Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

July 2.—There was something odd in the look of my Dutch steamer this morning when I boarded her off Sourabaya. I had not noticed it before. It was not her suggestion of indolence. Even a liner which carries important people and the mails on long voyages to the great ports of the world may appear to one who visits her as if she were thoroughly tired after her exertions, and did not intend to move for a long time. It was not the Savoe’s languor which was remarkable. One might expect lassitude in a torrid roadstead of Java. But her design suggests that she expects no weather but halcyon; yet her boats are broad and shallow scows, with diagonal strakes for greater strength, and are fended all around the gunwales by stout rope. If the mother ship does not expect to meet even a gale, it is certain her boats are meant for handy work on seas which in shallow waters will break into a dangerous surf. Their davits and falls are clearly designed to get the boats out and away quickly and often; and that is certainly very unusual in the boats of a steamship.

Her sailors are working—if closely watched one could almost swear they are working—at tasks which do not appear to be relevant. Their cotton trousers have attractive floral patterns, and their neat muslin bodices are very ladylike. Their millinery, as another sparkling Parisian outrage in Oxford Street, would have all the attraction of originality. They are Malays, of Java and Celebes. The Savoe is bound for more beaches than I have counted, and she may deviate and add as many more as pleases the captain. They are scattered between the Java Sea and New Guinea, and some of them are places which are not named on the common maps. For that reason I had supposed I should be the only passenger. I was wrong. Some prahus approached us. Each had two triangular sails, set upside down to my eyes, for the base of the triangle was uppermost. These open boats flew with great wings, and their narrow bodies rocked in a startling way; the men who handled them had little to learn. In fact, the chief officer told me they were Madurese and the grandsons of pirates. They flew alongside with our passengers. The first out was a perambulator. A Bugis woman followed with her child. No athlete could board a lively motor-bus with more grace than that Malay mother launched from her prancing craft to our gangway. She was followed by a tangle of humanity, Malays, Arabs, and Chinese, in costumes as noticeable as those of the actors in an inexplicable allegory. Among them was a lady who was neither Bugis nor Dutch, but something of each, who wore what might have been bed drapery with a design of pomegranates and parrots, a turban, and a black gauze mantelet. There was also an Englishman with a monocle. There was a Hadji in his white cap, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, a maroon sarong or skirt, and a khaki tunic.

We sailed; and the background for just such an extravagant and willful romance as would accord with our company has been provided all day by the mountainous coast of East Java, the sun, and the clouds. There was plaintive music from the queer soliloquizing instruments enjoyed by our native passengers, who are berthed on a lower deck, which has open sides, and was light and even fresh till the passengers had occupied it for a few hours. By then banana skins and the chewing of betel nut made that deck a horror to our chief mate, who, being Dutch, is a sailor with a noticeable strain of the housewife. But Malays are used to floors of earth, or else to floors of bamboo with the earth a few feet below. Decks to them are to recline upon and to spit upon.

I am bound to confess that the perambulator, and the swarm of brown children whose voices reach my cabin on the boat deck, are contrary to my idea of what is right in a voyage in strange seas. What have perambulators to do with the Flores Sea and the Macassar Strait? What has a bicycle—for a bicycle swings from an awning beam over a Chinese peddler, who sprawls on a mat on the after hatch—what business has a bicycle with pearl fishing or with manuk dewata, the “bird of the gods”?

There is something else, too. There is the incessant and valiant crowing of many cocks. But when I reproached the mate because my voyage was being made between a nursery and a farmyard he said: “But you do not know. We are in a world by itself. You shall see.” And to begin with a trifle I discovered that the poultry is all game-cocks, and that matches might be arranged on the ship—but would not be allowed by the captain—at any time. For the Dutch, having put down head-hunting among most of the islands, and piracy altogether, considered it wise to leave some outlets to the pugnacity of the islanders, and to their passion for gambling. Piracy, of course, was merely gambling by speculators of temerity, skill, and enterprise; and it was only the armed steam launch that eradicated it from the complex reefs and shallows of these difficult seas; and that means, of course, that it was ended but last week. Something, then, had to be allowed to these leisured but mettlesome men, and so cock-fighting and gambling were left for their indulgence, as compensations for the loss of the more desperate pastimes.

There was something even worse than the perambulators and the chewing of betel. I found the signs of another passenger in my cabin, though I had been promised I should have it to myself. There was a sun helmet in the other bunk, and very foreign baggage on the floor. I am sociable, I hope; but never when I am alone. This was too much. With the sun helmet was a book; Conrad’s Rescue, in English. I flung out, churlish because there was not time to change into another ship and go elsewhere. Later in the day I went to the cabin to get my binoculars, and found there my cabin mate. He is a gentle Dutchman, and is genuinely sorry to intrude. I assured him that I was desolated because my tenancy of the cabin must annoy him. He sent for drinks and professed his love for all that is English. This must be sincere, for he declared he had read Paradise Lost in both English and Dutch; and he mentioned Conrad with his hands upraised because words completely failed him. He used to live at Bromley in Kent, and his wife was at school at Bideford in Devon. I remained there with him, and forgot why I wanted the binoculars.

July 3.—At sunrise to-day my Chinese boy brought me coffee, and handed me my pipe as though it were a scepter. I looked out of the cabin window to see where we were. I put down the coffee at once, where nothing could hold it, and it spread on the floor. This was excusable. Our ship was approaching the narrow strait between the islands of Lombok and Baly. If there had been no reward for overcoming the doldrums of a long voyage but the first light of day caught and bewildered by the forests and clouds of Agung and Ringani, the Peak of Baly and the Peak of Lombok, volcanoes which regard each other, supernal and terrible, over remote celestial kingdoms of cloud, then those small islands between the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean would have been enough. It was the kind of reward which comes to a traveler when the gods forget that he is often discontented and unworthy.

We anchored off Ampenan, a village in a bay on Lombok’s west side. There was a beach of black volcanic sand, a heavy surf, a line of palms so still they might have been cast in metal, and behind them heights that were merely blue shapes. In the clear green deeps alongside sharks were lazily and patiently patrolling for anything that might happen. They had nothing else to do, and so considered the Savoe was as good as any other waiting-place. Then—but how they came there I never saw—we were besieged by canoes, which would have looked unsafe on a pool, weighted with daring paddlers who were ready to face any wave while they had an inch of freeboard and boys to bail out the wash with bent palm leaves. I did not see what business the Savoe conducted at Ampenan. I was much too dazzled by gyrating canoeists who balanced themselves on rocking bamboos by their toes over leisurely sharks.

July 4.—We have lost the Englishman with his monocle. Heaven knows what he proposes to do in Lombok. We have added a Malay rajah and his ladies to our company. He is a wizened old man, barefooted, in sarong and jacket and a little turban. Even a voyager among these islands for the first time would not mistake that old man for merely another native. Once, at a mere hint from him, men had died. His mouth and eyes still are those of a man whose whims, if fantastic, have not always been futile. His wife is dressed like an old-fashioned suburban lady on the Sabbath, but she has added a barbaric tiara in pearls and trinkets which suggests that she will revert to a Dyak custom after divine service is over.