Letters from Australia

by John Martineau

The streets are full of natives, clothed or half-clothed in white or coloured cotton dress. The driver of your hired carriage who sits close in front of you is perhaps bare to the waist; but the dark-brown colour of his skin prevents you from being keenly alive to the fact, and you are not much impressed with any deficiency in his apparel. Men as well as women wear their black hair long and tied in a knot, or confined by tortoiseshell combs. Indeed the general appearance of men and women is so much alike that at first sight one is almost puzzled to distinguish them. A lady lately arrived at Galle, talking to a friend who had been much in her house and knew all about her establishment, happened to mention her ayah. The friend expressed surprise, as he did not know she had an ayah; and after explanation, and summoning the servant in question, she was made aware that her servant was a man, and had never pretended to be anything else, though he had been acting as nurse, and washing and dressing the baby for a week or two.

Crowding round the verandah of the hotel is a host of importunate vendors of tortoiseshell, baskets, ivory boxes, and jewellery. As regards jewellery there is ample scope for their roguery, which is without limit. A fellow will ask you fourteen pounds for what he calls a real sapphire ring, and gladly let you have it, after a little bargaining, for two shillings. Europeans take unblushing rascality of this sort as a matter of course, and treat it, not with indignation, but with contempt. Even in a few hours one can understand a little why the natives are so often treated by Europeans much in the way that a good-natured man treats a useful dog.

The hotel is a great building, with the bedrooms for greater coolness separated by partitions reaching only part of the way to the ceiling, so that a word or a snore is sometimes audible in every room from one end to the other of the long corridor; and many are the reproaches, expletives, bolsters, boots, and other missiles, which are flung over the partition at anyone who offends in this latter particular. In some of the private houses the doors are for the same reason made so as to come within a foot of the ground, and consequently when anyone is coming into the room there is ample time and opportunity for inspecting his or her feet, &c. before any other part of the person is visible.

The heat does not admit of much going about in the middle of the day; but towards evening you can drive beyond town and suburbs, and see the palms on each side bending over the road, and the rich swampy soil teeming with rank vegetation, and feast your senses on the often-described wonders of a tropical climate. Beautiful as it is, it is not to be compared for beauty (one is told) with the interior. And there is no time or opportunity for seeing that, for punctual to its day the great black hull of the steamer from Calcutta and Madras, which is to pick up all the passengers for Suez, rounds the point and enters the bay, and by daybreak next morning she is off again.

A huge monster she is of two thousand six hundred tons or thereabouts, with a charming long flush deck from bows to stern of immense length. She is cram-full; for it is the end of March, and all Indians who can get away—officers, civilians, invalids, and young children—are on their way home before the hot season sets in. Some cabins have been reserved for passengers waiting at Galle, and we from Australia are a not very welcome addition to the already large number, and are probably set down as at best successful diggers, and as most likely holders of tickets-of-leave. But with or without tickets-of-leave we soon shake down, and get on pretty well with each other, for there is no room for quarrelling. There are some five hundred human beings on board, of whom more than half are passengers, and of these above fifty are children. They are pale, sickly, quiet little beings, these children, or one does not know how the ship would hold them, for they are under little or no control. Often half a dozen or more have been confided to the care of one invalid lady, who has about enough to do to take care of herself. As for the ayahs, of whom there are plenty, they have not a shadow of authority over their charges, and submit as a matter of course to thumps and abuse in answer to their feeble threats and entreaties.

It is worth while to stroll over the ship about midnight, when everyone has settled down for the night. The season is not yet advanced and hot enough to oblige everyone to sleep on deck, but on the after-deck under the awning are perhaps twenty men-passengers asleep—some on mattresses brought up from their cabins, others on the benches or on cane lounging-chairs. Forward, near the funnel and galley and on the forecastle, the bright moonlight shines upon bodies lying as thick and as motionless as on a battle-field after a battle—some wrapped head and all in their garments of white linen or coarse cloth, some in their natural bare black to the waist, some huddled together, head to feet, in groups, and some alone, and all without the slightest regard to whether they are in the gangway or not. In the saloon, on the tables, or on the narrow benches, with one leg on the table to keep them from rolling off, lie white-shirted and white-trousered stewards; and on the floor at their mistresses’ cabin-doors are prostrate ayahs, so exactly in the way that in the half-light one almost has to feel for them to avoid treading on them in passing. On the lockers in the stern are a few children and an ayah or two; but the head-quarters of the children are down below on the lower-deck, where they are laid out by dozens on the table, on cushions, shawls, and anything that comes to hand, while over them the punkah, its strings connected with the engines, fans the air steadily the whole night through. And all seem to sleep peacefully and even comfortably each after his fashion, for the north-east monsoon is just dying away, there is not a wave to stir the ship, and every port and scuttle to within two or three feet of the-water-line is open to admit the air.

We carry on the monsoon till Cape Guardafui is in sight; then comes a strong south-east breeze heavy with moisture blowing up the gulf, and on the morning but one after, the rising sun lights up brilliantly the red and yellow mountains which stretch across the little peninsula of Aden, rising up behind it in high peaks and ridges abrupt and sharp and serrated like the Dolomite mountains of the Tyrol. And in an hour or two the Tarus drops her anchor within a quarter of a mile of the shore, among steamers and ships of war and transports on their way to Annesley Bay to feed the Abyssinian Expedition, now near its goal at Magdala.

Like King George’s Sound, Aden is an isolated corner of a continent, cut off by deserts from land-communication with the outer world of civilization, and important only as a refuge or coaling-station for shipping. Wild tribes of Bedouins are the only inhabitants of the deserts which bound the peninsula, and for some years after our occupation of it they made repeated attacks upon us; and strong fortifications, garrisoned chiefly by Bombay sepoy regiments, now guard the small space where it is possible to penetrate the strong natural defence of the mountains.

And the impression of strange wild primeval desolation is increased as we land. Moist as is the air in the gulf, the atmosphere of Aden itself is as dry as can be conceived, and tempts one, protected by a green veil and an umbrella, to ride or walk, or even run, in spite of the fierce sun which blazes out of the unclouded sky. Scarcely a morsel of vegetation, not a blade of grass is to be seen, only at rare intervals in the sand a leafless shrub. For at Aden not a drop of rain falls often for years in succession, though the mountain-peak not four miles from the harbour is capped with cloud. Water is supplied chiefly by distillation from the sea, and also from huge tanks. We drive to see them, passing strings of camels, and tall, dirty, melancholy, scowling Arabs, and a wretched Arab village of huts of mud and straw like a warren of ill-instructed rabbits, and turn up a hill through fortifications and covered ways hewn in the rock, where white-coated sepoy sentinels stand on guard, and down on the other side to the cantonments and to the Arab town of Aden itself, for where we landed is not Aden proper but the Bunder or port. They are a strange memorial of the past, those tanks. They are hewn out of the solid rock one above another in a steep gulley of the cloud-capt mountain, from whence at long intervals torrents of water pour down and fill them. Tradition assigns them an origin anterior to the time of Abraham, but there is no fragment of sculpture to help to give them a date; they are only huge irregular basins in the rock, capable of holding from a quarter to two or three millions of gallons each, and for centuries were almost choked with rubbish, till within the last few years our Government has cleared them out and made them available again.

Early the same afternoon we are steaming away again for Suez, and at midnight pass through the Straits of Babel-mandeb. The little island of Perim divides the straits into two. We pass through the eastern and narrower passage, which is not much more than a mile wide, and by the bright moonlight both the island and the Arabian coast are clearly visible. A few years ago, when the importance of the position of the island first became apparent, and while consuls and envoys were busy discussing to whom it belonged—for it was then uninhabited—the English quietly took possession of it, and are now admitted to have thereby acquired a good title to it. An officer or two and about half a company of troops from Aden are located on it as garrison, and considering that it is perfectly bare, without an inhabitant or a tree, or a blade of grass, or a hill, or water, or, I believe, any animal except rats, and in a climate like a furnace, it must be about as unpleasant a prison to be confined in as well could be found anywhere.