Tales of the Malayan Coast
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.
The gharry, 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 and cat'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 Indian chitty, or money-lender, stands talking to a brother,
supremely unconscious of the eddying throng about. These chitties are
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 a chitty fails, 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 in sarong and kris by his side,
singing with his syrah-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 island of 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
pirate prau, 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, and by a band of chattering monkeys; on others you
detect a Malay kampong, or village, its umbrella-like houses of attap,
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 of sampans and fishing praus. 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-shaped outlines 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 Kling sampans,
and great, unwieldy Borneo tonkangs.
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 island
along 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 Club and 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 deg. to 80 deg., 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 and Chinese
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
Malay kebuns, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously
clean Chinese "boys" are passing silently among the guests with trays
of eatables.
Dozens of gharries dodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of
the way.
A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses,
driven by a Malay syce, 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. The syce springs 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 shaded road. 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-grown ox. 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