Very early next morning we started. The sea was very rough, and to escape the breakers we went farther and farther away from land. I had my excellent servant, Ah Choy, with me, and he was steering, and I had a very good crew of Dyak boatmen. After some time Ah Choy said to me:
“We are very far out, and can hardly see the land. Had we not better get nearer shore?”
The men were rowing as well as they could, but they were getting very tired, and we were making very little progress.
I told Ah Choy to bring the boat nearer shore, but as soon as we got into shallower water the waves were so great that it was evident the boat could not live through them.
I asked Ah Choy to steer the boat straight for the shore, and I told the men to row as hard as they could, and as soon as they felt their oars touch bottom to jump out and pull the boat up the shore as fast as they could. They did exactly as I wished. The boat was dragged ashore, but several large waves beat into it, and everything was soaked. It had one or two hard bumps on the sand, and was split from end to end.
We were not far from Kabong, a village at the mouth of the Krian River, and I, accompanied by one of my boatmen, walked along the beach to the Government Fort there. The clerk in charge, Ah Fook Cheyne, kindly supplied me with food and with sleeping things for the night. I sent some Malays to look after my boat, which they managed to bring to Kabong the next day.
Whenever I have had to travel on foot I have always had with me Dyaks who knew the country, so there has been no danger of my losing my way. But it is remarkable how easily one can get lost in the jungle. I have sometimes gone off the path for no great distance, and have had some difficulty in finding my way back. At Banting one afternoon I was accompanied by two schoolboys, and we went into the lowland jungle near the Mission Hill after some wood-pigeon. We followed the birds from one wild fig-tree to another, and managed to shoot a few, and then we tried to find our way back. After wandering about for some twenty minutes we came to a spot where a tree had been cut down, and a length of the trunk used evidently for a Dyak coffin. As someone had been buried a few days ago in the cemetery round the church, we guessed we could not be far from Banting Hill, on which the Mission House and Church stood. We tried to follow what we thought was the track made by the people who had cut the tree down, but after wandering about for over half an hour, we found ourselves in the same spot again.
We could see the sun through the trees, and one of the boys with me said:
“When we sit on the seat on the brow of the hill facing the river we see the sun setting in front of us, so if we walk in the direction of the sun we are sure to come to some part of Banting Hill.”