"In detested memory of the traitor, Peter Erberveld, who was executed. No one will be permitted to build, lay bricks or plant on this spot, either now or in the future.
Batavia, April 14, 1772."
Erberveld was a half-caste agitator who had conspired with certain disaffected natives to launch a revolt, massacre all the Dutch in Batavia, and have himself proclaimed king. Fortunately for the Dutch, the plot was betrayed through the faithlessness of a native girl with whom Erberveld was infatuated. Because of the imperative need of safeguarding the little handful of white colonists against massacre by the natives, it was decided that the half-caste should be punished in a manner which would strike fear to the hearts of the Javanese, who have no particular dread of death in its ordinary forms. The judges did their best to achieve this object, for Erberveld was sentenced to be impaled alive, broken on the wheel, his hands and head cut off, and his body quartered. Why they omitted hanging and burning from the list I can not imagine. The sentence was carried out—the contemporary accounts record that he endured his fate with silent fortitude—and his head is on the wall to-day. But I think that, were I the Governor-General of the Indies, I should have that grisly reminder of the bad old days taken down. Many nations have family skeletons but they usually prefer to keep them out of sight.
CHAPTER IX
PUPPET RULERS AND COMIC OPERA COURTS
Hamangkoe Boewoenoe Senopati Sahadin Panoto Gomo Kalif Patelah Kandjeng VII, Ruler of the World, Spike of the Universe, and Sultan of Djokjakarta, is an old, old man, yet his brisk walk and upright carriage betrayed no trace of the worries which might be expected to beset one who is burdened with the responsibility of supporting three thousand wives and concubines. When one achieves a domestic establishment of such proportions, however, he doubtless shifts the responsibility for its administration, discipline and maintenance to subordinates, just as the commander of a division delegates his authority to the officers of his staff. The Sultan, who is now in his eighty-ninth year, is a worthy emulator of King Solomon, the lowest estimate which I heard crediting him with one hundred and eighty children. These are the official ones, as it were. How many unofficial ones he has, no one knows but himself. The youngest of his children, now five years old, was, I imagine, a good deal of a surprise, being sometimes referred to by disrespectful Europeans as "the Joke of Djokjakarta."
Djokjakarta, or Djokja, as it is commonly called, is set in the middle of a broad and fertile plain, at the foot of the slumbering volcano of Merapi, whose occasional awakenings are marked by terrific earthquakes, which shake the city to its foundations and usually result in wide-spread destruction and loss of life. It is a city of broad, unpaved thoroughfares, shaded by rows of majestic waringins, and lined, in the European quarter, by handsome one-story houses, with white walls, green blinds and Doric porticos. There are two hotels in the city, one an excellently kept and comfortable establishment, as hotels go in Java; a score or so of large and moderately well-stocked European stores, and many small shops kept by Chinese; an imposing bank of stone and concrete; and one of the most beautiful race-courses that I have ever seen, the spring race meeting at Djokja being one of the most brilliant social events in Java. The busiest part of the city is the Chinese quarter, for, throughout the Insulinde, commerce, both retail and wholesale, is largely in the hands of these sober, shrewd, hard-working yellow men, of whom there are more than three hundred thousand in Java alone and double that number in the archipelago. Beyond the European and Chinese quarters, scattered among the palms which form a thick fringe about the town, are the kampongs of the Javanese themselves—clusters of bamboo-built huts, thatched with leaves or grass, encircled by low mud walls. Standing well back from the street, and separated from it by a splendid sweep of velvety lawn, is the Dutch residency, a dignified building whose classic lines reminded me of the manor houses built by the Dutch patroons along the Hudson. A few hundred yards away stands Fort Vredenburg, a moated, bastioned, four-square fortification, garrisoned by half a thousand Dutch artillerymen, whose guns frown menacingly upon the native town and the palace of the Sultan. Though its walls would crumble before modern artillery in half an hour, it stands as a visible symbol of Dutch authority and as a warning to the disloyal that that authority is backed up by cannon.
Between Fort Vredenburg and the Sultan's palace stretches the broad aloun-aloun, its sandy, sun-baked expanse broken only by a splendid pair of waringin-trees, clipped to resemble royal payongs or parasols. In the old days those desiring audience with the sovereign were compelled to wait under these trees, frequently for days and occasionally for weeks, until "the Spike of the Universe" graciously condescended to receive them. Here also was the place of public execution. In the days before the white men came, public executions on the aloun-aloun provided pleasurable excitement for the inhabitants of Djokjakarta, who attended them in great numbers. The method employed was characteristic of Java: the condemned stood with his forehead against a wall, and the executioner drove the point of a kris between the vertebrae at the base of the neck, severing the spinal cord. But the gallows and the rope have superseded the wall and the kris in Djokjakarta, just as they have superseded the age-old custom of hurling criminals from the top of a high tower in Bokhara or of having the brains of the condemned stamped out by an elephant, a method of execution which was long in vogue in Burmah.
But, though certain peculiarly barbarous customs which were practised under native rule have been abolished by the Dutch, I have no intention of suggesting that life in Djokjakarta has become colorless and tame. Au contraire! If you will take the trouble to cross the aloun-aloun to the gates of the palace, your attention will be attracted by a row of iron-barred cages built against the kraton wall. Should you be so fortunate as to find yourself in Djokjakarta on the eve of a religious festival or other holiday, each of these cages will be found to contain a full-grown tiger. For tiger-baiting remains one of the favorite amusements of the native princes. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, save only in East Africa, where the Masai warriors encircle a lion and kill it with their spears, can you witness a sport which is its equal for peril and excitement.