Travels in the East Indian archipelago

by Albert S. Bickmore

The crimson flowers of the coral-tree

In the warm isles of India’s sunny sea.”

A JUNGLE.

Soon after sunset huge bats always came out, in pairs, and sailed about on their leathery wings, searching for those trees that chanced to be in fruit. The wings of a male that I shot measured four feet and four inches from tip to tip, and the wings of the female, which accompanied him, expanded four feet eight inches. They are very properly named by the Dutch, “flying foxes,” and almost seem to be antediluvian monsters, which ought to have disappeared from the face of the earth long ago, like the formidable Pterodactyles. During the day they hide away in the thick foliage, and one afternoon I found one hanging, as they delight to do when they rest or sleep, with its head downward, from the limb of a tree. They are very tenacious of life, and will receive charge after charge of large shot in the head before they will let go of the limbs with their crooked claws and allow themselves to fall. They are said to be good for food, but I never saw the natives eat them, and certainly had no desire myself to try the flavor of such questionable meat. A small path, leading a mile through the forest, brought me out on to a large open field or prairie, covered with a coarse grass as high as a man’s shoulders. Beyond this was another forest, and there I was informed was a settlement of two or three houses, the farthest place inland inhabited by any of the coast people or common Malays. Beyond that point there is not the slightest footpath. All the hills and high mountains, which I could see toward the interior of the island, are covered with one dense, unbroken forest, and only on some of the lower hills, bordering the bay, are there open areas of grass. What a nice thing it would be to live out there for a week in the midst of that forest! My mind was made up to do it. I returned and explained my plan to the controleur, and the next day we set off to hire one of the distant huts. The farthest one from Kayéli, and exactly the one I wanted, chanced to be unoccupied, for the native who owned it had found the place so lonely that he had deserted it and taken up his abode in the village. The rent for a week was agreed to without much parleying. The owner further agreed to send his son to bring water and keep house while I and my hunter were away, and to be generally useful, which he interpreted to mean that he would only do what he could not avoid. Another man was engaged as cook, and my domestic arrangements were complete, for I purposed not only to live in a native house, but to conform entirely to the Malay cuisine. Our cooking-apparatus consisted of a couple of shallow kettles and a small frying-pan; and the little teapot that accompanied me on my Amboina excursions was not left behind.

October 16th.—This morning we came out to our forest home. Our house is about eight feet wide, twelve feet long, and perched upon large posts four feet from the ground. It is divided by a transverse partition into a front room or parlor, and a back room or kitchen. In one corner of the latter is a square framework filled with ashes, in which are inserted three long stones, whose tops slightly incline toward each other. These are to support the kettles, for no Malay has ever conceived of a machine for cooking so complicated as a crane. As to a chimney, there is none whatever, but the smoke is allowed to escape under the eaves or through a hole in the side of the house that also serves for a window. The frame of the house is made from small trees. For a flooring, broad sheets of bark are used. The walls are made of gaba-gaba, the dry midribs of large palm-leaves, and the roof is of atap. The front door is in one of the gable ends, and is reached by a rickety ladder of two rounds. This part is transformed into a rude piazza by a shed-roof, beneath which we have made a seat and a kind of table for the hunter to use in skinning birds.

My daily routine here is the same as before—hunting every morning and evening, with a native to carry my ammunition and to pick up the birds—a very difficult task whenever we are in the thick jungle or among the tall grass. Near our house is the stony bed of a torrent, which is now perfectly dry. It is the only cleared way there is through the dense forest around us, and I avail myself of it to travel up toward the mountains and down toward the sea. Indeed, I feel proud of our grand highway. True, it is not paved with blocks all carefully cut down to one precise model, and so exactly uniform as to be absolutely painful to the eye, but Nature herself has paved it in her own inimitable way—notice how all the stones have been rounded by the boiling torrent which pours down here from the mountains during the rainy season. Some are almost perfect ellipsoides or spheres, but most are disk-shaped, for they are made from thin fragments of slate that had sharp corners when they broke away from their parent mountain. To prevent a dull uniformity of color, she has scattered here and there rounded boulders of opaque milk-white quartz, fragments, undoubtedly, from beds of that rock which, at this place at least, are interstratified with the slate. Here and there are deeper places, where the troubled stream was accustomed to rest before it went on again in a foaming torrent to empty its sparkling waters into the wide sea, the original source of all streams. By this way I visit my nearest neighbors and procure chickens, which our cook roasts on sticks over the fire, after having carefully rubbed them with salt and a liberal allowance of red pepper, the two universal condiments among the Malays. For ages all the salt these people have had has been brought from Java. The red pepper thrives well everywhere without the slightest care, and it is almost always found growing near every hut. A large bush of it at one corner of our house is now filled with fruit of all sizes; some small and green, and some fully grown and showing it is already ripe by its bright-pink color. In this condition the Malays gather and dry it, and always carry a good supply wherever they go. Its Malay name is lombok, but the one more generally used is the Javanese name chabé. Besides chickens, we have paddy, that is, rice in the husk. A large elliptical hole is made in a log for a mortar, a small quantity of paddy is then poured in and pounded with a stick five or six feet long, and as large round as a man’s arm. This is raised vertically, and, when the hole is nearly even full, a native will usually pound off all the husks without scattering more than a few grains on the ground; but, if a foreigner attempts it, he will be surprised to see how the rice will fly off in all directions at every blow. When the husks are pounded off they are separated from the kernels by being tossed up from a shallow basket and carried away by the wind, as our farmers used to winnow grain. This is the only mode of preparing rice practised by the Malays, and the process is the same in every part of the archipelago. From one corner of our piazza hangs a large bunch of green bananas to ripen in the sunshine. I find it very agreeable to pluck off a nice ripe one myself when I come in weary and thirsty from a long hunt. From the other corner hangs a cluster of cocoa-nuts filled with clear, cool, refreshing water.

Not far from us is a hut inhabited by two natives, who are engaged in cultivating tobacco. Their ladangs, or gardens, are merely places of an acre or less, where the thick forest has been partially destroyed by fire, and the seed is sown in the regular spaces between the stumps. As soon as the leaves are fully grown they are plucked off, and the petiole and a part of the midrib are cut away. Each leaf is then cut transversely into strips about a sixteenth of an inch wide, and these are dried in the sun until a mass of them looks like a bunch of oakum. It is then ready for use, and at once carried to market. This cosmopolite, Nicotiana tabacum, is a native of our own country. Las Casas says that the Spaniards on Columbus’s first voyage saw the natives in Cuba smoking it in tubes called tabacos, hence its name. Mr. Crawford states that, according to a Javanese chronicle, it was introduced into Java in the year 1601, ninety years after the conquest of Malacca by the Portuguese, who were probably the first Europeans that furnished it to the Javanese, as the Dutch had not yet formed an establishment on the island. It is now cultivated in every part of the archipelago. The fact that this narcotic was originally found only in America leads us to infer, without raising the questions whether our continent received her aboriginal population from some other part of the globe, or whether they were created here, that there never has been any extensive migration of our Indians or red-men to the islands in the Pacific, or to any distant part of the world; for if they had colonized any area, in that place at least, its use would undoubtedly continue to exist at the present day, since it is probable that they would never have thought of going to a new land without taking with them this plant, which they valued more even than food, and which they had been accustomed to cultivate. If, after establishing themselves in their new colony, they had been overpowered and completely destroyed by some more powerful tribe, their conquerors would probably have become addicted to the same habit as readily as the people of every clime and every stage of civilization do now, and thus the practice would have been perpetuated, though the people who introduced it perished ages ago, and all the idols, and temples, and fortifications they might have made, have long since crumbled into dust. This inference is greatly strengthened, if we consider the past and present geographical distribution of maize, or Indian corn, which is also a native of our continent only, and, like tobacco, is now raised in every part of the archipelago. Unlike rice, this plant thrives on hill-sides and elevated lands, and can therefore be raised on all the larger islands in these seas, where there are few level areas that can be readily inundated for the cultivation of rice. It was also probably introduced by the Portuguese, for Juan Gaetano, a Spanish pilot, who visited Mindanao in 1642, twenty-one years after the discovery of the Philippines by Magellan, states[41] that “in a certain part of that island ruled by the Moors” (Arabs), “there are some small artillery, and hogs, deer, buffaloes, and other animals of the chase, with Castilian” (or common) “fowls, rice, palms, and cocoa-nuts. There is no maize in that island, but for bread they use rice and a bark which they call sagu, from which also they extract oil in like manner as they do from palms.”

As maize is not difficult to be transported on account of its bulk or liability to any injury, and formed the chief article of food among most of our red-men, it would be the very provision they would take with them on their migrations; and as the part eaten is the fruit, they would have plenty of seed, and would know from their previous experience precisely how to cultivate it.

One part of the surrounding forest is a grove of jati, or teak-trees, Tectona grandis, Linn. Those found here are only a foot or fifteen inches in diameter and forty feet high, a size they attain in Java in twenty-five or thirty years, where they do not reach their full growth in less than a century. The native name jati is a word of Javanese origin, signifying true, or genuine, and was probably applied to these trees on account of the well-known durability of the wood they yield. Now, near the end of the dry monsoon, they have lost nearly all their foliage; for, though it is sometimes asserted that in the tropics the leaves fall imperceptibly one by one, that is not true, in this region, where there are well-defined wet and dry seasons. The teak also thrives in a few places on the continent, and is found in the central and eastern provinces of Java, in Madura, Bali, and particularly in Sumbawa, where the wood is considered better than that of Java, but it is said to be unknown in Sumatra, Borneo, and in the peninsula of Malacca. It exists in some places in Celebes, but the natives assert that the seed was brought there from Java by one of the sovereigns of Tanéte. It is therefore uncertain whether the teak is a native of this island. In the early morning, and again soon after sunset, flocks of large green parrots, Tanygnathus macrorynchus, Wagl., come to these trees to feed on the fruit which is now ripe. They are so wary that it is extremely difficult to get near them, especially as the large dry leaves of this tree cover the ground and continually crack and rustle beneath one’s feet. To see these magnificent birds flying back and forth in the highest glee, while they remain unconscious of danger, is a grand sight, and it seems little less than absolute wickedness to shoot one, even when it is to be made the subject, not of idle gazing, but of careful study, and it requires still greater resolution to put an end to one’s admiration and pull the fatal trigger. When one of these birds has been wounded, its mate, and sometimes the whole flock, hearing its cries, at once comes back, as if hoping to relieve its misery.