From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People

by Sven Anders Hedin

The next day the steamer Moldavia (also belonging to the P. & O.) arrived from England, and was moored close to the Delhi in order to transfer to her passengers and goods for the Far East, after which the Moldavia was to continue her voyage for two weeks more to Australia. When all is ready the Delhi swings out to sea again, the band of the Moldavia playing a march and her crew and passengers cheering. In the evening we double the southern point of Ceylon, turning due east—a course we shall hold as far as the northern cape of Sumatra, 1000 miles away.

The Sunda Islands

On the morning of October 21 all field-glasses are pointed eastwards. Two small, steep islands stand up out of the sea, a white ring of surf round their shores, and beyond them several other islands come into sight, their woods ever green in the perpetual summer of these hot regions. Now islands crop up on all sides, and we are in the midst of quite an archipelago. To the south-west we can see rain falling over Sumatra.

Asia is the largest continent of the world. It has three other divisions of the world as its neighbours, Europe, Africa, and Australia, and Asia is more or less connected with these, forming with them the land of the eastern hemisphere, while America belongs to the western hemisphere. Europe is so closely and solidly connected with Asia that it may be said to be a peninsula of it. Africa is joined to Asia by an isthmus 70 miles broad, which since 1869 has been cut through by the Suez Canal. On the other hand, Australia is like an enormous island, and lies quite by itself; the only connection between it and Asia consists of the two series of large islands and innumerable small ones which rise above the surface of the intervening sea. The western chain consists of the Sunda Islands, the eastern of the Philippines and New Guinea. Sumatra is the first island of the immense pontoon bridge which extends south-eastwards from the Malay Peninsula. The next is Java, and then follows a row of medium-sized islands to the east.

THE SUNDA ISLANDS.

The animal and vegetable life of these islands is very abundant. In their woods live elephants, rhinoceroses, and tapirs; in the brushwood lurk tigers and panthers; and in the depths of their primeval forests dwell monkeys of various species. The largest is the orang-utang, which grows to a height of five feet, is very strong, savage and dangerous, and is almost always seen on trees. On these islands, too, grow many plants and trees which are invaluable to the use of man—sugar-cane, coffee and tea, rice and tobacco, spices, coco-palms, and the tree the bark of which yields the remedy for fever, quinine. This remedy is needed not least on the Sunda Islands themselves, for fever is general in the low-lying districts round the coasts, though the climate 4000 or 5000 feet above sea-level, among the mountains which occupy the interior of the islands, is good and healthy.

The equator passes through the middle of Sumatra and Borneo, and therefore perpetual summer with very moist heat prevails in these islands. The only seasons really distinguishable are the rainy and dry seasons, and the Sunda Islands constitute one of the rainiest regions in the world. The people are Malays and are heathen, but along the coasts Mohammedanism has acquired great influence. The savage tribes of the interior have a blind belief in spirits, which animate all lifeless objects, and the souls of the dead share in the joys and sorrows of the living.

The larger Sunda islands are four: Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Celebes. Java, one of the most beautiful and most productive countries in the world, has an area nearly equal to that of England without Wales, and its population is also nearly the same—about 30 millions. Sumatra, which the Delhi has just left to starboard, is three times the size of Java, but has only one-seventh of its population. The curiously shaped island of Celebes, again, is about half the size of Sumatra, while Borneo is the third largest island on the globe not ranking as a continent, its area being about 300,000 square miles. The Sunda Islands are subject to Holland, only the north-eastern part of Borneo belonging to England.

In the strait between Sumatra and Java lies a very small volcanic island, Krakatau, which in the summer of 1883 was the scene of one of the most violent eruptions that have taken place in historic times. The island was uninhabited, and was only visited occasionally by fishermen from Sumatra; but if it had been inhabited, not a soul would have survived to relate what took place, for on two other islands which lay a few miles distant the inhabitants were killed to the last man.