To indulge in a joke is quite contrary to their natural disposition, and they deeply feel, and are ever ready to resent, a breach of etiquette or a personal affront. The higher classes are extremely polite, and have all the quiet manners and dignity of the best educated Europeans. But this external polish is united with a reckless cruelty and contempt for human life which forms the dark side of their character. Hence it is not to be wondered at that different authors give us such totally contradictory accounts of them.
An old traveller, Nicolo Conti, who wrote in 1430, says that ‘the inhabitants of Java and Sumatra surpass all other people in cruelty,’ while Drake praises their love of truth and justice. Mr. Crawfurd describes the Javanese as a peaceable and industrious people, but Barbosa, who visited Malacca about the year 1660, informs us that they are extremely cunning and great cheats; that they seldom speak the truth, and are ever ready for a villanous deed.
Their intelligence seems to be incapable of any higher flight. They comprehend nothing which goes beyond the simplest combination of ideas, and have little taste and energy to obtain an increase of knowledge. The civilisation they possess shows no traces of original growth, but is entirely confined to those nations or states which have adopted the Mahometan religion, or in still earlier times received their culture from India.
It must, however, be remarked in their favour that the curse both of domestic tyranny and of a foreign yoke weighs heavily upon them, and that the extension of European domination in the Indian Ocean has been as fatal to their race as it has been in America and Africa to the Red-skin and the Negro.
‘The first voyagers from the west,’ says Rajah Brooke, ‘found the natives rich and powerful, with strong established governments, a flourishing literature, and a thriving trade with all parts of the eastern world. The rapacious European has reduced them to their present abject condition. Their governments have been broken up; the old states decomposed by treachery, by bribery, and intrigue; their possessions wrested from them under flimsy pretences, their trade restricted, their vices encouraged, and their virtues repressed.’
‘Among the Malays of the present day,’ says Newbold, ‘we look in vain for that desire of knowledge which excited their ancestors to transplant the flowers of Arabian literature among their own forests. Works of science are now no longer translated from the Arabic, and creations of the imagination have almost ceased to appear. The few children educated among them learn nothing but to mumble in an unknown tongue a few passages from the Koran, entirely neglecting arithmetic and the acquirement of any useful manual art or employment. Painting, sculpture, architecture, mechanics, geography, are totally unknown to the Malays. Their literature declined with the fall of their empire in the Archipelago, nor could it well be expected to flourish under the Upas trees of Portuguese intolerance, Dutch oppression, and British apathy.’
Essentially maritime in their tastes, the Malays have been named the Phœnicians of the East; but not satisfied with the peaceful pursuits of the fisherman or the merchant, many of them infest the Indian Ocean as merciless pirates.
Encouraged by the weakness and distraction of the old-established Malay governments, the facilities offered by natural situation, and the total absence of all restraint from European nations, except now and then the destruction of some mud fort or bamboo-village, which is soon rebuilt, the Illanuns, the Balagnini, and other sea-robbing tribes, issue forth like beasts of prey, enslave or murder the inhabitants on the coasts or at the entrance of rivers, and attack ill-armed or stranded European vessels.
The Illanuns of Mindanao are particularly noted for their daring and long-protracted piratical excursions, which they undertake in large junks with sails, netting, and heavy guns. On one occasion the ‘Rajah Brooke’ met eighteen Illanun boats on neutral ground, and learned from their two chiefs that they had been two years absent from home; and from the Papuan slaves on board it was evident that their cruise had extended from the most eastern islands of the Archipelago to the north-western coast of Borneo.
The Balagnini inhabit a cluster of small islands in the vicinity of Sooloo, where they probably find encouragement and a slave market. They cruise in large prahus, and to each of these a fleet boat or ‘sampan’ is attached, which on occasion can carry from ten to fifteen men. They seldom have large guns like the Illanuns, but, in addition to their other arms, brass pieces, carrying from a one- to a three-pound ball. They use long poles with barbed iron points, with which, during an engagement or flight, they hook their prey. By means of their sampans they are able to capture all small boats; and it is a favourite device with them to disguise one or two men, whilst the rest lie concealed in the bottom of the boat, and thus to surprise prahus at sea, and fishermen or others at the mouths of rivers. Their cruising grounds are very extensive; they frequently make the circuit of Borneo; Gillolo and the Moluccas lie within their range, and it is probable that Papua is occasionally visited by them. The Borneans, from being so harassed by these freebooters, who yearly take a considerable number of this unwarlike people into slavery, call the easterly monsoon ‘the pirate wind.’ Their own native governments are probably without exception participators in or victims to piracy, and in many cases both—purchasing from one set of pirates and enslaved and plundered by another; and whilst their dependencies are abandoned, the unprotected trade goes to ruin. Thus piracy rests like a blighting curse upon lands pre-eminently blessed by Nature, and proves as ruinous to the welfare of the Eastern Archipelago as the black stain of the African slave trade to that of the Negroes.