ASCENDING THE MENAM, FROM BANGKOK TO AYUTHIA.
Doctor Bronson had a letter of introduction to the American Consul at Bangkok, which a friend in New York had given him before his departure. A few mornings after his arrival in Siam, he called at the consulate to deliver the letter and make the acquaintance of his country's representative.
He found the consul seated in a large arm-chair on the veranda of a spacious building on the east bank of the river, in the foreign portion of the city. A yard with shade-trees and gravelled walks surrounded the building, and near the landing-place there was a tall staff from which the flag of the United States waved in the breeze. The consul was a man of pleasing manners, and he was heartily glad to meet a compatriot, as the visits of Americans to Bangkok are not at all numerous. "Until you arrived," said he to the Doctor, "there had not been an American tourist here for nearly eight months. I wish more would come, as we lead rather a lonely life in Siam, and are very glad of anything to break the monotony."
In a frank, open-hearted way, the consul offered his services to Doctor Bronson and his young friends, in case there was anything he could do for them.
The Doctor thanked him for the proffered courtesy, and said they hoped to be able to see his majesty, the King of Siam, before their departure.
"I think that can be arranged without much difficulty," the consul answered. "The king likes to see strangers who are enough interested in Siam to come here out of the beaten track. He is a polite, intelligent, and most agreeable gentleman, and I feel confident that I can promise to present you to him.
"Just now he is absent from the city, and will not be back here for three or four days. On his return, I will endeavor to arrange what you wish. Meantime there is an excursion going up the river to Ayuthia, the ancient capital of Siam, and I advise you to join it. A party is going to see some elephants driven in from the forest, and the sight will be interesting to you. It can easily be arranged for you to join the excursion, which will start to-morrow morning."
Doctor Bronson assented at once to the proposal, and, after exchanging a few general observations, he departed, promising to come again in the afternoon to learn more fully about the excursion, and to bring the boys with him to introduce to the consul. He had left them at the hotel, busy with their first letters to friends at home.
Frank and Fred were delighted at the plan for going to Ayuthia, especially as they would have an opportunity to see with their own eyes the way the Siamese catch elephants. They were impatient to be off, and could hardly keep their minds on their letters, as they were filled with thoughts of the novelties in store for them.
When they called at the consulate in the afternoon, they found that the whole business had been settled. They were to have a house-boat or barge, large enough for half a dozen persons, and it was to be towed by a steam-launch which had been procured from one of the foreign merchants at Bangkok. To economize time, it had been determined to start an hour or two before sunset, and travel during the night; by this means they would reach Ayuthia early the next forenoon, and thus have the greater part of the day for sight-seeing. The consul decided to accompany them, as the cares of the consulate were not very heavy at that particular time, and, besides, the vice-consul was there to see that nothing went wrong.
A sufficient supply of cooked and canned provisions was procured, and the necessary amount of blankets, overcoats, and other comforts was made ready. The barge came to the front of the hotel at the appointed time, and in a few moments they were steaming up the river.
PRIVATE GARDEN NEAR BANGKOK.
Frank and Fred thought the sight was one of the strangest they had ever seen. Here was a broad river, its surface covered with small boats of a character new to them, and its banks lined with floating houses, such as have been described. Junks, and ships, and sloops, and steamers were anchored in the stream; and occasionally a great barge, rowed by twenty or thirty men, and belonging to some member of a noble family, shot past them, or turned into some of the many canals that open out from the Menam. Houses were just visible through the dense mass of palms and other tropical trees that lined the banks, and the spires of the pagodas rose above like great watch-towers, whose line of vision extended many miles. At a bend in the river the white walls of the royal palace came into view, and as they passed beyond the palace and proceeded up the river their eyes rested upon extensive fields and gardens, and on another fringe of floating houses along the bank. Suddenly a practical question occurred to Frank, and he asked the consul—
"Does the river ever freeze over?"
"Not by any means," was the reply. "The average temperature here is about 82°. April is the hottest month, and the thermometer then goes to 97°, and sometimes above 100°. It rarely falls below 65°, and the lowest ever known is 54°. There are only two seasons—the hot, or wet; and the dry, or cool. The south-west monsoon blows from April till October, and brings heat and rain with it; while from October till April we have the north-east monsoon, which is cool and comfortable. Most of the time during the north-east monsoon we have fine weather; there is now and then a shower, but it rarely lasts long.
"There is a very good story about the absence of cold in this part of Siam. Forty or fifty years ago, when the Protestant missionaries first came here, some of them were taken before the king, who wanted to see what manner of men they were. Up to that time Siam had had very little intercourse with foreign countries, and the old king was not very well versed in the geography of other lands, and their climate and productions. So he asked the missionaries, who were from Boston, what their country was, and what it produced.
"They told him many things about America, described the Falls of Niagara, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi, the fields of cotton and wheat, and other things that the soil produced, the great steamboats on the rivers, and talked of many other matters that they thought would interest him. Finally, one of them told him that where they came from the rivers were frozen over two or three months in the year.
"'What do you mean by that?' the king asked, through his interpreter.
"'Why, I mean,' said the missionary, 'that if this palace and the river Menam were at Boston, your majesty could walk across the water during three months of the year as he could walk on this floor. The water becomes solid, and men cut holes in it with axes and saws.'
"'Now I know you are lying,' the king replied, as he rose from his seat in great anger. 'I have thought so for some minutes, and now I am certain of it.' And he ordered the reception to end at once, as he wished no further communication with men who talked about a river getting hard enough for a king to walk on."
The scenery along the river was much like that below the city. There was the same luxuriance of vegetation that had astonished the boys when they entered the Menam, the same trees, and the same creeping and climbing plants. Here and there were great fields of rice; and our friends were not surprised to learn that rice was the chief product of the country, and its only export of consequence. There were also fields of sugar, which was extensively cultivated and exported; and the consul told them that there were exports of hemp, pepper, and cotton that sometimes reached a respectable figure. There was little manufacturing industry in Siam, and what the people wanted in the way of manufactured goods was brought from Europe or America.
A SIAMESE FOREST SCENE.
The consul pointed out various objects of interest as the boat moved along the river, and explained many things that otherwise might have been misunderstood by the boys, or not comprehended at all. Frank had a commercial turn of mind, and asked many questions about the trade of Siam; and he was much pleased to find that the consul had the whole subject at his command, and was able to give all the desired information. When their dialogue ended, Frank had the following facts recorded in his note-book:
"In 1876 the exports of Siam amounted to $8,350,000, and the imports to $7,070,000—an increase in the volume of trade over the previous year of $686,000. The chief export is rice, and in the year mentioned 4,101,000 piculs of rice were exported. The picul is a Chinese weight of 133 pounds. The direct exportation to the United States was 8800 piculs; but there is a large amount that is reshipped from Hong-kong, and does not appear on the records of the Siamese custom-house as going to America.
"In 1857 six foreign ships visited Bangkok; twenty years later, the number of foreign ships coming there in a single twelvemonth was more than two hundred. In 1840 there was only one trading-ship flying the Siamese flag; while in 1874 there were one hundred and twenty-nine native ships entered at the custom-house of Bangkok, and one hundred and seventy seven cleared from the port. These ships are nearly all native built and manned, and they go to Singapore, Hong-kong, and the ports of Java. They have not yet ventured on voyages to Europe and America, and are not likely to do so for a long time to come."
Fred wished to know what American articles were used in Siam, and Frank said he was coming to that as soon as he had written down the notes about the shipping.
The consul told them it would take a long time to name over all the foreign articles that could be sold in the country; but he would certainly not advise anybody to bring a cargo of heavy woollen blankets and overcoats, as they would not be in demand.
"I should say so," answered Fred. "With the thermometer as we have seen it since we came here, a heavy blanket or anything of the kind is quite superfluous. We rather want something for keeping cool, and if somebody will invent an ice-machine that you can carry in your pocket or even in your trunk he will make a fortune."
"Yes," the consul answered, "a thing much needed in the East is a cheap, easily handled, and light ice-machine. Ice is worth from three to six cents a pound here, and sometimes it can't be had at any price. There is a machine made by a French company that is somewhat used here, but it gets out of order easily, and has to be sent to Paris to be repaired. Where is the Yankee that will make something to go ahead of it?
"But to return to the subject of the things that are made in America and sent here to sell. We have cotton cloths of various kinds; canvas, iron, steel, and lead; glassware in several varieties; lamps, kitchen machinery and utensils; canned fruits and vegetables, together with canned fish and preserves. By-the-way," he continued, "we had a dinner at the consulate last year at Christmas-time, when everything edible on the table was of American origin, and brought to Siam in cans. The dinner-party was also made up of Americans, and you may be sure we had a good time, and could easily imagine we were at home.
"Some American machinery is used here, but not much, for the very simple reason that there is very little machinery of any kind used in Siam. All the weighing apparatus in the custom-house and other government offices is from America, as you will find on going through them."
"We passed the custom-house the other day," said Frank, "and I remember seeing some scales there which seemed like American ones. I looked for the maker's name, and saw the word which everybody knows at home, 'Fairbanks.' I was told that the king had some of these scales in his royal museum, and the only weighing-machines used in Siam, at least by the government, were made by Fairbanks."
"The native merchants are learning the advantages of the American system of weighing, in preference to their primitive one, as they can get along so much faster with the new than with the old," the consul answered. "But the East is conservative, and cannot be expected to adopt anything new very hastily.
"There is a good deal of American petroleum burnt here," he continued, "but it comes to Siam from Singapore, and not directly from America. In fact, about seventy per cent. of all the import and export trade of Siam is through Singapore, and so the merchants of Siam pay more for their goods than if they were brought here direct from the countries where they are produced. The king is desirous of having direct trade with the United States, and so are many private individuals, and it is to be hoped that some of the merchants will yet bring it about. It is a pity that the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, or the Occidental and Oriental, does not see its way clear to a branch line between Hong-kong and Bangkok, to connect with the regular steamers between Hong-kong and San Francisco. Two small steamers would perform the service, and I am confident it would pay."
There were occasional interruptions to this conversation. Now and then the boys saw a curious tree or something else that they wished to study, and they were never tired of looking at the native boats that paddled, or sailed, or floated down the river.
PARASITE AND PALM.
One of the trees that attracted their attention as they went along near the shore belonged to the family of parasites, and was not unlike some they had seen as they ascended the river from Paknam to Bangkok. The Doctor explained that in this case the parasite was not a vine, but a distinct tree that grew from a seed deposited by the wind or by the birds on the trunk or among the leaves of a palm. It grows much faster than the palm, and in a few years the palm dies and the parasite lives. It is held in the air by the decaying stem of the parent tree until the latter altogether rots away and falls. When once the parasite has obtained a hold, the destruction of the palm is only a question of time. Frank made a sketch of one of these trees while the boat was stopped a few moments to enable the engineer of the steam-launch to arrange something that had got out of order.
THE BAMBOO-TREE.
The bamboo-tree seemed to abound along the Menam, as it does everywhere in the East. In some places the stalks stood singly, and shot up straight as arrows; while in others they were in clusters so dense that the stems could not be distinguished one from another. While Frank was busy over his sketch of the parasite, Fred managed to secure a good picture of one of the most useful trees in the world. It is said that there are more than a hundred uses for the bamboo among the Chinese, and it is possible that a few others might be added in Siam and Java.
THE BOAT THEY NARROWLY MISSED.
Several times they had narrow escapes from collisions with the native boats, as the men who managed the latter were not very skilful in handling the rudder. One that passed so close to them as almost to scrape her sides against the boat of our friends, was a Chinese craft not unlike what they had seen between Hong-kong and Canton. It was running before the wind, and had a great sail of matting that was kept in place by a dozen or more cords gathered in a single line at the stern. She had a high cabin, that seemed rather top-heavy with the wind on the beam, but was all right before it; and there was a little deck forward of the mast, where a couple of men were seated. The narrowness of the escape did not appear to disturb these natives in the least, and they kept their places as though nothing had happened.
SCENE AT BANG-PA-IN.
Night came upon them, but there was a good moon, and they kept steadily on their way. They were going against the current, and as the boat was considerably larger than the steam-launch, the progress was not rapid. At nine o'clock in the morning they passed Bang-pa-in, where the king has a summer palace on a very pretty island in the most picturesque part of the river. The palace is built in European style, and was completed only a few years ago; the grounds are handsomely laid out, and there is an abundance of shade-trees, in irregular groves, from one end of the island to the other.
Ayuthia is ten miles above Bang-pa-in; and soon after passing the picturesque island Frank discovered some ruins of a temple close to the river's bank. The consul told him they would soon see an abundance of ruins, and sure enough at the next turn of the river they came in sight of what seemed to be a deserted village. Then they saw a number of floating houses tied to the shore, and farther on the towers and domes of Ayuthia were visible. The boat was stopped in front of a rude wharf, and the party stepped ashore in the ancient capital of Siam.
A RIVER SCENE.