Ten years in Burma

by Julius Smith

This good ship made but one voyage more under its Scotch ownership. It was then sold to the Spaniards and renamed the Alicante. This circumstance became of much interest to us at a later date, when this ship was the first to be loaded with defeated Spanish troops at Santiago.

The outward voyage had its many objects of interest to the passengers going out for the first time. We sailed in plain view of the Portuguese and Spanish coasts, but were disappointed in passing Gibraltar at night. The next day, however, we were charmed with a magnificent view of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Southern Spain, as they lifted their snowy heights into cloudless skies, and their vineclad slopes dropped away to the level of the sea. For nearly a whole day we sailed close by the picturesque shores of Sardinia. Here we noted a singular confusion of the compass by reason of being magnetized by the land. As the good ship swung off from the southern cape of the island, it made two great curves to correct the erratic state of the compass. We entered the harbor of Naples in the full floodlight of a Mediterranean noon. The afternoon was spent in the city. Our party was not favorably impressed with the gay people in their holiday attire. It seems they have many holidays of the like kind. In the evening we sailed southward; and as darkness closed around us, distant Vesuvius sent its fiery glow upward on the black mass of overhanging cloud, making a lurid night scene. In the morning we woke in plain view of the great volcanic cone of Stromboli, rising out of the sea. We were near the island, which seems to have no land except the volcano itself; yet houses nestle here and there around its base. What a choice for a home—at the base of an actual volcano! The weather was perfect as we sailed through the Straits of Messina, but great Mount Ætna, which we hoped to see, was hid in clouds.

The second stop in our journey was at Port Said. The Suez Canal is the gateway of the nations. Port Said is its northern entrance. It is under international control, and hence its government is less responsible than that of almost any other city. It is one of the most wicked cities of the world. Representatives of all races are congregated there. It is not our purpose to describe this city, but to point out that here for the first time we had a glimpse of the Orient. The fellaheen of Egypt loaded our ship with coal, carrying great baskets on their heads. We arrived in the night, and the coaling began almost immediately. My wife and I got out of our cabin before day to go on deck and see these people at work by the light of torches. A strange, weird sight it was to Western eyes; and their shouting in strange tongues emphasized the fact that we had indeed come to a strange land.

The Suez Canal is the natural dividing-line between the Western and the Eastern civilizations, between the cold Northlands and the perpetually tropical countries of Southern Asia. Looking westward and northward, you find energy put to practical account; looking eastward, you find lethargy and life no more aggressive that it must be to keep peoples as they have been for a thousand years. Westward you greet progress, but Eastward life has been stagnated for ages, and only stirs as it is acted upon from the West. Westward you have an increasing degree of prosperity and material comforts and advantages of modern civilization, but Eastward you have such poverty among the millions as can not be conceived by people more favored. Westward you have civilizations never content with present attainment; but Eastward you have peoples whose highest ideals are only to be and to do what their fathers were and did before them. The West seeks to produce new things, but the East condemns all improvement for no other reason than that it is new. All this, and much more, is suggested by the Suez Canal, from which you plunge downward into Asiatic civilization. Climatically you are henceforth to know only the tropics, a climate, so far as Southern Asia is concerned, that you will come to know henceforth as dividing the year into two seasons, “Three months very hot, and nine months very much hotter.” At Port Said you will be informed of the change that is just ahead of you. Whatever you may have bought in New York or London, you will need one more article of dress at Port Said—a helmet, to protect your head from the tropical sun. You will never see a day in Southern Asia in which you can go forth in the noonday sun with an ordinary hat, or without a helmet, except at your peril; and most of the time you will wear that protection for your head from early morning until five in the evening, or later. You will have another indication that you are going down into the tropics. If you have made your journey, as we did, in the colder months, the sunniest place on the deck has been the most comfortable until you arrive at Port Said; but there they raise double canvas over the whole ship, and from that on, as long as you go to and fro in the tropical seas, you will never travel a league by sea that you do not have that same double canvas above you when the sun is in the heavens. No wonder the Suez Canal means so much besides commerce or travel to all who have passed through it to Southern Asia!

Through the fifteen hundred miles of the Red Sea we took our way. Then the Gulf of Aden was traversed, and next through the Arabian Sea our good ship bore us on our journey. The heat, like very hot summer at home, was upon us, though we were out at sea in December. Coming on deck one morning before other passengers were astir, I was delighted to see the green hills of Ceylon a few miles to our left. We had rounded the island in the night. The decks had been scrubbed in the early morning, as usual; the ocean was smooth, and the tropical sun flooded sea and land, while the sweetest odor of spices filled the air. At once I thought of “Ceylon’s spicy breezes,” but I suddenly noted that the wind was toward the shore, which lay some miles away, and then I was prepared for the sentiment of the chief steward who had sprinkled spices out of the ship stores over the wet deck to please the passengers’ sense of smell as they came forth to give their morning greetings to this emerald isle of the Indian Ocean. In rounding Ceylon we reached our lowest latitude, six degrees north. We were still six days’ sail from Burma, and our course took us nearly northeast from this point. The entire voyage from the Suez Canal to Burma was made under cloudless skies and through calm waters. A day from Rangoon we passed near the beautiful little Cocoa Islands, while the Andamans showed above the horizon far to the southward. It is remarkable how much interest there is among passengers when a ship is sighted, or land appears on a long voyage. These Cocoa Islands are important as being guides to vessels homeward or outward bound, and they mark the line between the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Martahan. An important lighthouse has been maintained there for the past fifty years. The Andamans are shrouded in gloomy mystery, due to the fact that they are used as a penal colony of criminals transported from India. On the 31st of December, 1890, after passing several light-ships, we came, about noon, in sight of the low-lying shores of Burma. We had been thirty-five days from Liverpool, and were getting weary of the sea, to say nothing of our curiosity to land in a country new to us. But no land could be less interesting than this shore-line of Burma, first sighted on coming in from the sea. It lies just above the sea-level, and besides a fringe of very small shrubbery, and here and there a cocoanut palm-tree, it is absolutely expressionless. After lying at anchor for three hours at the mouth of the Rangoon River, waiting for the incoming tide, we began the last twenty miles of our journey up the broad river to the city of Rangoon.

The passengers were made up mostly of people who were returning to Burma after a furlough in England. The anticipation of friendly greetings and the appearance of every familiar object along the river created a quiver of pleasant excitement among them. Our missionary party were almost the only ones who had not special friends in Rangoon to meet them.

Sway Dagon Pagoda

Presently all eyes were turned up the river as the second officer called out, “There is the Great Pagoda.” Yes, this, the greatest shrine of the Buddhist world, rising from a little hilltop just behind the main part of the city of Rangoon, lifted its gilded and glistening form hundreds of feet skyward. This is the first object of special importance that is looked for by every traveler going up the Rangoon River. It is seen before any public building comes into view. But presently the smoke from the great chimneys of the large rice mills of Rangoon appeared, and then the city was outlined along a river frontage of two or three miles. The city has no special attractions, as viewed from the harbor; but the whole river presents an animated scene, always interesting even to any one familiar with it, but full of startling surprises to the newcomer to the East. With the single exception of Port Said, our missionary party had seen nothing of Oriental life. The panoramic view of that river and shore life seen on that last day of 1890 will remain a lifetime in the minds of our party. Steamers of many nations and sailing-vessels under a score of flags, native crafts of every description, steam launches by the dozen, and half a thousand small native boats of a Chinese pattern, called “sampans,” moved swiftly about the river, while two or three thousand people crowded the landing and the river front. It is possible that half a hundred nationalities were represented in that throng, but to us strangers there were only two distinctions to be made out clearly: a few men and women with fair skins, and the remainder of the multitude men of darker hue. “Europeans and natives” is the general distinction used in all India.

Some incidents at such moments in our lives, as our landing in this strange country, make profound impressions far above their actual importance. It was just six o’clock in the evening as we made fast to the wharf. Suddenly, as I faced the new world life of labor just before me, and began to contrast it with that of the past, I remembered that just eleven years before, on that day and at that hour, allowing for difference of latitude, I stepped off the cars in a college town, and parted with my old life as a farmer boy for the new life of a college student. A great change that proved to be, and this was destined to prove even more in contrast with life hitherto. The curious circumstance was that the two transitions corresponded by the year and hour.