The Doctor nodded.
"The river is alive with them," he said. "Man-eaters, too. The port surgeon told me that they get a native or so every day."
"I've changed my mind about wanting a swim," I remarked, heading for the ship's shower-bath.
(Dusk is settling on the great river and the palm fronds are gently stirring before the breeze that comes with nightfall on the Line. If you have nothing better to do, suppose you sit down beside me in a deck-chair and let me tell you something about these cruel and cunning monsters and the curious methods by which they are captured. Boy! Pass the cheroots and bring us something cold to drink.)
Though crocodiles are found everywhere in Malaysia, they attain their greatest size and ferocity in the rivers of Borneo, it being no uncommon thing for them to attack and capsize the frail native canoes, killing their occupants as they flounder in the water. I suppose that the crocodile of Borneo more nearly approaches the giant saurians of prehistoric times than anything alive to-day. Imagine, if you please, a creature as large as a ship's launch, with the swiftness and ferocity of a man-eating shark, the cunning of a snake, a body so heavily armored with scales that it is impervious to everything save the most high-powered bullets, a tail that is capable of knocking down an ox, and a pair of jaws that can cut a man in two at a single snap. How would you like to encounter that sort of thing when you were having a pleasant swim, I ask you? Compared to the crocodile of Malaysia, the Florida alligator is about as formidable as a lizard. One was captured while we were at Sandakan which measured slightly over twenty-eight feet from the end of his ugly snout to the tip of his vicious tail. Before you raise your eyebrows incredulously you might take a look at the accompanying photograph of this monster. Nor was this a record crocodile, for, shortly before our arrival at Samarinda, one was caught in the Koetei which measured ten metres, or within a few inches of thirty-three feet.
The crocodile obtains its meals by the simple expedient of lying motionless just beneath the surface of a pool where the natives are accustomed to bathe or where they go for water. The unsuspecting brown girl trips jauntily down to the river-bank to fill her amphora—usually a battered Standard Oil tin. As she bends over the stream there comes without the slightest warning the lightning swish of a scaly tail, a scream, the crunch of monster jaws, a widening eddy, a scarlet stain overspreading the surface of the water—and there is one less inhabitant of Borneo. But instead of proceeding to devour its victim then and there, the crocodile carries the body up a convenient creek, where it has the self-control to leave it until it is sufficiently gamey to satisfy its palate. For the crocodile, like the hunter, does not like freshly killed meat. Hence, a crocodile swimming up-stream with a native in its mouth is by no means an uncommon sight on Borne an rivers.
"But it is a quick death," as an Englishman whom I met in Borneo philosophically observed. "They don't play with you as a cat plays with a mouse—they just hold you under the water until you are drowned."
Yet, in spite of the hundreds who fall victim to the terrible jaws each year, the natives seem incapable of observing the slightest precautions. For superstitious reasons they will not disturb the crocodile until it has shown itself to be a man-eater. If the crocodile will live at peace with him the native has no wish to start a quarrel. But the day usually comes when a native who has gone down to the river fails to return. In America, under such circumstances, the relatives of the missing man would send for grappling irons and an undertaker. But in Borneo they summon a professional crocodile hunter. The idea of this is not so much to obtain revenge as to recover the brass ornaments which the dear departed was wearing at the moment of his taking off, for, though human life is the cheapest thing there is in Borneo, brass is extremely dear.
The professional crocodile hunters are usually Malays. One of the best known and most successful in Borneo is an old man who runs a ferry across the Barito at Bandjermasin. He has capitalized his skill and cunning by organizing himself into a sort of crocodile liability company, as it were. Anyone may secure a policy in this company by paying him a weekly premium of 2½ Dutch cents. When one of his policy holders is overtaken by death in the form of a pair of four-foot jaws the old man turns the ferry over to one of his children and sets out to fulfill the terms of his contract by capturing the offending saurian, recovering from its stomach the weighty bracelets, anklets and earrings worn by the deceased, and restoring them to the next of kin. In order to make good he sometimes has to kill a number of crocodiles, but he keeps on until he gets the right one. This is not as difficult as it sounds, for the big man-eaters usually have their recognized haunts in certain deep pools in the rivers, many of them, indeed, being known to the natives by name. The old ferryman at Bandjermasin has been so successful in the conduct of his curious avocation that, so the Dutch Resident assured me, he has several hundred policy holders who pay him their premiums with punctilious regularity, thereby giving him a very comfortable income.