternoon when the heat of the day has fallen from 150° to 80°, the European population meets on this esplanade park to play tennis, cricket, and football, and to promenade, gossip, and listen to the music of the regimental or man-of-war band.

The drive from the sea, up Orchard Road to the Botanic Gardens, carries you by all the diversified life of the city. The Chinese restaurant is omnipresent. By its side sits a naked little bit of bronze, with a basket of sugar-cane—each stick, two feet long, cleaned and scraped, ready for the hungry and thirsty rickshaw coolies, who have a few quarter cents with which to gratify their appetites. On every veranda and in every shady corner are the Kling andChinese barbers. They carry their barber-shops in a kit or in their pockets, and the recipient of their skill finds a seat as best he may. The barber is prepared to shave your head, your face, trim your hair, braid your queue, and pull the hairs out of your nose and ears.

There is no special quarter for separate trades. Madras tailor shops rub shoulders with Malay blacksmith shops, while Indian wash-houses join Manila cigar manufactories.

Once past the commercial part of the ride, the great bungalows of the European and Chinese merchants come into view. The immediate borders of the road itself reveal nothing but a dense mass of tropical verdure and carefully cut hedges, but at intervals there is a wide gap in the hedge, and a road leads off into the seeming jungle. At every such entrance there are posts of masonry, and a plate bearing the name of the manor and its owner.

At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of wide-spreading veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, black interior. Acres of closely shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs of the brightest reds, deepest purples, and fieriest solferinos, beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green masses of ferns meet your eye.

Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players, and bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. Red-turbaned Malaykebuns, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously clean Chinese “boys” are passing silently among the guests with trays of eatables.

Dozens ofgharriesdodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way.

A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a Malaysyce, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation,dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze of wheels.

Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first cart. Thesycesprings down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,—pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,—urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shadedroad. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,”—we children pronounce it “Dom-i-stick,”—how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these “twenty fat bullocks” time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our extravagant colors.

The color of the Indian bullock varies. Some are a dirty white, some a cream color, some almost pink, and a few are of the darker shades. They are about the size of our cows, seldom as large as a full-grownox. Their horns, which are generally tipped with curiously carved knobs, and often painted in colors, are as diversified in their styles of architecture as are the horns of our cattle, though they are more apt to be straight and V-shaped. Their necks are always “bowed to the yoke,” to once more use biblical phraseology, and seem almost to invite its humiliating clasp. Above their front legs is the mark of their antiquity, the great clumsy, flabby, fleshy, tawny hump, always swaying from side to side, keeping time to every plodding step of its sleepy owner. This seemingly useless mountain of flesh serves as a cushion against which rests a yoke. Not the natty yoke of our rural districts, but a simple pole, with a pin of wood through each end, to ride on the outside of the bullocks’ necks. The burden comes against the projecting hump when the team pulls. To the centre of this yoke is tied, with strong withes of rattan,the pole of a cart, that in this nineteenth century is generally only to be seen in national museums, preserved as a relic of the first steps in the art of wagon building. And yet as a cart it is not to be despised: all the heavy traffic of the colonies is done within its rude board sides. It has two wheels, with heavy square spokes that are held on to a ponderous wooden axle-tree by two wooden pins. A platform bottom rests on the axle-tree, and two fence-like sides.

The genie of the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bitof ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed Mudd. They have cold weather up in Simla, and he knows of a certain gown he is going to buy of a Chinaman in the bazaar. But his bullocks lag, and he saws on thegamootyrope that is attached to their noses, and beats them half consciously with his rattan whip. Ofttimes he will stand stark upright in the cart for a full half-hour, with his rattan held above his head in a threatening attitude, and talk on and on to his animals, apotheosizing their strength and patience, telling them how they are sacred to Buddha, how they are the companions of man, and how they shall have an extrachupaof paddy when the sun goes down, and he has delivered to the merchantsahibon the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the rod, and tells them to look how heholds it above them. If in the course of the harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of younglallanggrass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of denunciation.

The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, shows him the rattan, rubs it against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed the pieces to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of the offender, that seem to have little more effect than to raise a cloud of tiger gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs.

As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this description, shambles along down the shady road, and out of the reach of thesyce’sarms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests oneither hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to his team. Oursycetranslates. “He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their souls will no become men. He say he sorry that they make the great Americansahibangry.”

The singular trio passes on, the driver praising and reprimanding by turns in the soft, musical tongue of his people, the historic beasts swinging lazily along, regardless of their illustrious past, all unconscious of the fact that their names are embalmed in sacred writ and Indian legend, and rounding a corner of the broad, red road, are lost to view amid the olive-green shadows of a clump of gently swaying bamboo. To me, for the moment, they seem to disappear, like phantoms, into the mists of the dim centuries, from out of which my imagination has called them forth.

Soon you are at the wide-open gates of the Botanic Garden. A perfect riot of strange tropical foliage bursts upon the view. The clean, red road winds about and among avenues of palms, waringhans, dark green mangosteens, casuarinas, and the sweet-smelling hibiscus, all alike covered with a hundred different parasitic vines and ferns. Artificial lakes and moats are filled with the giant pods of the superb Victoria regia, and the flesh-colored cups of the lotus.

In the translucent green twilight of the flower-houses a hundred varieties of the costly orchids thrive—not costly here. A shipload can be bought of the natives for three cents apiece.

Walks carry you out into the dim aisles of the native jungle. Monkeys, surprised at your footsteps, spring from limb to limb, and swing, chattering, out of sight in a mass of rubber-vines. Splendid macadamized roads, that are kept in perfect repair by aforce of naked Hindus and an iron roller drawn by six unwilling, hump-backed bullocks, spread out over the island in every direction. Leave one at any point outside the town, and plunge into the bordering jungle, and you are liable to meet a tiger or a herd of wild boar. The tigers swim across the straits from the mainland, and occasionally strike down a Chinaman. It is said that if a Chinaman, a Malay, and a European are passing side by side through a field, the tiger will pick out the Chinaman to the exclusion of the other two.

Acres upon acres of pineapples stretch away on either hand, while patches of bananas and farms of coffee are interspersed with spice trees and sago swamps.

This road system is the secret of the development of the agriculture, and one of the secrets of the rapid growth of the great English colonies. Were it not for the great black python, that lies sleeping in the roadin front of you, or the green iguana that hangs in atimbosotree over your head, or a naked runner pulling a rickshaw, you might think you were travelling the wide asphaltum streets of Washington.

The home of the European in Singapore is peculiar to the country. The parks about their great bungalows are small copies of the Botanic Gardens—filled with all that is beautiful in the flora of the East. From five to twenty servants alone are kept to look after its walks and hedges and lawns.

A bungalow proper may consist of but a half-dozen rooms, and yet look like a vast manor house. It is the generous sweep of the verandas running completely around the house that lends this impression. Behind its bamboochicksyou retire on your return from the office. The Chinese “boy” takes your pipe-clayed shoes and cork helmet, and brings a pair of heelless grass slippers. If a friend drop in, you never think of invitinghim into your richly furnished drawing-room, but motion him to a long rattan chair, call “Boy, bring the master a cup of tea,” and pass a box of Manila cigars.

Bungalows are one story high, with a roof of palm thatch, and are raised above the ground from two to five feet by brick pillars, leaving an open space for light and air beneath. Nearly every day it rains for an hour in torrents. The hot, steaming earth absorbs the water, and the fierce equatorial sun evaporates it, only to return it in a like shower the next day. So every precaution must be taken against dampness and dry-rot.

In every well-ordered bungalow seven to nine servants are an absolute necessity, while three others are usually added from time to time. The five elements, if I may so style them, are the “boy,” or boys, the cook and his helpers, the horseman, the water-carrier, the gardener, and the maid. The adjunctsare the barber, the wash man, the tailor, and the watchman. In a mild way, you are at the mercy of these servants. Their duties are fixed by caste, one never intruding on the work of another. You must have all or none. Still this is no hardship. Only newcomers ever think, of trying to economize on servant bills. The record of the thermometer is too appalling, and you speedily become too dependent on their attentions.

The Chinese “boy”—he is always the “boy” until he dies—is the presiding genius of the house. He it is who brings your tea and fruit to the bedside at 6A.M., and lays out your evening suit ready for dinner, puts your studs in your clean shirt, brings your slippers, knows where each individual article of your wardrobe is kept, and, in fact, thinks of a hundred and one little comforts you would never have known of, had he not discovered them. He is yourvalet de chambre, yourbutler, your steward and your general agent, your interpreter and your directory. He controls the other servants with a rod of iron, but bows to the earth before the mem, or the master. For his ten Mexican dollars a month he takes all the burdens from your shoulders, and stands between you and the rude outside polyglot world. He is a hero-worshipper, and if you are aTuan Besar—great man—he will double his attentions, and spread your fame far and wide among his brother majordomos.

But a description of each member of theménageand their duties would be in a large measure the description of the odd, complex life of the East.

The growth of Singapore since its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 would do honor to the growth of one of our Western cities.

Within three months after the purchase of the ground from the Sultan of Johore,Raffles wrote to Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor:—

“We have a growing colony of nearly five thousand souls,” and a little later one of his successors wrote apologetically to Lord Auckland, discussing some project relating to Singapore finance;—

“These details may appear to your Lordship petty, but then everything connected with these settlements is petty, except their annual surplus cost to the Government of India.”

To-day the city and colony has a population of over one million, and a revenue of five million dollars—a magnificent monument to its founder’s foresight!

From a commercial and strategic stand-point, the site of the city is unassailable. When the English and the Dutch divided the East Indies by drawing a line through the Straits of Malacca,—the English to hold all north, the Dutch all south,—the craftyDutchman smiled benignly, with one finger in the corner of his eye, and went back to his coffee and tobacco trading in the beautiful islands of Java and Sumatra, pitying the ignorance of the Englishman, who was contented with the swampy jungles of an unknown and savage neck of land, little thinking that inside of a half century all his products would come to this same despised district for a market, while his own colonies would retrograde and gradually pass into the hands of the English.

Singapore is one of the great cities of the world, the centre of all the East Indian commerce, the key of southern Asia, and one of the massive links in the armored chain with which Great Britain encircles the globe.

A Fight with Illanum PiratesThe Yarn of a Yankee SkipperTheDaily Straits Timeson the desk before me contained a vivid word picture of the capture of the British steamshipNamoaby three hundred Chinese pirates, the guns of Hong Kong almost within sight, and the year of our Lord 1890 just drawing to a close. The report seemed incredible.I pushed the paper across the table to the grizzled old captain of theBunker Hilland continued my examination of the accounts of a half-dozen sailors of whom he was intent on getting rid. By the time I had signed the last discharge and affixed the consular seal he had finished the article and put it aside with a contemptuous“Humph!” expressive of his opinion of the valor of the crew and officers. I could see that he was anxious for me to give him my attention while he related one of those long-drawn-out stories of perhaps a like personal experience. I knew the symptoms andsometimestook occasion to escape, if business or inclination made me forego the pleasure. To-day I was in a mood to humor him.There is always something deliciously refreshing in a sailor’s yarn. I have listened to hundreds in the course of my consular career, and have yet to find one that is dull or prosy. They all bear the imprint of truth, perhaps a trifle overdrawn, but nevertheless sparkling with the salt of the sea and redolent of the romance of strange people and distant lands. In listening, one becomes almost dizzy at the rapidity with which the scene and personnel change. The icebergs and the aurora borealis of the Arctic give place to the torrid waters and the SouthernCross of the South Pacific. A volcanic island, an Arabian desert, a tropical jungle, and the breadth and width of the ocean serve as the theatre, while a Fiji Islander, an Eskimo, and a turbaned Arab are actors in a half-hour’s tale. In interest they rival Verne, Kingston, or Marryat. All they lack is skilled hands to dress them in proper language.IThe Captain’s YarnThe captain helped himself to one of my manilas and began:—I’ve nothing to say about the fate of the poor fellows on theNamoa, seeing the captain was killed at the first fire, but it looks to me like a case of carelessness which was almost criminal. The idea of allowing three hundred Chinese to come aboard as passengers without searching them for arms. Why! it is an open bid to pirates. Goes to showpretty plain that these seas are not cleared of pirates. Sailing ships nowadays think they can go anywhere without a pound of powder or an old cutlass aboard, just because there is an English or Dutch man-of-war within a hundred miles. I don’t know what we’d have done when I first traded among these islands without a good brass swivel and a stock of percussion-cap muskets.Let me see; it was in ’58, I was cabin boy on the shipBangor. Captain Howe, hale old fellow from Maine, had his two little boys aboard. They are merchants now in Boston. I’ve been sailing for them on theElmiraever since. We were trading along the coast of Borneo. Those were great days for trading in spite of the pirates. That was long before iron steamers sent our good oaken ships to rot in the dockyards of Maine. Why, in those days you could see a half-dozen of our snug little crafts in any port of the world, and I’ve seen moreAmerican flags in this very harbor of Singapore than of any other nation. We had come into Singapore with a shipload of ice (no scientific ice factories then), and had gone along the coast of Java and Borneo to load with coffee, rubber, and spices, for a return voyage. We were just off Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and about loaded, when the captain heard that gold had been discovered somewhere up near the head of the Rejang. The captain was an adventurous old salt, and decided to test the truth of the story; so, taking the long-boat and ten men, he pulled up the Sarawak River to Kuching and got permission of Rajah Brooke to go up the Rejang on a hunting expedition. The Rajah was courteous, but tried to dissuade us from the undertaking by relating that several bands of Dyaks had been out on head-hunting expeditions of late, and that the mouth of the Rejang was infested by Illanum pirates.The captain only laughed, and jokingly told Sir James that if the game proved scarce he might come back and claim the prize money on a boat-load of pirate heads.We started at once,—for the captain let me go; we rowed some sixty miles along the coast to the mouth of the Rejang; then for four days we pulled up its snakelike course. It was my first bit of adventure, and everything was strange and new. The river’s course was like a great tunnel into the dense black jungle. On each side and above we were completely walled in by an impenetrable growth of great tropical trees and the iron-like vines of the rubber. The sun for a few hours each day came in broken shafts down through the foliage, and exposed the black back of a crocodile, or the green sides of an iguana. Troops of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches above, and at intervals a grove of cocoanut broke the monotony of the scenery. Among themwe would land and rest for the day or night, eat of their juicy fruit, and go on short excursions for game. A roasted monkey, some baked yams, and a delicious rice curry made up a royal bill of fare, and as the odor of our tobacco mixed with the breathing perfume of the jungle, I would fall asleep listening to sea-yarns that sometimes ran back to the War of 1812.IIAt the end of the fifth day we arrived at the head of the Rejang. Here the river broke up into a dozen small streams and a swamp. A stockade had been erected, and the Rajah had stationed a small company of native soldiers under an English officer to keep the head-hunting Dyaks in check. I don’t remember what our captain found out in regard to the gold fields, at least it was not encouraging; for he gave up the search and joined the English lieutenantin a grand deer-hunt that lasted for five days, and then started back accompanied by two native soldiers bearing despatches to the Rajah.It was easy running down the river with the current. One man in each end of the boat kept it off roots, sunken logs, and crocodiles, and the rest of us spent the time as best our cramped space allowed. Twice we detected the black, ugly face of a Dyak peering from out the jungle. The men were for hunting them down for the price on their heads, but the captain said he never killed a human being except in self-defence, and that if the Rajah wanted to get rid of the savages he had better give the contract to a Mississippi slave-trader. Secretly, I was longing for some kind of excitement, and was hoping that the men’s clamorous talk would have some effect. I never doubted our ability to raid a Dyak village and kill the head-huntersand carry off the beautiful maidens. I could not see why a parcel of blacks should be such a terror to the good Rajah, when Big Tom said he could easily handle a dozen, and flattered me by saying that such a brawny lad as I ought to take care of two at least.In the course of three days we reached the mouth of the river, and prepared the sail for the trip across the bay to theBangor. Just as everything was in readiness, one of those peculiar and rapid changes in the weather, that are so common here in the tropics near the equator, took place. A great blue-black cloud, looking like an immense cartridge, came up from the west. Through it played vivid flashes of lightning, and around it was a red haze. “A nasty animal,” I heard the bo’s’n tell the captain, and yet I was foolishly delighted when they decided to risk a blow and put out to sea. The sky on all sides grewdarker from hour to hour. A smell of sulphur came to our nostrils. It was oppressively hot; not a breath of wind was stirring. The sail flapped uselessly against the mast, and the men labored at the oars, while streams of sweat ran from their bodies.The captain had just taken down the mast, when, without a moment’s warning, the gale struck us and the boat half filled with water. We managed to head it with the wind, and were soon driving with the rapidity of a cannon-ball over the boiling and surging waters. It was a fearful gale; we blew for hours before it, ofttimes in danger of a volcanic reef, again almost sunk by a giant wave. I baled until I was completely exhausted. But the long-boat was a stanch little craft, and there were plenty of men to manage it, so as long as we could keep her before the wind, the captain felt no great anxiety as to our safety.IIIAt about six bells in the afternoon, the wind fell away, and the rain came down in torrents, leaving us to pitch about on the rapidly decreasing waves, wet to the skin and unequal to another effort. We were within a mile of a rocky island that rose like a half-ruined castle from the ocean. The Dyak soldiers called it Satang Island, and I have sailed past it many a time since. Without waiting for the word, we rowed to it and around it, before we found a suitable beach on which to land. One end of the island rose precipitous and sheer above the beach a hundred feet, and ended in a barren plateau of some two dozen acres. The remainder comprised some hundred acres of sand and rocks, on which were half a dozen cocoanut trees and a few yams. Along the beach we found a large number of turtles’ eggs.The captain, remembering the Rajah’s caution in regard to pirates, decided not to make a light, but we were wet and hungry and overcame his scruples, and soon had a huge fire and a savory repast of coffee, turtles’ eggs, and yams. At midnight it was extinguished, and a watch stationed on top of the plateau. Toward morning I clambered grumblingly up the narrow, almost perpendicular sides of the rift that cut into the rocky watch-tower. I did not believe in pirates and was willing to take my chances in sleep. I paced back and forth, inhaling deep breaths of the rich tropical air; below me the waves beat in ripples against the rugged beach, casting off from time to time little flashes of phosphorescent light, and mirroring in their depths the hardly distinguishable outline of the Southern Cross. The salt smell of the sea was tinged with the spice-laden air of the near coast. Drowsiness came over me. I picked up amusket and paced around the little plateau. The moon had but just reached its zenith, making all objects easily discernible. The smooth storm-swept space before me reflected back its rays like a well-scrubbed quarter-deck; below were the dark outlines of my sleeping mates. I could hear the light wind rustling through the branches of the casuarina trees that fringed the shore. I paused and looked over the sea. Like a charge of electricity a curious sensation of fear shot through me. Then an intimation that some object had flashed between me and the moon. I rubbed my eyes and gazed in the air above, expecting to see a night bird or a bat. Then the same peculiar sensation came over me again, and I looked down in the water below just in time to see the long, keen, knife-like outline of a pirateprauglide as noiselessly as a shadow from a passing cloud into the gloom of the island. Its great, wide-spreading, dark redsails were set full to the wind, and hanging over its sides by ropes were a dozen naked Illanums, guiding the sensitive craft almost like a thing of life. Within theprauwere two dozen fighting men, armed with their alligator hide buckler, long, steel-tipped spear, and ugly, snake-likekris. A thirdpraufollowed in the wake of the other two, and all three were lost in the blackness of the overhanging cliffs.With as little noise as possible, I ran across the plain and warned my companion, then picked my way silently down the defile to the camp. The captain responded to my touch and was up in an instant. The men were awakened and the news whispered from one to another. Gathering up what food and utensils we possessed, we hurried to get on top of the plateau before our exact whereabouts became known. The captain hoped that when they discoveredwe were well fortified and there was no wreck to pillage, they would withdraw without giving battle. They had landed on the opposite side of the island from our boat and might leave it undisturbed. We felt reasonably safe in our fortress from attacks. There were but two breaks in its precipitous sides, each a narrow defile filled with loose boulders that could easily be detached and sent thundering down on an assailant’s head. On the other hand, our shortness of food and water made us singularly weak in case of siege. But we hoped for the best. Two men were posted at each defile, and as nothing was heard for an hour, most of us fell asleep.IVIt was just dawn, when we were awakened by the report of two muskets and the terrific crashing of a great boulder, followed by groans and yells. With one accord we rushed to the head of the cañon. TheIllanums, naked, with the exception of party-coloredsarongsaround their waists, with their bucklers on their left arms and their gleaming knives strapped to their right wrists, were mounting on each other’s shoulders, forcing a way up the precipitous defile, unmindful of the madly descending rocks that had crushed and maimed more than one of their number. They were fine, powerful fellows, with a reddish brown skin that shone like polished ebony. Their hair was shorn close to their heads; they had high cheek bones, flat noses,syrah-stained lips, and bloodshot eyes. In their movements they were as lithe and supple as a tiger, and commanded our admiration while they made us shudder. We knew that they neither give nor take quarter, and for years had terrorized the entire Bornean coast.We were ready to fire, but a gesture from the captain restrained us; our ammunition was low, and he wished to save it until weactually needed it. By our united efforts we pried off two of the volcanic rocks, which, with a great leap, disappeared into the darkness below, oftentimes appearing for an instant before rushing to the sea. Every time an Illanum fell we gave a hearty American cheer, which was answered by savage yells. Still they fought on and up, making little headway. We were gradually relaxing our efforts, thinking that they were sick of the affair, when the report of a musket from the opposite side of the island called our attention to the bo’s’n, who had been detailed to guard the other defile.The bo’s’n and one native soldier were fighting hand to hand with a dozen pirates who were forcing their way up the edge of the cliff. Half of the men dashed to their relief just in time to see the soldier go over the precipice locked in the arms of a giant Illanum. One volley from our muskets settled the hopes of the invaders.Our little party was divided, and we were outnumbered ten to one. One of the sailors in dislodging a boulder lost his footing and went crashing down with it amid the derisive yells of the pirates. Suddenly the conflict ceased and the pirates withdrew. In a short time we could see them building a number of small fires along the beach, and the aroma of rice curry came up to us with the breeze. The captain, I could see, was anxious, although my boyish feelings did not go beyond a sense of intoxicating excitement. I heard him say that nothing but a storm or a ship could save us in case we were besieged; that it was better to have the fight out at once and die with our arms in our hands than to starve to death.Giving each a small portion of ship biscuit and a taste of water, he enjoined on each a careful watchfulness and a provident use of our small stock of provisions.I took mine in my hand and walked outon the edge of the cliff somewhat sobered. Directly below me were the pirates, and at my feet I noticed a fragment of rock that I thought I could loosen. Putting down my food, I foolishly picked up a piece of timber which I used as a lever, when, without warning, the mass broke away, and with a tremendous bound went crashing down into the very midst of the pirates, scattering them right and left, and ended by crushing one of theprausthat was drawn up on the sand.In an instant the quiet beach was a scene of the wildest confusion. A surging, crowding mass of pirates with theirkrisesbetween their teeth dashed up the cañon, intent on avenging their loss. I dropped my lever and rushed back to the men, nearly frightened to death at the result of my temerity. There was no time for boulders; the men reached the brink of the defile just in time to welcome the assailants with a broadside. Their lines wavered, but fresh men took theplaces of the fallen, and they pushed on. Another volley from our guns, and the dead and wounded encumbered the progress of the living. A shower of stones and timbers gave us the light, and they withdrew with savage yells to open the siege once more. Only one of our men had been wounded,—he by an arrow from a blowpipe.VAll that night we kept watch. The next morning we were once more attacked, but successfully defended ourselves with boulders and our cutlasses. Yet one swarthy pirate succeeded in catching the leg of the remaining native soldier and bearing him away with them. With cessation of hostilities, we searched the top of the island for food and water. At one side of the tableland there was a break in its surface and a bench of some dozen acres lay perhaps twenty feet below our retreat. We cautiously workedour way down to this portion and there to our delight found a number of fan-shaped traveller’s palms and monkey-cups full of sweet water, which with two wild sago palms we calculated would keep us alive a few days at all events.We were much encouraged at this discovery, and that night collected a lot of brush from the lower plain and lit a big fire on the most exposed part of the rocks. We did not care if it brought a thousand more pirates as long as it attracted the attention of a passing ship. Two good nine-pounders would soon send our foes in all directions. We relieved each other in watching during the night, and by sunrise we were all completely worn out. The third day was one of weariness and thirst under the burning rays of the tropical sun. That day we ate the last of our ship biscuit and were reduced to a few drops of water each. Starvation was staring us in the face. There was but onealternative, and that was to descend and make a fight for our boat on the beach. The bo’s’n volunteered with three men to descend the defile and reconnoitre. Armed only with their cutlasses and a short axe, they worked their way carefully down in the shadow of the rocks, while we kept watch above.All was quiet for a time; then there arose a tumult of cries, oaths, and yells. The captain gave the order, and pell-mell down the rift we clambered, some dropping their muskets in their hurried descent, one of which exploded in its fall. The bo’s’n had found the beach and our boat guarded by six pirates, who were asleep. Four of these they succeeded in throttling. We pushed the boat into the surf, expecting every moment to see one of theprausglide around the projecting reef that separated the two inlets. We could plainly hear their cries and yells as they discovered our escape, and with a “heigh-ho-heigh!” our long-boat shot out into theplacid ocean, sending up a shower of phosphorescent bubbles. We bent our backs to the oars as only a question of life or death can make one. With each stroke the boat seemed almost to lift itself out of the water. Almost at the same time a long dark line, filled with moving objects, dashed out from the shadow of the cliffs, hardly a hundred yards away.It was a glorious race over the dim waters of that tropical sea. I as a boy could not realize what capture meant at the hands of our cruel pursuers. My heart beat high, and I felt equal to a dozen Illanums. My thoughts travelled back to New England in the midst of the excitement. I saw myself before the open arch fire in a low-roofed old house, that for a century had withstood the fiercest gales on the old Maine coast, and from whose doors had gone forth three generations of sea-captains. I saw myself on a winter night relating this very story of adventureto an old gray-haired, bronzed-faced father, and a mother whose parting kiss still lingered on my lips, to my younger brother, and sister. I could feel their undisguised admiration as I told of my fight with pirates in the Bornean sea. It is wonderful how the mind will travel. Yet with my thoughts in Maine, I saw and felt that the Illanums were gradually gaining on us. Our men were weary and feeble from two days’ fasting, while the pirates were strong, and thirsting for our blood.The captain kept glancing first at the enemy and then at a musket that lay near him. He longed to use it, but not a man could be spared from the oars. Hand over hand they gained on us. Turning his eyes on me as I sat in the bow, the captain said, while he bent his sinewy back to the oar, “Jack, are you a good shot?”I stammered, “I can try, sir.”“Very well, get the musket there in thebow. It is loaded. Take good aim and shoot that big fellow in the stern. If you hit him, I’ll make you master of a ship some day.”Tremblingly I raised the heavy musket as directed. The boat was unsteady, I hardly expected to hit the chief, but aimed low, hoping to hit one of the rowers at least. I aimed, closed my eyes, and fired. With the report of the musket the tall leader sprang into the air and then fell head fore-most amid his rowers. I could just detect the gleam of the moonlight on the jewelled handle of hiskrisas it sank into the waters. I had hit my man. The sailors sent up a hearty American cheer and a tiger, as they saw thepraucome to a standstill.Our boat sprang away into the darkness. We did not cease rowing until dawn,—then we lay back on our oars and stretched our tired backs and arms. I had taken my place at the oar during the night.Away out on the northern horizon we saw a black speck; on the southern horizon another. The captain’s glass revealed one to be the pirateprauwith all sails set, for a wind had come up with the dawn. The other we welcomed with a cheer, for it was theBangor. Enfeebled and nearly famishing, we headed toward it and rowed for life. How we regretted having left our sails on the island. Theprauhad sighted us and was bearing down in full pursuit; we soon could distinguish its wide-spreading, rakish sails almost touching the water as it sped on. Then we made out the naked forms of the Illanums hanging to the ropes, far out over the water, and then we could hear their blood-curdling yell. It was too late; their yell was one of baffled rage. It was answered by the deep bass tones of the swivel on board theBangorsending a ball skimming along over the waters, which, although it went wide of its mark, caused thenatives on the ropes to throw themselves bodily across theprau, taking the great sail with them.In another instant the red sail, the long, keen, black shell, the naked forms of the fierce Illanums, were mixed in one undefinable blot on the distant horizon.And that was the skipper’s yarn.

TheDaily Straits Timeson the desk before me contained a vivid word picture of the capture of the British steamshipNamoaby three hundred Chinese pirates, the guns of Hong Kong almost within sight, and the year of our Lord 1890 just drawing to a close. The report seemed incredible.

I pushed the paper across the table to the grizzled old captain of theBunker Hilland continued my examination of the accounts of a half-dozen sailors of whom he was intent on getting rid. By the time I had signed the last discharge and affixed the consular seal he had finished the article and put it aside with a contemptuous“Humph!” expressive of his opinion of the valor of the crew and officers. I could see that he was anxious for me to give him my attention while he related one of those long-drawn-out stories of perhaps a like personal experience. I knew the symptoms andsometimestook occasion to escape, if business or inclination made me forego the pleasure. To-day I was in a mood to humor him.

There is always something deliciously refreshing in a sailor’s yarn. I have listened to hundreds in the course of my consular career, and have yet to find one that is dull or prosy. They all bear the imprint of truth, perhaps a trifle overdrawn, but nevertheless sparkling with the salt of the sea and redolent of the romance of strange people and distant lands. In listening, one becomes almost dizzy at the rapidity with which the scene and personnel change. The icebergs and the aurora borealis of the Arctic give place to the torrid waters and the SouthernCross of the South Pacific. A volcanic island, an Arabian desert, a tropical jungle, and the breadth and width of the ocean serve as the theatre, while a Fiji Islander, an Eskimo, and a turbaned Arab are actors in a half-hour’s tale. In interest they rival Verne, Kingston, or Marryat. All they lack is skilled hands to dress them in proper language.

IThe Captain’s YarnThe captain helped himself to one of my manilas and began:—I’ve nothing to say about the fate of the poor fellows on theNamoa, seeing the captain was killed at the first fire, but it looks to me like a case of carelessness which was almost criminal. The idea of allowing three hundred Chinese to come aboard as passengers without searching them for arms. Why! it is an open bid to pirates. Goes to showpretty plain that these seas are not cleared of pirates. Sailing ships nowadays think they can go anywhere without a pound of powder or an old cutlass aboard, just because there is an English or Dutch man-of-war within a hundred miles. I don’t know what we’d have done when I first traded among these islands without a good brass swivel and a stock of percussion-cap muskets.Let me see; it was in ’58, I was cabin boy on the shipBangor. Captain Howe, hale old fellow from Maine, had his two little boys aboard. They are merchants now in Boston. I’ve been sailing for them on theElmiraever since. We were trading along the coast of Borneo. Those were great days for trading in spite of the pirates. That was long before iron steamers sent our good oaken ships to rot in the dockyards of Maine. Why, in those days you could see a half-dozen of our snug little crafts in any port of the world, and I’ve seen moreAmerican flags in this very harbor of Singapore than of any other nation. We had come into Singapore with a shipload of ice (no scientific ice factories then), and had gone along the coast of Java and Borneo to load with coffee, rubber, and spices, for a return voyage. We were just off Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and about loaded, when the captain heard that gold had been discovered somewhere up near the head of the Rejang. The captain was an adventurous old salt, and decided to test the truth of the story; so, taking the long-boat and ten men, he pulled up the Sarawak River to Kuching and got permission of Rajah Brooke to go up the Rejang on a hunting expedition. The Rajah was courteous, but tried to dissuade us from the undertaking by relating that several bands of Dyaks had been out on head-hunting expeditions of late, and that the mouth of the Rejang was infested by Illanum pirates.The captain only laughed, and jokingly told Sir James that if the game proved scarce he might come back and claim the prize money on a boat-load of pirate heads.We started at once,—for the captain let me go; we rowed some sixty miles along the coast to the mouth of the Rejang; then for four days we pulled up its snakelike course. It was my first bit of adventure, and everything was strange and new. The river’s course was like a great tunnel into the dense black jungle. On each side and above we were completely walled in by an impenetrable growth of great tropical trees and the iron-like vines of the rubber. The sun for a few hours each day came in broken shafts down through the foliage, and exposed the black back of a crocodile, or the green sides of an iguana. Troops of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches above, and at intervals a grove of cocoanut broke the monotony of the scenery. Among themwe would land and rest for the day or night, eat of their juicy fruit, and go on short excursions for game. A roasted monkey, some baked yams, and a delicious rice curry made up a royal bill of fare, and as the odor of our tobacco mixed with the breathing perfume of the jungle, I would fall asleep listening to sea-yarns that sometimes ran back to the War of 1812.

The captain helped himself to one of my manilas and began:—

I’ve nothing to say about the fate of the poor fellows on theNamoa, seeing the captain was killed at the first fire, but it looks to me like a case of carelessness which was almost criminal. The idea of allowing three hundred Chinese to come aboard as passengers without searching them for arms. Why! it is an open bid to pirates. Goes to showpretty plain that these seas are not cleared of pirates. Sailing ships nowadays think they can go anywhere without a pound of powder or an old cutlass aboard, just because there is an English or Dutch man-of-war within a hundred miles. I don’t know what we’d have done when I first traded among these islands without a good brass swivel and a stock of percussion-cap muskets.

Let me see; it was in ’58, I was cabin boy on the shipBangor. Captain Howe, hale old fellow from Maine, had his two little boys aboard. They are merchants now in Boston. I’ve been sailing for them on theElmiraever since. We were trading along the coast of Borneo. Those were great days for trading in spite of the pirates. That was long before iron steamers sent our good oaken ships to rot in the dockyards of Maine. Why, in those days you could see a half-dozen of our snug little crafts in any port of the world, and I’ve seen moreAmerican flags in this very harbor of Singapore than of any other nation. We had come into Singapore with a shipload of ice (no scientific ice factories then), and had gone along the coast of Java and Borneo to load with coffee, rubber, and spices, for a return voyage. We were just off Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and about loaded, when the captain heard that gold had been discovered somewhere up near the head of the Rejang. The captain was an adventurous old salt, and decided to test the truth of the story; so, taking the long-boat and ten men, he pulled up the Sarawak River to Kuching and got permission of Rajah Brooke to go up the Rejang on a hunting expedition. The Rajah was courteous, but tried to dissuade us from the undertaking by relating that several bands of Dyaks had been out on head-hunting expeditions of late, and that the mouth of the Rejang was infested by Illanum pirates.The captain only laughed, and jokingly told Sir James that if the game proved scarce he might come back and claim the prize money on a boat-load of pirate heads.

We started at once,—for the captain let me go; we rowed some sixty miles along the coast to the mouth of the Rejang; then for four days we pulled up its snakelike course. It was my first bit of adventure, and everything was strange and new. The river’s course was like a great tunnel into the dense black jungle. On each side and above we were completely walled in by an impenetrable growth of great tropical trees and the iron-like vines of the rubber. The sun for a few hours each day came in broken shafts down through the foliage, and exposed the black back of a crocodile, or the green sides of an iguana. Troops of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches above, and at intervals a grove of cocoanut broke the monotony of the scenery. Among themwe would land and rest for the day or night, eat of their juicy fruit, and go on short excursions for game. A roasted monkey, some baked yams, and a delicious rice curry made up a royal bill of fare, and as the odor of our tobacco mixed with the breathing perfume of the jungle, I would fall asleep listening to sea-yarns that sometimes ran back to the War of 1812.

IIAt the end of the fifth day we arrived at the head of the Rejang. Here the river broke up into a dozen small streams and a swamp. A stockade had been erected, and the Rajah had stationed a small company of native soldiers under an English officer to keep the head-hunting Dyaks in check. I don’t remember what our captain found out in regard to the gold fields, at least it was not encouraging; for he gave up the search and joined the English lieutenantin a grand deer-hunt that lasted for five days, and then started back accompanied by two native soldiers bearing despatches to the Rajah.It was easy running down the river with the current. One man in each end of the boat kept it off roots, sunken logs, and crocodiles, and the rest of us spent the time as best our cramped space allowed. Twice we detected the black, ugly face of a Dyak peering from out the jungle. The men were for hunting them down for the price on their heads, but the captain said he never killed a human being except in self-defence, and that if the Rajah wanted to get rid of the savages he had better give the contract to a Mississippi slave-trader. Secretly, I was longing for some kind of excitement, and was hoping that the men’s clamorous talk would have some effect. I never doubted our ability to raid a Dyak village and kill the head-huntersand carry off the beautiful maidens. I could not see why a parcel of blacks should be such a terror to the good Rajah, when Big Tom said he could easily handle a dozen, and flattered me by saying that such a brawny lad as I ought to take care of two at least.In the course of three days we reached the mouth of the river, and prepared the sail for the trip across the bay to theBangor. Just as everything was in readiness, one of those peculiar and rapid changes in the weather, that are so common here in the tropics near the equator, took place. A great blue-black cloud, looking like an immense cartridge, came up from the west. Through it played vivid flashes of lightning, and around it was a red haze. “A nasty animal,” I heard the bo’s’n tell the captain, and yet I was foolishly delighted when they decided to risk a blow and put out to sea. The sky on all sides grewdarker from hour to hour. A smell of sulphur came to our nostrils. It was oppressively hot; not a breath of wind was stirring. The sail flapped uselessly against the mast, and the men labored at the oars, while streams of sweat ran from their bodies.The captain had just taken down the mast, when, without a moment’s warning, the gale struck us and the boat half filled with water. We managed to head it with the wind, and were soon driving with the rapidity of a cannon-ball over the boiling and surging waters. It was a fearful gale; we blew for hours before it, ofttimes in danger of a volcanic reef, again almost sunk by a giant wave. I baled until I was completely exhausted. But the long-boat was a stanch little craft, and there were plenty of men to manage it, so as long as we could keep her before the wind, the captain felt no great anxiety as to our safety.

At the end of the fifth day we arrived at the head of the Rejang. Here the river broke up into a dozen small streams and a swamp. A stockade had been erected, and the Rajah had stationed a small company of native soldiers under an English officer to keep the head-hunting Dyaks in check. I don’t remember what our captain found out in regard to the gold fields, at least it was not encouraging; for he gave up the search and joined the English lieutenantin a grand deer-hunt that lasted for five days, and then started back accompanied by two native soldiers bearing despatches to the Rajah.

It was easy running down the river with the current. One man in each end of the boat kept it off roots, sunken logs, and crocodiles, and the rest of us spent the time as best our cramped space allowed. Twice we detected the black, ugly face of a Dyak peering from out the jungle. The men were for hunting them down for the price on their heads, but the captain said he never killed a human being except in self-defence, and that if the Rajah wanted to get rid of the savages he had better give the contract to a Mississippi slave-trader. Secretly, I was longing for some kind of excitement, and was hoping that the men’s clamorous talk would have some effect. I never doubted our ability to raid a Dyak village and kill the head-huntersand carry off the beautiful maidens. I could not see why a parcel of blacks should be such a terror to the good Rajah, when Big Tom said he could easily handle a dozen, and flattered me by saying that such a brawny lad as I ought to take care of two at least.

In the course of three days we reached the mouth of the river, and prepared the sail for the trip across the bay to theBangor. Just as everything was in readiness, one of those peculiar and rapid changes in the weather, that are so common here in the tropics near the equator, took place. A great blue-black cloud, looking like an immense cartridge, came up from the west. Through it played vivid flashes of lightning, and around it was a red haze. “A nasty animal,” I heard the bo’s’n tell the captain, and yet I was foolishly delighted when they decided to risk a blow and put out to sea. The sky on all sides grewdarker from hour to hour. A smell of sulphur came to our nostrils. It was oppressively hot; not a breath of wind was stirring. The sail flapped uselessly against the mast, and the men labored at the oars, while streams of sweat ran from their bodies.

The captain had just taken down the mast, when, without a moment’s warning, the gale struck us and the boat half filled with water. We managed to head it with the wind, and were soon driving with the rapidity of a cannon-ball over the boiling and surging waters. It was a fearful gale; we blew for hours before it, ofttimes in danger of a volcanic reef, again almost sunk by a giant wave. I baled until I was completely exhausted. But the long-boat was a stanch little craft, and there were plenty of men to manage it, so as long as we could keep her before the wind, the captain felt no great anxiety as to our safety.

IIIAt about six bells in the afternoon, the wind fell away, and the rain came down in torrents, leaving us to pitch about on the rapidly decreasing waves, wet to the skin and unequal to another effort. We were within a mile of a rocky island that rose like a half-ruined castle from the ocean. The Dyak soldiers called it Satang Island, and I have sailed past it many a time since. Without waiting for the word, we rowed to it and around it, before we found a suitable beach on which to land. One end of the island rose precipitous and sheer above the beach a hundred feet, and ended in a barren plateau of some two dozen acres. The remainder comprised some hundred acres of sand and rocks, on which were half a dozen cocoanut trees and a few yams. Along the beach we found a large number of turtles’ eggs.The captain, remembering the Rajah’s caution in regard to pirates, decided not to make a light, but we were wet and hungry and overcame his scruples, and soon had a huge fire and a savory repast of coffee, turtles’ eggs, and yams. At midnight it was extinguished, and a watch stationed on top of the plateau. Toward morning I clambered grumblingly up the narrow, almost perpendicular sides of the rift that cut into the rocky watch-tower. I did not believe in pirates and was willing to take my chances in sleep. I paced back and forth, inhaling deep breaths of the rich tropical air; below me the waves beat in ripples against the rugged beach, casting off from time to time little flashes of phosphorescent light, and mirroring in their depths the hardly distinguishable outline of the Southern Cross. The salt smell of the sea was tinged with the spice-laden air of the near coast. Drowsiness came over me. I picked up amusket and paced around the little plateau. The moon had but just reached its zenith, making all objects easily discernible. The smooth storm-swept space before me reflected back its rays like a well-scrubbed quarter-deck; below were the dark outlines of my sleeping mates. I could hear the light wind rustling through the branches of the casuarina trees that fringed the shore. I paused and looked over the sea. Like a charge of electricity a curious sensation of fear shot through me. Then an intimation that some object had flashed between me and the moon. I rubbed my eyes and gazed in the air above, expecting to see a night bird or a bat. Then the same peculiar sensation came over me again, and I looked down in the water below just in time to see the long, keen, knife-like outline of a pirateprauglide as noiselessly as a shadow from a passing cloud into the gloom of the island. Its great, wide-spreading, dark redsails were set full to the wind, and hanging over its sides by ropes were a dozen naked Illanums, guiding the sensitive craft almost like a thing of life. Within theprauwere two dozen fighting men, armed with their alligator hide buckler, long, steel-tipped spear, and ugly, snake-likekris. A thirdpraufollowed in the wake of the other two, and all three were lost in the blackness of the overhanging cliffs.With as little noise as possible, I ran across the plain and warned my companion, then picked my way silently down the defile to the camp. The captain responded to my touch and was up in an instant. The men were awakened and the news whispered from one to another. Gathering up what food and utensils we possessed, we hurried to get on top of the plateau before our exact whereabouts became known. The captain hoped that when they discoveredwe were well fortified and there was no wreck to pillage, they would withdraw without giving battle. They had landed on the opposite side of the island from our boat and might leave it undisturbed. We felt reasonably safe in our fortress from attacks. There were but two breaks in its precipitous sides, each a narrow defile filled with loose boulders that could easily be detached and sent thundering down on an assailant’s head. On the other hand, our shortness of food and water made us singularly weak in case of siege. But we hoped for the best. Two men were posted at each defile, and as nothing was heard for an hour, most of us fell asleep.

At about six bells in the afternoon, the wind fell away, and the rain came down in torrents, leaving us to pitch about on the rapidly decreasing waves, wet to the skin and unequal to another effort. We were within a mile of a rocky island that rose like a half-ruined castle from the ocean. The Dyak soldiers called it Satang Island, and I have sailed past it many a time since. Without waiting for the word, we rowed to it and around it, before we found a suitable beach on which to land. One end of the island rose precipitous and sheer above the beach a hundred feet, and ended in a barren plateau of some two dozen acres. The remainder comprised some hundred acres of sand and rocks, on which were half a dozen cocoanut trees and a few yams. Along the beach we found a large number of turtles’ eggs.

The captain, remembering the Rajah’s caution in regard to pirates, decided not to make a light, but we were wet and hungry and overcame his scruples, and soon had a huge fire and a savory repast of coffee, turtles’ eggs, and yams. At midnight it was extinguished, and a watch stationed on top of the plateau. Toward morning I clambered grumblingly up the narrow, almost perpendicular sides of the rift that cut into the rocky watch-tower. I did not believe in pirates and was willing to take my chances in sleep. I paced back and forth, inhaling deep breaths of the rich tropical air; below me the waves beat in ripples against the rugged beach, casting off from time to time little flashes of phosphorescent light, and mirroring in their depths the hardly distinguishable outline of the Southern Cross. The salt smell of the sea was tinged with the spice-laden air of the near coast. Drowsiness came over me. I picked up amusket and paced around the little plateau. The moon had but just reached its zenith, making all objects easily discernible. The smooth storm-swept space before me reflected back its rays like a well-scrubbed quarter-deck; below were the dark outlines of my sleeping mates. I could hear the light wind rustling through the branches of the casuarina trees that fringed the shore. I paused and looked over the sea. Like a charge of electricity a curious sensation of fear shot through me. Then an intimation that some object had flashed between me and the moon. I rubbed my eyes and gazed in the air above, expecting to see a night bird or a bat. Then the same peculiar sensation came over me again, and I looked down in the water below just in time to see the long, keen, knife-like outline of a pirateprauglide as noiselessly as a shadow from a passing cloud into the gloom of the island. Its great, wide-spreading, dark redsails were set full to the wind, and hanging over its sides by ropes were a dozen naked Illanums, guiding the sensitive craft almost like a thing of life. Within theprauwere two dozen fighting men, armed with their alligator hide buckler, long, steel-tipped spear, and ugly, snake-likekris. A thirdpraufollowed in the wake of the other two, and all three were lost in the blackness of the overhanging cliffs.

With as little noise as possible, I ran across the plain and warned my companion, then picked my way silently down the defile to the camp. The captain responded to my touch and was up in an instant. The men were awakened and the news whispered from one to another. Gathering up what food and utensils we possessed, we hurried to get on top of the plateau before our exact whereabouts became known. The captain hoped that when they discoveredwe were well fortified and there was no wreck to pillage, they would withdraw without giving battle. They had landed on the opposite side of the island from our boat and might leave it undisturbed. We felt reasonably safe in our fortress from attacks. There were but two breaks in its precipitous sides, each a narrow defile filled with loose boulders that could easily be detached and sent thundering down on an assailant’s head. On the other hand, our shortness of food and water made us singularly weak in case of siege. But we hoped for the best. Two men were posted at each defile, and as nothing was heard for an hour, most of us fell asleep.

IVIt was just dawn, when we were awakened by the report of two muskets and the terrific crashing of a great boulder, followed by groans and yells. With one accord we rushed to the head of the cañon. TheIllanums, naked, with the exception of party-coloredsarongsaround their waists, with their bucklers on their left arms and their gleaming knives strapped to their right wrists, were mounting on each other’s shoulders, forcing a way up the precipitous defile, unmindful of the madly descending rocks that had crushed and maimed more than one of their number. They were fine, powerful fellows, with a reddish brown skin that shone like polished ebony. Their hair was shorn close to their heads; they had high cheek bones, flat noses,syrah-stained lips, and bloodshot eyes. In their movements they were as lithe and supple as a tiger, and commanded our admiration while they made us shudder. We knew that they neither give nor take quarter, and for years had terrorized the entire Bornean coast.We were ready to fire, but a gesture from the captain restrained us; our ammunition was low, and he wished to save it until weactually needed it. By our united efforts we pried off two of the volcanic rocks, which, with a great leap, disappeared into the darkness below, oftentimes appearing for an instant before rushing to the sea. Every time an Illanum fell we gave a hearty American cheer, which was answered by savage yells. Still they fought on and up, making little headway. We were gradually relaxing our efforts, thinking that they were sick of the affair, when the report of a musket from the opposite side of the island called our attention to the bo’s’n, who had been detailed to guard the other defile.The bo’s’n and one native soldier were fighting hand to hand with a dozen pirates who were forcing their way up the edge of the cliff. Half of the men dashed to their relief just in time to see the soldier go over the precipice locked in the arms of a giant Illanum. One volley from our muskets settled the hopes of the invaders.Our little party was divided, and we were outnumbered ten to one. One of the sailors in dislodging a boulder lost his footing and went crashing down with it amid the derisive yells of the pirates. Suddenly the conflict ceased and the pirates withdrew. In a short time we could see them building a number of small fires along the beach, and the aroma of rice curry came up to us with the breeze. The captain, I could see, was anxious, although my boyish feelings did not go beyond a sense of intoxicating excitement. I heard him say that nothing but a storm or a ship could save us in case we were besieged; that it was better to have the fight out at once and die with our arms in our hands than to starve to death.Giving each a small portion of ship biscuit and a taste of water, he enjoined on each a careful watchfulness and a provident use of our small stock of provisions.I took mine in my hand and walked outon the edge of the cliff somewhat sobered. Directly below me were the pirates, and at my feet I noticed a fragment of rock that I thought I could loosen. Putting down my food, I foolishly picked up a piece of timber which I used as a lever, when, without warning, the mass broke away, and with a tremendous bound went crashing down into the very midst of the pirates, scattering them right and left, and ended by crushing one of theprausthat was drawn up on the sand.In an instant the quiet beach was a scene of the wildest confusion. A surging, crowding mass of pirates with theirkrisesbetween their teeth dashed up the cañon, intent on avenging their loss. I dropped my lever and rushed back to the men, nearly frightened to death at the result of my temerity. There was no time for boulders; the men reached the brink of the defile just in time to welcome the assailants with a broadside. Their lines wavered, but fresh men took theplaces of the fallen, and they pushed on. Another volley from our guns, and the dead and wounded encumbered the progress of the living. A shower of stones and timbers gave us the light, and they withdrew with savage yells to open the siege once more. Only one of our men had been wounded,—he by an arrow from a blowpipe.

It was just dawn, when we were awakened by the report of two muskets and the terrific crashing of a great boulder, followed by groans and yells. With one accord we rushed to the head of the cañon. TheIllanums, naked, with the exception of party-coloredsarongsaround their waists, with their bucklers on their left arms and their gleaming knives strapped to their right wrists, were mounting on each other’s shoulders, forcing a way up the precipitous defile, unmindful of the madly descending rocks that had crushed and maimed more than one of their number. They were fine, powerful fellows, with a reddish brown skin that shone like polished ebony. Their hair was shorn close to their heads; they had high cheek bones, flat noses,syrah-stained lips, and bloodshot eyes. In their movements they were as lithe and supple as a tiger, and commanded our admiration while they made us shudder. We knew that they neither give nor take quarter, and for years had terrorized the entire Bornean coast.

We were ready to fire, but a gesture from the captain restrained us; our ammunition was low, and he wished to save it until weactually needed it. By our united efforts we pried off two of the volcanic rocks, which, with a great leap, disappeared into the darkness below, oftentimes appearing for an instant before rushing to the sea. Every time an Illanum fell we gave a hearty American cheer, which was answered by savage yells. Still they fought on and up, making little headway. We were gradually relaxing our efforts, thinking that they were sick of the affair, when the report of a musket from the opposite side of the island called our attention to the bo’s’n, who had been detailed to guard the other defile.

The bo’s’n and one native soldier were fighting hand to hand with a dozen pirates who were forcing their way up the edge of the cliff. Half of the men dashed to their relief just in time to see the soldier go over the precipice locked in the arms of a giant Illanum. One volley from our muskets settled the hopes of the invaders.

Our little party was divided, and we were outnumbered ten to one. One of the sailors in dislodging a boulder lost his footing and went crashing down with it amid the derisive yells of the pirates. Suddenly the conflict ceased and the pirates withdrew. In a short time we could see them building a number of small fires along the beach, and the aroma of rice curry came up to us with the breeze. The captain, I could see, was anxious, although my boyish feelings did not go beyond a sense of intoxicating excitement. I heard him say that nothing but a storm or a ship could save us in case we were besieged; that it was better to have the fight out at once and die with our arms in our hands than to starve to death.

Giving each a small portion of ship biscuit and a taste of water, he enjoined on each a careful watchfulness and a provident use of our small stock of provisions.

I took mine in my hand and walked outon the edge of the cliff somewhat sobered. Directly below me were the pirates, and at my feet I noticed a fragment of rock that I thought I could loosen. Putting down my food, I foolishly picked up a piece of timber which I used as a lever, when, without warning, the mass broke away, and with a tremendous bound went crashing down into the very midst of the pirates, scattering them right and left, and ended by crushing one of theprausthat was drawn up on the sand.

In an instant the quiet beach was a scene of the wildest confusion. A surging, crowding mass of pirates with theirkrisesbetween their teeth dashed up the cañon, intent on avenging their loss. I dropped my lever and rushed back to the men, nearly frightened to death at the result of my temerity. There was no time for boulders; the men reached the brink of the defile just in time to welcome the assailants with a broadside. Their lines wavered, but fresh men took theplaces of the fallen, and they pushed on. Another volley from our guns, and the dead and wounded encumbered the progress of the living. A shower of stones and timbers gave us the light, and they withdrew with savage yells to open the siege once more. Only one of our men had been wounded,—he by an arrow from a blowpipe.

VAll that night we kept watch. The next morning we were once more attacked, but successfully defended ourselves with boulders and our cutlasses. Yet one swarthy pirate succeeded in catching the leg of the remaining native soldier and bearing him away with them. With cessation of hostilities, we searched the top of the island for food and water. At one side of the tableland there was a break in its surface and a bench of some dozen acres lay perhaps twenty feet below our retreat. We cautiously workedour way down to this portion and there to our delight found a number of fan-shaped traveller’s palms and monkey-cups full of sweet water, which with two wild sago palms we calculated would keep us alive a few days at all events.We were much encouraged at this discovery, and that night collected a lot of brush from the lower plain and lit a big fire on the most exposed part of the rocks. We did not care if it brought a thousand more pirates as long as it attracted the attention of a passing ship. Two good nine-pounders would soon send our foes in all directions. We relieved each other in watching during the night, and by sunrise we were all completely worn out. The third day was one of weariness and thirst under the burning rays of the tropical sun. That day we ate the last of our ship biscuit and were reduced to a few drops of water each. Starvation was staring us in the face. There was but onealternative, and that was to descend and make a fight for our boat on the beach. The bo’s’n volunteered with three men to descend the defile and reconnoitre. Armed only with their cutlasses and a short axe, they worked their way carefully down in the shadow of the rocks, while we kept watch above.All was quiet for a time; then there arose a tumult of cries, oaths, and yells. The captain gave the order, and pell-mell down the rift we clambered, some dropping their muskets in their hurried descent, one of which exploded in its fall. The bo’s’n had found the beach and our boat guarded by six pirates, who were asleep. Four of these they succeeded in throttling. We pushed the boat into the surf, expecting every moment to see one of theprausglide around the projecting reef that separated the two inlets. We could plainly hear their cries and yells as they discovered our escape, and with a “heigh-ho-heigh!” our long-boat shot out into theplacid ocean, sending up a shower of phosphorescent bubbles. We bent our backs to the oars as only a question of life or death can make one. With each stroke the boat seemed almost to lift itself out of the water. Almost at the same time a long dark line, filled with moving objects, dashed out from the shadow of the cliffs, hardly a hundred yards away.It was a glorious race over the dim waters of that tropical sea. I as a boy could not realize what capture meant at the hands of our cruel pursuers. My heart beat high, and I felt equal to a dozen Illanums. My thoughts travelled back to New England in the midst of the excitement. I saw myself before the open arch fire in a low-roofed old house, that for a century had withstood the fiercest gales on the old Maine coast, and from whose doors had gone forth three generations of sea-captains. I saw myself on a winter night relating this very story of adventureto an old gray-haired, bronzed-faced father, and a mother whose parting kiss still lingered on my lips, to my younger brother, and sister. I could feel their undisguised admiration as I told of my fight with pirates in the Bornean sea. It is wonderful how the mind will travel. Yet with my thoughts in Maine, I saw and felt that the Illanums were gradually gaining on us. Our men were weary and feeble from two days’ fasting, while the pirates were strong, and thirsting for our blood.The captain kept glancing first at the enemy and then at a musket that lay near him. He longed to use it, but not a man could be spared from the oars. Hand over hand they gained on us. Turning his eyes on me as I sat in the bow, the captain said, while he bent his sinewy back to the oar, “Jack, are you a good shot?”I stammered, “I can try, sir.”“Very well, get the musket there in thebow. It is loaded. Take good aim and shoot that big fellow in the stern. If you hit him, I’ll make you master of a ship some day.”Tremblingly I raised the heavy musket as directed. The boat was unsteady, I hardly expected to hit the chief, but aimed low, hoping to hit one of the rowers at least. I aimed, closed my eyes, and fired. With the report of the musket the tall leader sprang into the air and then fell head fore-most amid his rowers. I could just detect the gleam of the moonlight on the jewelled handle of hiskrisas it sank into the waters. I had hit my man. The sailors sent up a hearty American cheer and a tiger, as they saw thepraucome to a standstill.Our boat sprang away into the darkness. We did not cease rowing until dawn,—then we lay back on our oars and stretched our tired backs and arms. I had taken my place at the oar during the night.Away out on the northern horizon we saw a black speck; on the southern horizon another. The captain’s glass revealed one to be the pirateprauwith all sails set, for a wind had come up with the dawn. The other we welcomed with a cheer, for it was theBangor. Enfeebled and nearly famishing, we headed toward it and rowed for life. How we regretted having left our sails on the island. Theprauhad sighted us and was bearing down in full pursuit; we soon could distinguish its wide-spreading, rakish sails almost touching the water as it sped on. Then we made out the naked forms of the Illanums hanging to the ropes, far out over the water, and then we could hear their blood-curdling yell. It was too late; their yell was one of baffled rage. It was answered by the deep bass tones of the swivel on board theBangorsending a ball skimming along over the waters, which, although it went wide of its mark, caused thenatives on the ropes to throw themselves bodily across theprau, taking the great sail with them.In another instant the red sail, the long, keen, black shell, the naked forms of the fierce Illanums, were mixed in one undefinable blot on the distant horizon.And that was the skipper’s yarn.

All that night we kept watch. The next morning we were once more attacked, but successfully defended ourselves with boulders and our cutlasses. Yet one swarthy pirate succeeded in catching the leg of the remaining native soldier and bearing him away with them. With cessation of hostilities, we searched the top of the island for food and water. At one side of the tableland there was a break in its surface and a bench of some dozen acres lay perhaps twenty feet below our retreat. We cautiously workedour way down to this portion and there to our delight found a number of fan-shaped traveller’s palms and monkey-cups full of sweet water, which with two wild sago palms we calculated would keep us alive a few days at all events.

We were much encouraged at this discovery, and that night collected a lot of brush from the lower plain and lit a big fire on the most exposed part of the rocks. We did not care if it brought a thousand more pirates as long as it attracted the attention of a passing ship. Two good nine-pounders would soon send our foes in all directions. We relieved each other in watching during the night, and by sunrise we were all completely worn out. The third day was one of weariness and thirst under the burning rays of the tropical sun. That day we ate the last of our ship biscuit and were reduced to a few drops of water each. Starvation was staring us in the face. There was but onealternative, and that was to descend and make a fight for our boat on the beach. The bo’s’n volunteered with three men to descend the defile and reconnoitre. Armed only with their cutlasses and a short axe, they worked their way carefully down in the shadow of the rocks, while we kept watch above.

All was quiet for a time; then there arose a tumult of cries, oaths, and yells. The captain gave the order, and pell-mell down the rift we clambered, some dropping their muskets in their hurried descent, one of which exploded in its fall. The bo’s’n had found the beach and our boat guarded by six pirates, who were asleep. Four of these they succeeded in throttling. We pushed the boat into the surf, expecting every moment to see one of theprausglide around the projecting reef that separated the two inlets. We could plainly hear their cries and yells as they discovered our escape, and with a “heigh-ho-heigh!” our long-boat shot out into theplacid ocean, sending up a shower of phosphorescent bubbles. We bent our backs to the oars as only a question of life or death can make one. With each stroke the boat seemed almost to lift itself out of the water. Almost at the same time a long dark line, filled with moving objects, dashed out from the shadow of the cliffs, hardly a hundred yards away.

It was a glorious race over the dim waters of that tropical sea. I as a boy could not realize what capture meant at the hands of our cruel pursuers. My heart beat high, and I felt equal to a dozen Illanums. My thoughts travelled back to New England in the midst of the excitement. I saw myself before the open arch fire in a low-roofed old house, that for a century had withstood the fiercest gales on the old Maine coast, and from whose doors had gone forth three generations of sea-captains. I saw myself on a winter night relating this very story of adventureto an old gray-haired, bronzed-faced father, and a mother whose parting kiss still lingered on my lips, to my younger brother, and sister. I could feel their undisguised admiration as I told of my fight with pirates in the Bornean sea. It is wonderful how the mind will travel. Yet with my thoughts in Maine, I saw and felt that the Illanums were gradually gaining on us. Our men were weary and feeble from two days’ fasting, while the pirates were strong, and thirsting for our blood.

The captain kept glancing first at the enemy and then at a musket that lay near him. He longed to use it, but not a man could be spared from the oars. Hand over hand they gained on us. Turning his eyes on me as I sat in the bow, the captain said, while he bent his sinewy back to the oar, “Jack, are you a good shot?”

I stammered, “I can try, sir.”

“Very well, get the musket there in thebow. It is loaded. Take good aim and shoot that big fellow in the stern. If you hit him, I’ll make you master of a ship some day.”

Tremblingly I raised the heavy musket as directed. The boat was unsteady, I hardly expected to hit the chief, but aimed low, hoping to hit one of the rowers at least. I aimed, closed my eyes, and fired. With the report of the musket the tall leader sprang into the air and then fell head fore-most amid his rowers. I could just detect the gleam of the moonlight on the jewelled handle of hiskrisas it sank into the waters. I had hit my man. The sailors sent up a hearty American cheer and a tiger, as they saw thepraucome to a standstill.

Our boat sprang away into the darkness. We did not cease rowing until dawn,—then we lay back on our oars and stretched our tired backs and arms. I had taken my place at the oar during the night.

Away out on the northern horizon we saw a black speck; on the southern horizon another. The captain’s glass revealed one to be the pirateprauwith all sails set, for a wind had come up with the dawn. The other we welcomed with a cheer, for it was theBangor. Enfeebled and nearly famishing, we headed toward it and rowed for life. How we regretted having left our sails on the island. Theprauhad sighted us and was bearing down in full pursuit; we soon could distinguish its wide-spreading, rakish sails almost touching the water as it sped on. Then we made out the naked forms of the Illanums hanging to the ropes, far out over the water, and then we could hear their blood-curdling yell. It was too late; their yell was one of baffled rage. It was answered by the deep bass tones of the swivel on board theBangorsending a ball skimming along over the waters, which, although it went wide of its mark, caused thenatives on the ropes to throw themselves bodily across theprau, taking the great sail with them.

In another instant the red sail, the long, keen, black shell, the naked forms of the fierce Illanums, were mixed in one undefinable blot on the distant horizon.

And that was the skipper’s yarn.

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