The Malays are perhaps the least vivid feature of Singapore. They are an inoffensive people, but not, I thought, as interesting as the other Oriental peoples. Chinese industry and European intelligence were the great motive powers at Singapore.
Tanglin, outside the town of Singapore, is an ideal barrack. It was a soldier’s paradise I thought.
Singapore, with its wonderful mixture of races, was strangely fascinating, even to people who had been through the East rather exhaustively; but I doubt if we should remember Singapore half so pleasantly, did we not remember it as the residence of Sir Charles Warren.
If I felt free to glide into purely personal reminiscences, I should record of Singapore that there we greatly liked a man, and greatly thanked a host.
On our way to China we had spent a month or more in Singapore. Now we passed a few more pleasant weeks there. Then came a few sad days in Rangoon and a memorable passage back to Calcutta. It was late in July and the elements were in indescribable confusion. Only an expert could tell which was sky and which was sea. And neither sea nor sky could have been uglier.
NATIVES READING AT PENANG. Page 256.
We lost a great number of sheep overboard in the storm; and I, too, very nearly went overboard. I should have deserved my fate; but the poor innocent sheep did not deserve theirs. Yet perhaps it is pleasanter to die by drowning than by slaughter. I love the deck of a boat, but I hate the “down below.” I never go below more than is absolutely necessary. But on this trip I had my own way once too often. I don’t know how I had inveigled the Captain, but I had. My steamer chair was lashed to the hatch. I was snug and dry under my rugs. The ship rolled and pitched splendidly, the rain rushed down in nasty torrents, and the salt spray curled and split into a hundred whipcords, before it struck my face.
The Captain and my captain came up every few moments to reason with me and to invite me down, but I shook my wilful head at them. The night, the storm, and the fresh, angry air, seemed to me far more pleasant than the close, warm, sociable saloon would have been.