The Road Was Empty, Except for a Bullock Cart
Our lower deck is a campong, or native village, with a population even larger than the usual hamlet of huts. That deck is occupied from the stem to the stern. There are Arab and Chinese quarters, from which women are absent. But the Malays are one big family, unpartitioned. They are asleep on their mats, or they sit in groups, men and women, gambling with cards. There are messes of rice in great pots, strings of fish, melons, red earthenware jars of water, and queer smells. Cabbages and maize hang from the beams. The cocks crow, the parrots screech, and the children squat and stare like infant Buddhas at the ship’s gear, and at myself when I pass. I hear there is never any trouble here through the ladies. Each man knows the other has a knife. Besides, as a ship’s officer put it to me, “There is no trouble, because they have not the morality of Europeans.”
July 5.—I have been trying to teach myself, with Mr. Potter’s East Indian pilotage books and the charts to assist me, where I am going. But I have given up the task. I shall take what comes. It is clear this voyage will occupy two months, and yet we are not likely to be out of sight of land on a single day. We shall go north and south, and east and west, but with a general easterly bias. I abandoned my attempt to trace the course of our voyage when it developed into a ravel which had the equator entangled in it thrice in twenty-four hours. That was too much. But I did get a vague idea, from the large-scale charts, of the extent of Indonesia. It would want the Atlantic Ocean to give it elbow room. There are 3,000 miles between Acheen Head, Sumatra, and New Guinea; and half as many between the Philippines and Melville Island, North Australia. Within those marks it is a pleasure to read the beautiful names of the seas—the Java Sea, the Flores Sea, the Banda Sea, the Arafura Sea, the Molucca Sea, and the Sea of Celebes. The islands dot the spaces like the stars in a chart of the heavens. And here I am, among the constellations. We passed the first item of the Spermode group two hours after lunch, and the captain thereupon went to the bridge, in mauve pajamas and a cigar; Dutch ships have their own customs. But all our officers are most friendly souls, and one imagines they are speaking English excellently until, among themselves, they show how much more familiar they are with their own language. They are able and versatile seamen, for this ship has to look after herself, in the way ships did in the past. She has her own company of cargo coolies, and her own shipping office, because our officers must buy and sell cargo, ship and stow, book passengers and inspect them for trouble of every kind, appraise trade opportunities for the use of headquarters in Batavia, and publish the news of the world on distant coasts. Our chief mate is even a good ethnologist. One should be that when one’s duties are among the subtle possibilities of Malay, Papuan, Polynesian, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, and whites who are even more difficult and dangerous to label. It is sunset, and we are approaching Macassar.
CHAPTER XVII
A ship should have light when making Macassar. The Spermode Islands dot the sea about the southwest end of Celebes, and though the blue film of the waters there seems just tangible enough to float such fairy-like islands, yet it is best to con them by day, and from a wide berth. So your ship will approach Macassar either not much before sunrise or while a memory of the vanished day with a brief exaltation holds away the night. The approach to its harbor, when the sun is near the horizon, especially if there is a stillness before or after rain during the wet monsoon, would make you believe, looking ahead from the ship’s bow, that “the storms all weathered and the ocean crost,” you were nearing that “favored isle, where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile.” For there is no end to the illusions of travel—indeed, they are the best of it, and part of the fun is in seeing them break. Half an hour of the beatific! What more should we expect? It is an experience long enough for the good of any mortal traveler. At the end of that time you are alongside a modern wharf and the bunker coal. Macassar is properly proud of its modern facilities, as they are called. Luckily it is easy to escape from them.
The city, though old, with all the history of the Malay islands from the sixteenth century in its streets, native, Portuguese, Dutch, and English, has still behind it a land of which we know hardly more than we know of the future of true religion. Macassar is, in fact, only a market place on a beach where gather the traders and ships from hundreds of islands about it. With the exception of Singapore—a very much greater place—Macassar is, I think, the most interesting town in the East Indies. You soon get tired of Batavia and Sourabaya, sporadic cities where the distances, which would be very little in a temperate climate, in Java are almost impassable gulfs of heat and dust. And even native inland cities, where the Javanese are still listlessly protecting the relics of their traditions and their native crafts that have not yet been foundered in the flood of shoddy from Western civilization, soon weary a traveler. He sees with his own unaccustomed eyes that often what the natives pretend is their traditional craft was made by machinery in the likeness of the original at Manchester or Dresden. But tourists do not see Macassar. It is aside from their track. There is no need for Macassar to deceive chance visitors, and to deceive its regular visitors, the traders, requires careful thought and takes all its time.
It has its own atmosphere, which is largely, though not altogether, caused by the fish which is spread out in half-acres to dry in the sun near the waterside. Its heat, too, is not a smothering weight, but is bearable. You can get about on foot. The natives are a lively and sturdy tribe—its men were active and resourceful pirates in the past—and so the byways of Macassar are attractive with figures which make drab and meager a visitor’s memory of his prosperous industrial city of the hard north. And the Chinese are established in Macassar. But then they are everywhere. There is not an island in the archipelago without its Chinese trader; probably an honest one, too. You cannot help liking the Chinese. Talk of the tenacity, the artless and audacious, enterprise, the courage, resourcefulness, delicacy in humbugging, and the other qualities of the Anglo-Saxon which have made him what he is—all that would tax a Chinaman’s polite resolution to keep his smile well hidden. He was like that when a child ten thousand years ago. He sits in front of his shop in Macassar to-day—an open shop, without windows or door—where there are great paper lanterns pendent, and a red banner with letters of gold. He smokes his opium pipe. He wears short black trousers and a blue jacket and a little black cap, and sees Heaven knows what ancient dream through his horn spectacles. His face is tranquil and benevolent. His tiny daughter with her long black pigtail and fringe, an incredibly animated ivory doll dressed in miniature cotton trousers, and his little son with a clean-shaven poll and dressed in nothing at all, play with dice at his feet. He can never be beaten or outlived. He is unconquerable and deathless. He has forgotten more than our culture has had the time to acquire. He is such a friendly soul, too, if you are sufficiently cautious when accepting him. He has his own theater in Macassar; a safely fascinating place once you have subdued the magic of its orchestra. And his temples! There is in Macassar one which will draw you every day you are in the port. You will find yourself outside it again, lost in the attempt to unravel its involuted fantasy, and without knowing you were going to it, though it is in a back street. To stay a season in that back street of Macassar, in one of the Chinese houses opposite the temple, would be greater fun than to explore every tomb in Egypt. Nobody appears to see you in that street. Not any of the strange eyes which pass look at yours. You might not be there. And all the doors in that street are shut to you, spiritually and in fact.
Well, not all. Perhaps not every day. A door there opened to me one evening. It was not my fault. I was taken by an Englishman who knew that Chinaman, and who introduced me as a man from Limehouse. The result was astonishing. I had to refuse all that beer and brandy, and, instead, desired orangeade. It was good orangeade. It was wonderful orangeade. I remember that night now only as a bright but distorted dream in which move the shadowy figures of a fable of Cathay. But an hour came when I knew, at least, that I must leave my friends; and in the street, alone, and in the Macassar dark, I assembled my intelligence, which told me that my Chinese friend, in expansive hospitality, had vastly improved my innocent drink with cognac. How was I to manage the gangplank of the Savoe? That had to be faced. Anyhow, I argued to myself, you can sleep at the foot of it. But at the foot of the precarious inclined plane, in the light of a ship’s lantern, stood a little child, the daughter of a Dutch passenger, who was just waiting for a man like me to come along. Her mother ordered me to carry her daughter aboard. Now how did I do it, and without a fault? I wish I knew.