“Great Heaven! Martin—Prabu,” I cried, “he is about running a muck;” and such, I believe, was his intention, had not his captain commanded him to sheath his weapon and declare his grievance.
“The dog—the son of a burnt mother!” he exclaimed (pointing to the slave who had brought the horses), “has sought to make me eat dirt—he has given me a lamed mare;” at which great cause of passion, Martin and I laughed. Not so, however, Prabu, who at once reprimanded the slave, and ordered him to bring another horse; for, as we then for the first time discovered, no greater disgrace can be offered to a man than a mare for a steed.
This little difficulty being got over, we rode forward through the jungle until we reached the river, where we found a prahu, and the two chiefs on board ready to receive us, which they did in a very friendly manner. This vessel, although not built, like ours, for long voyages, was large enough to hold, if necessary, nearly a hundred persons, and arranged into various rooms—in fact, a kind of floating house, in which the chief, attended by his retinue and the ladies of his household, could take their pleasure for days together. As for the two chiefs, men of very different ages, they were companionable, pleasant personages enough, except when speaking of the Dutch, then they were ferocious. Indeed, the eldest was one of the many natives of the island we had met, who chronicled a vendetta in his heart against their European conquerors.
It appeared that his father, a principal chief of one of the eastern provinces, having risen in arms against the Dutch, and being defeated and slain, he and an only brother, to whom he was passionately attached, had been sold as slaves to one of the merchants of Batavia. The merchant continuing, over a series of years, to treat the two youths very cruelly, one of them, the brother, had in a moment of desperation slain his master: for this crime he was condemned to death, and his brother compelled to stand by and witness the execution. It must have been a terrible sight, as indeed it must be a lasting disgrace to a nation, both European and Christian, who could have inflicted such a punishment. But let my readers judge for themselves by the very words of a Dutchman, who, having witnessed one of these executions, thus records it:—
“The punishments inflicted at Batavia are excessively severe, especially such as fall upon the natives. I saw an execution of this kind of a slave who had murdered his master, which was done in the following manner: The criminal was led in the morning to the place of execution, being a grass-plot, and laid upon his stomach, held by four men. The executioner made a transverse incision at the lower part of the body; he then introduced the sharp point of the spike, which was about six feet long and made of polished iron, into the wound, so that it passed between the backbone and the skin. Two men drove it forcibly upwards along the spine, while the executioner held the end and gave it a proper direction, till it came out of the neck and shoulders. The lower end was then put into a wooden post and riveted fast, and the sufferer was lifted up thus impaled, and the post stuck in the ground. At the top of the post, about ten feet from the ground, there was a kind of little bench, upon which the body rested.
“The insensibility or fortitude of the wretched man was incredible. He did not utter the least complaint, except when the spike was riveted into the pillar; the hammering and shaking occasioned by it seemed to be intolerable to him, and he then bellowed out with pain, and likewise, once again, when he was lifted up and set in the ground. He sat in this dreadful situation till death put an end to his torments, which, fortunately, happened the next day, about three o’clock in the afternoon. He owed this speedy termination of his misery to a light shower of rain, which continued for about an hour, and he gave up the ghost half-an-hour afterwards.
“There have been instances, at Batavia, of criminals who have been impaled in the dry season, and have remained alive for eight or nine days without any food or drink, which is prevented being given them by a guard, who is stationed at the place of execution for that purpose. One of the surgeons of the city assured me that none of the parts immediately necessary to life are injured by impalement, which makes the punishment the more cruel and intolerable, but that as soon as any water gets into the wound it mortifies, and occasions gangrene—which directly attacks the more noble parts, and brings on death almost immediately.”
Speaking again of the slave, the same writer continues:—
“This miserable sufferer continually complained of insufferable thirst, which is peculiarly incident to this terrible punishment. The criminals are exposed during the whole day to the burning rays of the sun, and are unceasingly tormented by numerous stinging insects. I went to see him again about three hours before he died, and found him conversing with the bystanders. This he did with great composure; yet an instant afterwards he burst out in the bitterest complaints of unquenchable thirst, and raved for drink, while no one was allowed to alleviate, by a single drop of water, the excruciating torments he underwent.”
These are the kind of punishments meted out to a subjected race by a Christian people—a people, too, who have themselves known the lash, the stake, the thumb-screw, and the thousand other devilish inventions of torture adopted by the Governors of the tyrant Philip, in the Low Countries, to suppress mental and political freedom. One would have thought that their own great sufferings would have taught them forbearance to others, but no! Scarcely had they burst their own bonds, than, voyaging to the East, their insatiate thirst for gold rendered them willing slaves to the strong, as in China and Japan—tyrants to the weak, as in the Archipelago. Taking advantage of the simple islanders, who received them with the warmest hospitality, they commenced a series of small conquests; but finding themselves called upon to exercise the functions of sovereigns and politicians, these rapacious adventurers—too weak and incompetent to undertake a conquest upon a grand scale, and by which it is possible the natives then, settled under so many petty despots, might have been benefited—had recourse to a policy of subtlety and intrigue, the consequence of which has been continued wars, waste of human life, and a mutual hatred between them and the natives, to the ruin and destruction of the islands, and the great misery of their inhabitants.