Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

My friend the missionary, who has spent most of his life among the islands, confused the ethnological problem still more that night with a story of one island he knows, which I should like to see, but never shall. It was not far from me then, and yet more difficult of access than Spitzbergen is from Edinburgh. He called it Makisar. It is to the south of the Moluccas, an isolated lump in the direction of Australia. The Dutch sent a garrison of a hundred of their countrymen and their wives to Makisar some time in the seventeenth century, built a stockade for them, left them, and forgot them. There the descendants of the garrison are to-day, still in the stockade. To that island, about that time or somewhat later, came some English folk named Francis and Coffin, and a Dutch family named Joosten from Macassar. They, too, went into the stockade, which had no traffic with the islanders. The stockaded part of Makisar to-day is peopled with men and women with light eyes and skins and fair hair, who are European in appearance, but who have no word of Dutch or English, though their names are out of the Church registers of the West of England and Holland.

CHAPTER XXVII

July 16.—The Jalan Pantai, or the seashore road, of Ternate, has an affinity with that prelude to the day when the risen sun has still to surmount the high land of Halmaheira across the sea; or so you think till you are sauntering there when the sun has fallen behind the volcano at the back of you. The truth is, that path is so responsive to light that morning is there before its hour, and day remains when the sun has gone. This morning the path by the beach was as elated as though with good tidings which a stranger like myself could not be expected to understand. I did not know the reason for its joy, but I could share it. It was high water. The sea itself could have been the dawn. A sailing canoe, with prow and stern so shaped that the craft was like a black swan with a head at each end of its long body, was flying in the brightness between us and that land which lay athwart the east. Tamarinds and other trees made a dark roof to the path, but the light came low and level through their colonnade. One tree had strewn the road with white corollas, the size of goblets, and their stamens were long tassels of white silk tipped with pink. Careless bounty! By the jetty was a stall for the fishermen, with coffee, fried cakes of fish, pineapples, and mangosteens; some cockatoos and lories sat on the branch of a tamarind beside it. The high peak of Tidore was the first to see the sun, and signaled the news to us from a cloud. From the end of the pier I thought I could see through the water even to the little stones lying on the sea floor in five fathoms. Corals and sea-growths were darkly grouped about the greenish pallor of tracks in that garden. The coral was tall and branched, or was in rounded beds. Its shapes wavered and pulsed in the unseen movements of the crystal. It dilated and diminished in areas of olive green, orange, crimson, and gray. It appeared to be not much below the surface of the glass, but bonitos like torpedoes of blue light glanced over it in midspace and changed the illusion, and other fish, like oscillating silver coins, like tinted glow lamps intermittently charged, like swooping black and yellow butterflies, like the petals of flowers quivering in a zephyr, deepened and extended the sight. Their vivid forms would appear suddenly where there had been nothing, and then, like apparitions, become absorbed in their element. The heat of the day, which had come, was unnoticed.

July 17.—The surgeon of the garrison took me over with him to Tidore in his motor-launch. He had some cases of yaws and dysentery to attend to there. I was reminded that this paradise, in spite of its shining aspect, is only one degree north of the line. Tidore once was the rival sultanate to Ternate’s; both little islands, in their day, competed for the rule over many greater neighboring islands, though I believe that Ternate was in the end the more successful. Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English intrigues in turn encouraged those natives’ claims which promised most profit at the time to civilized impartiality. About the east side of Ternate there are several decaying forts, and many derelict cannon, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more cut-purse maxims of a hustling commercial college probably are but transcriptions of the mottoes on the cannon butts of those lively traders of the past who wanted spice, and invoked the aid of God’s blessed gunpowder to get it.

As we neared Tidore the islands and coasts changed their outlines, and Ternate disappeared, for the village of Tidore is on the east side of its island. There were the usual beaches of black sand of a volcanic island, and the shore was littered with bowlders of weathered lava. From the landing place a spacious white terrace, with an occasional cannon by its balustrade, rose as though to a palace secret in the foliage above. We had that terrace to ourselves, however, a fact which seemed queer to me, and mounted it till we came to mounds of grass and shrubs and half-hidden walls. The palace has been overthrown. In that high sunny place there was no sultan, but only a silent sprite of a bird, which moved about the tangle of vines, watching us, as though wondering what men could want there. The village by the shore is almost derelict, and the esplanade, so remarkably broad with its white walls resplendent at noon, and the palm fronds above it, is but a memory of an importance almost hidden now under grass. Not even Dutch ships visit Tidore to-day. There are stone houses, and radiant white arches and pillars framed in creepers, and other hints of Spain when Spanish adventurers had no doubt all the seas were theirs. But Tidore on my day was abandoned to a brilliant light; we arrived after it had lost its interest and was beyond the verge of a living world.

July 19.—The padre showed me some graves of English seamen in the cemetery to-day, but their stones were illegible. The Chinese cemetery is next door, with its curious quarter-moon tombs on rising ground, and that, too, of the Malays, where the little gravestones are overgrown with shrubs. But I had discovered these places early in my stay on the island. The frangipani, which in the Malay islands is the “grave flower,” is freely planted, and so many other shrubs are in bloom that this little corner of island is a good hunting ground for insects; and, of course, it is not frequented by the natives. I may loiter there unobserved. The Chinese and the Malay burial places show that these people somehow have resolved the fact of death into their view of the earth, and they make no fuss about it. They don’t invite it, but when it comes they take it quietly, and their graves are as if they had no doubt the dead know best what to do with themselves. But the Christian cemetery is a loud and desperate effort to deny the fact. One curious structure there incloses the grave of a man named Laurens. It has a roof and an upper story. By the tomb is a map of Palestine and a series of biblical pictures. The walls of the inclosure are decorated with a host of framed texts, mainly of promises to the righteous, as though Laurens was prepared against the Last Day, and was ready to present God with a bundle of I O U’s. Surmounting the texts is the crest of a cavalry regiment, and so many other symbolical figures are scattered about that on the Resurrection Day Laurens should have no difficulty in establishing his merits, even if the entries made by the Recording Angel are inadequate. And so that Laurens shall make no simple but disastrous mistake when he gets up, a hand is stenciled where he will see it at once, with its dexter finger pointing to the sky.

The padre has spent most of his life among the islands east of Borneo and Java, but appears to be doubtful that he has saved many souls, so I did not pursue like a mean actuary the tender subject of missionary enterprise. He thought that missionaries merely imposed a form upon what remained essentially the same thing. The islanders still believe, when matters are urgent, whether they go to the church or the mosque, that the spirits are more potent than the prophets. If they go through the form of Christian marriage it is only to propitiate another doubtful element. They marry still by the process of lari-bini, to run with a wife; or of kawin-minta, to buy a wife. In the first there is a pretense of taking a girl by force from unwilling parents, and then a formal forgiveness and a payment. Or the consent of the parents is at once given and the price is paid. They may come to the missionary after that, to make things right all round. In the Kei Islands a marriage contract is made on a piece of wood, on which symbols may show that the bridegroom owes four gongs, two guns, and three drums, for the girl. He then enters the home of his wife’s parents and serves until the credit marks on the marriage contract correspond with the symbols on the other side of the stick. The padre told me that recently he baptized the black children of an Englishwoman who lives on Halmaheira. But these mysterious “English,” whenever I have come across an example, might be Arabs or Tamils just as easily. And they always speak a Port Said variety of cockney, when they know the language at all. Their names, however, are solidly British.

July 24.—Crossed over to Halmaheira to-day, and landed at the village of Gilolo, at its northwest corner. This extensive island appears to be covered with forest from the water line to the mountain tops. It is still unexplored and almost uninhabited. We landed by a mangrove swamp. The tide was out, and as it will take more than one day to explore so much mountainous jungle, I sat on a stump and watched the surface of the glistening mud. It was riddled with the burrows of little crabs. Some were vermilion, others were white, and one sort was violet with legs of pale blue. They seemed to have had disturbing news; perhaps it was an election, perhaps the Gilolo exchange had fallen, but that flat of mud was a scene of hysterical activity. Each alert crab, whatever his color, was a morsel of irrepressible curiosity and could not keep indoors, but must hear all the news, and so sat at the mouth of his burrow, or crept away from it to eavesdrop on his neighbors. He moved with an air of such studied and circumventing cunning that he might have been the secret agent of an embassy or a trust; but at the first haughty gesture of a neighbor’s claw—now then, none of that; keep away there, quite far off, please—fear shot him home. When our little motor-boat was returning to Ternate, a run of six hours, we got caught in opposing tide-rips and currents that had heaped in the intricate channels of the islands, and occasionally I wondered whether her engine would stand it. We gyrated at times in a light-headed and sickening way, and the Malay who steered us (good man!) had all he could do to keep us from being swamped. It was a relief to get under the shelter of Ternate, where we picked up an abandoned sailing prahu and took her in tow.