CHINESE JUNK AT SINGAPORE.
Singapore has a frontage of three miles, and has fine Government buildings, court-house, town-hall, clubs, institutes, masonic lodge, theatre, and the grandest English cathedral in Asia—that of St. Andrew’s. In Commercial Square, the business centre of Singapore, all nationalities seem to be represented. Here, too, are the Kling gharry-drivers, having active little ponies and neat conveyances. Jack ashore will be pestered with their applications. “These Klings,” says Mr. Thomson, “seldom, if ever, resort to blows; but their language leaves nothing for the most vindictive spirit to desire. Once, at one of the landing-places, I observed a British tar come ashore for a holiday. He was forthwith beset by a group of Kling gharry-drivers, and, finding that the strongest of British words were as nothing when pitted against the Kling vocabulary, and that no half-dozen of them would stand up like men against his huge iron fists, he seized the nearest man, and hurled him into the sea. It was the most harmless way of disposing of his enemy, who swam to a boat, and it left Jack in undisturbed and immediate possession of the field.” The naval officer will find excellent deer-hunting and wild-hog shooting to be had near the city, and tiger-hunting at a distance. Tigers, indeed, were formerly terribly destructive of native life on the island; it was said that a man per diem was sacrificed. Now, cases are more rare. For good living, Singapore can hardly be beaten; fruit in particular is abundant and cheap. Pine-apples, cocoa-nuts, bananas of thirty varieties, mangoes, custard-apples, and oranges, with many commoner fruits, abound. Then there is the mangosteen, the delicious “apple of the East,” thought by many to surpass any fruit in the world, and the durian, a fruit as big as a boy’s head, with seeds as big as walnuts enclosed in a pulpy, fruity custard. The taste for this fruit is an acquired one, and is impossible to describe, while the smell is most disgusting. So great is the longing for it, when once the taste is acquired, that the highest prices are freely offered for it, particularly by some of the rich natives. A former King of Ava spent enormous sums over it, and could hardly then satisfy his rapacious appetite. A succeeding monarch kept a special steamer at Rangoon, and when the supplies came into the city it was loaded up, and dispatched at once to the capital—500 miles up a river. The smell of the durian is so unpleasant that the fruit is never seen on the tables of the merchants or planters; it is eaten slily in corners, and out of doors.
SINGAPORE, LOOKING SEAWARDS.
And Jack ashore will find many other novelties in eating. Roast monkey is obtainable, although not eaten as much as formerly by the Malays. In the streets of Singapore a meal of three or four courses can be obtained for three halfpence from travelling restaurateurs, always Chinamen, who carry their little charcoal stoves and soup-pots with them. The authority principally quoted says that, contrary to received opinion, they are very clean and particular in their culinary arrangements. One must not, however, too closely examine the nature of the viands. And now let us proceed to the Australian Station, which includes New Guinea, Australia proper, and New Zealand.
LOOKING DOWN ON SINGAPORE.
This is a most important colony of Great Britain, although by no means its most [pg 151]important possession, a country as English as England itself, tempered only by a slight colonial flavour. Here Jack will find himself at home, whether in the fine streets of Melbourne, or the older and more pleasant city of Sydney, with its beautiful surroundings.
When the seventeenth century was in its early youth, that vast ocean which stretches from Asia to the Antarctic was scarcely known by navigators. The coasts of Eastern Africa, of India, and the archipelago of islands to the eastward, were partially explored; but while there was a very strong belief that a land existed in the southern hemisphere, it was an inspiration only based on probabilities. The pilots and map-makers put down, as well as they were able, the discoveries already made; must there not be some great island or continent to balance all that waste of water which they were forced to place on the southern hemisphere? Terra Australis, “the Southern Land,” was therefore in a sense discovered before its discovery, just as the late Sir Roderick Murchison predicted gold there before Hargreaves found it.[102]
In the year 1606, Pedro Fernando de Quiros started from Peru on a voyage of discovery to the westward. He found some important islands, to which he gave the name “Australia del Espiritu Santo,” and which are now believed to have been part of the New Hebrides group. The vessel of his second in command became separated in consequence of a storm, and by this Luis vas Torres in consequence reached New Guinea and Australia proper, besides what is now known as Torres Straits, which channel separates them. The same year a Dutch vessel coasted about the Gulf of Carpentaria, and it is to the persistent efforts of the navigators of Holland that the Australian coasts became well explored. From 1616, at intervals, till 1644, they instigated many voyages, the leading ones of which were the two made by Tasman, in the second of which he circumnavigated Australia. “New Holland” was the title long applied to the western part of Australia—sometimes, indeed, to the whole country.