The United States may not he a Protestant nation in the official sense of the word, but their general philosophy of life is decidedly Protestant and very decidedly un-Catholic. They may be inspired by the best of intentions towards the Philippines, give them endless good roads, thousands of schools, three universities, hospitals, doctors, nurses, incubators, meat and fish inspection, hygiene, and a thousand and one benefits of progress of which the Spaniards had never even heard. But all these generous expressions of goodwill mean comparatively little to people who from their earliest childhood have been taught to regard such worldly comforts and advantages as something very nice and pleasant but not to be compared to the chance of gaining salvation in another world, where hygiene and hospitals and good roads and schools shall no longer be of any interest to anybody.
Chapter XLI
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THE DUTCH EAST INDIES, THE TAIL THAT WAGS THE DOG
I have already told you how Japan and Formosa and the Philippines are merely the outer mountainous edges of the old Asiatic continent which in the course of millions of years got separated from the mainland by the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
The Malay Islands on the other hand (Malaysia, Insulinde, Indian Archipelago, the Dutch East Indies—they are known by so many different names) are not merely part of the old outer edge of Asia. They are the remnants of an enormous peninsula as large as that of China, which reached from Burma and Siam and Cochin-China eastward to Australia. During the earliest ages of our geographical history this peninsula may have been directly connected with the Asiatic continent (then enormously larger than to-day) and afterwards, during a period about which we are a little better informed, it was separated from Australia only by a narrow strip of water not much wider than the present Torres Strait between Queensland and New Guinea.
The reason for the cataclysmic changes which have turned so vast a piece of dry land into a group of oddly shaped islands, running all the way from Borneo, which is as large as the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula, down to thousands of tiny bits of rock situated wherever they happen to be most inconvenient to navigation, is not hard to discover. This part of the world was among the most volcanic regions of the earth. Even to-day Java retains the blue ribbon for volcanic activities. During the last three centuries, however, the hundred and twenty-odd volcanoes of Java have on the whole been very well-behaved, as have those of Sumatra, a little towards the west.
When Brahmanism, the old religion of India, was prevalent among the Javanese, the priests used to placate the spirits that dwelt in the bowels of the, earth by an occasional offering of human beings, who were pitched bodily into the boiling cauldron of the craters—apparently with success, for although the volcanoes continue to puff and roar and occasionally go on the rampage, there has been no major catastrophe for several centuries.
But the remnants of Krakatoa lie there as a dreadful warning of something that may happen again at any moment. On the morning of August 26, 1883, the island of Krakatoa, situated in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, was very much as it had always been since a prehistoric eruption had blown away the top of its crater and had cut the island up into several small pieces. Two days later the whole northern part of the island was gone. Where there had been hills 1500 feet high there now was a deep hollow, lying more than a thousand feet below the surface of the Indian Ocean. The noise of that explosion was heard 3000 miles away. Ashes were blown seventeen miles up in the air. The volcanic dust spread all over Africa, Europe, Asia, and America, and even as far north as the North Cape. The sky for six weeks afterwards was strangely coloured in localities for distant from Krakatoa as if from forest fires.
But the disturbance caused on the ocean was much more disastrous than that caused on land, for Krakatoa was uninhabited. A tidal wave more than fifty feet high swept along the coast of Java and killed 36,000 people. It wiped out harbours and villages, and destroyed large vessels as if they had been firewood. Ceylon and Mauritius were affected by these waves. They made themselves noticeable near Cape Horn, which is almost 8000 miles away, and they were faintly observed in the English Channel, which is 11,000 miles distant from the Strait of Sunda.
A year ago the remnant of the Krakatoa volcano was once more beginning to show signs of activity. And no one can foretell when or where the subterranean lightning will strike next. As for the people who live there, they are like all others who live under similar circumstances. They pay less attention to the volcanoes than the average pedestrian pays to passing motor traffic.
This fatalistic attitude may be due to the Mohammedan faith. It may also be the result of just plain ordinary contentment with life and the conviction that volcanic eruptions, like foreign dominations or floods or fires, are all of them negligible incidents in life and of small importance to the man who tills his fields, whose ancestors ever since the beginning of the world have tilled these same fields, whose children will till these same fields, and who none of them have feared or are likely to fear that they may go short of food.
THE DUTCH EAST INDIES COMPARED TO EUROPE
This sounds as if I were trying to describe Java as a sort of earthly Paradise. It is hardly that, but it has been so supremely favoured by Nature as to deserve a page to itself.
There is the soil, 28% of which is of volcanic origin. That soil, if treated at all kindly and understandingly, will yield three complete harvests every twelve months.
There is the climate, which although hot enough to favour the cultivation of every known tropical plant, is not excessive and which in the mountainous regions is much more agreeable than that of New York or Washington during the summer. For Java and the other islands of Insulinde, although so near the equator that the days and nights are almost equally long, is on all sides surrounded by the sea. It therefore has moisture enough for all purposes, and the temperature never goes much above or below the F. mean annual temperature of 79°. Thus it is always hot and also always wet, though two seasons are wetter than the others. The seasons follow each other with regularity. The rainy season, or monsoon (an Arabic word meaning ‘season’ and the name of these seasonal winds that blow regularly in this part of the world), lasts from November to March south of the equator. Then it rains every day at certain hours in Sumatra, which is cut by the equator; the season in the north of the island is always the opposite of that in the south.
As a result of these favourable climatic conditions Java, which is a little larger than England, forms a sort of rectangular breakwater 600 miles long and 120 miles wide, protecting the islands of the inner archipelago against the violence of the southern Indian Ocean, and is able to support nearly 40,000,000 people, while Sumatra and Borneo, although much larger, have only one-tenth of that population. And because of its great fertility the island has from early times attracted the attention of the white man.
The Portuguese were the first to appear upon the scene. Then came the English and the Dutch, but the English gradually concentrated all their forces upon the exploitation of British India and left Java and the other Malaysian islands to the Dutch. Having committed every possible mistake of which the European was capable in dealing with a native populace during the first three centuries of their rule the Dutch seem at last to have learned a few primary lessons of colonial management. They interfere just as little as possible with the native, and are gradually drawing him more and more into the administration of his own country, knowing that the time will come when for good or evil these people will insist upon being given their liberty. With an army of 30,000 men, of which only one-fifth are white, it must prove impossible to rule a territory fifty times as large as the mother country if the inhabitants have really made up their minds that the foreigner must go. The old days, therefore, of ‘forced labour’ and ‘government plantations’ are gone for ever. Schools and railways and hospitals are taking the place of the old punitive expeditions. If eventually one will have to give up these regions as the sovereign master, one may hope to remain behind as an indis
pensable part of the economic fabric. The old guard, which was firmly convinced that “a native was all right as long as he knew his place,” is slowly giving ground to a younger generation which knows that facts are mightier than slogans and that this universe of ours was created on the principle of eternal change.
JAVA
As for the other islands that belong to the Dutch group, none is as highly cultivated as Java. Celebes, that queerly shaped, spidery island just west of the Moluccas, the original spice-islands for which the English and the Portuguese and the Spaniards and the Dutch fought each other so bitterly throughout the seventeenth century, is being slowly developed by the Dutch to become a second Java. To-day Macassar, the town whence came the oil from which our Victorian grandfathers adorned their locks and which made our Victorian grandmothers knit their endless ‘antimacassars,’ is one of the most important cities of the Java sea, doing a regular business with Surabaya and Semarang, the main ports on the northern coast of Java, and being in regular communication with Tandjong Priok, which is the harbour of Batavia, the capital, just as Weltevreden is the residential quarter and Buttenzorg the seat of government.
The Molucca islands themselves are not as rich as they used to be, but their inhabitants, the Amboinese, are still renowned for their ability as sailors. Four hundred years ago these same Amboinese were dreaded far and wide as the most voracious cannibals of the Pacific Ocean. To-day they are exemplary Christians, although, curiously enough, they have given the Dutch East Indian army its best fighting regiments.
Borneo, the main remnant of the submerged Asiatic peninsula, suffers from under-population due to the strange native belief that head-hunting makes for holiness. The Dutch have been trying to kill this popular pastime by the most drastic forms of punishment. But in the interior no young man, even to-day, is allowed to marry until he has at least one head to his credit. This prolonged process of mutual extermination (the Borneo people will exhibit their gruesome conquests as proudly and as unconcernedly as an expert golfer will show you his cups) has kept the number of the inhabitants far below par. But now at last the rivers are being opened up, and oil and coal and diamond companies are constructing roads, and the savages are gradually being persuaded to turn to the more peaceful pursuits of agriculture. Thus the island, in due course of time, may be able to support twenty times its present population without noticing the difference.
The northern part of Borneo belongs to the English. The north-western corner is an independent state, called Sarawak, and ruled by the descendants of an Englishman, the famous Rajah Brooke, who arrived in the island to suppress a local rebellion and remained to become an independent sovereign.
Another island of great importance in the East is Sumatra, which runs parallel with the Malay peninsula. It is highly volcanic and will grow almost anything, but unfortunately it is cut into two distinct halves by a high mountain-range which has greatly retarded its development until the introduction of railways. The motor car and the aeroplane will do more to open up this territory to Western commerce than any other mechanical agency would ever have been able to do.
Between Sumatra and Borneo lie the islands of Banka and Billiton which, being a continuation of the Malay peninsula, are also exceedingly rich in tin. East of Java lies the famous island of Bali, where the ancient native form of life has been best preserved, and then come Flores and Timor, just north of Australia, and finally New Guinea, which is really part of the Australian mainland and of which only the western half is in Dutch hands. The island, which would cover the greater part of France and Germany, has hardly been touched. There are no rivers leading to the interior and the population is very small, due in part to cannibalism and in part to the backwardness of the natives, for ever decimated by disease and man-hunting. Here and there in the interior there are remnants of pygmy tribes, indicating that the island must have been settled at a very early age.
But then, this whole part of the world is very old, and according to one theory at least it is in this region that man first bade farewell to his anthropoid cousins, the apes. Hence the skull of the man-like creature, the famous Pithecanthropus erectus, which was found in the island of Java, and the presence in Borneo and Sumatra of those big, man-like apes which are known as the orang-utan.
It is indeed a curious world, this world of ours. One branch of the family progressed until it was able to build zoos provided with tropical heat. And the other half went to live in them.
Chapter XLII
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AUSTRALIA
Speaking of the wasteful methods of Nature and the lack of an apparent purpose in creation, Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz, the famous German scientist, a specialist in the field of physiological optics, is said to have made the remark that if any instrument-maker should have dared to favour him with a contraption as clumsy as the human eye he would have denounced the man as an incompetent bungler who did not know his business.
I am glad Helmholtz did not extend his investigations beyond the realms of physiology and electricity, for I would hate to repeat what he would have said about the geographical arrangement of our planet.
Take a country like Greenland. There it lies, almost buried beneath thousands of feet of snow and ice. If those 47,000 square miles could be moved to the middle of the ocean they might support a population of millions of people. Now they offer a scant living to a few thousand polar bears and a handful of half-starved Eskimos. At a first glance Australia must have seemed to offer an even worse example, for there were tremendous obstacles in the way of Its development, and it is not surprising that the first white men who saw its shores got an entirely wrong idea of the possibilities of this new country.
Its situation was certainly very much against it. To the north were the Malay Islands. These might appear to be convenient stepping-stones leading from Asia to Australia, but in reality they constituted a very formidable barrier cutting off the one effectually from the other. This was because the islands were inhabited by fierce pirates whose reputation gave no encouragement to wanderers to venture that way. And travellers who were brave and pertinacious enough to reach Australian shores by that route found no welcome awaiting them when they arrived, for the north-west consists chiefly of an arid and inhospitable tableland. As for the east, that was adequately protected by the south-west trade winds, which, drove seafarers steadily north-west, and so prevented them from sighting the shores of the elusive continent.
Thus, although the existence of a great, southern continent had been suspected by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Dutch for over a hundred years, nothing definite was known until Abel Tasman undertook his two voyages, and even be saw comparatively little of it. On his first voyage in 1642 he saw only the southern coast of Tasmania, and in 1644, flying the flag of the Dutch East India Company, he sailed from Java along the north and north-western coast of Australia, taking possession of the land in the name of the United Netherlands.
Tasman’s visit had no practical result, however, for the Dutch were not interested in what they deemed a wilderness, and so allowed their title to lapse. When James Cook was sent to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus in 1769 (a century and a quarter after Tasman’s voyage) the map-makers of Amsterdam and London were still quite uncertain where exactly they must place this Terra Australis incognita in the vast expanse of water that went by the name of the Great Peaceful Ocean. And the bounds of this vast territory of almost 3,000,000 square miles (nearly as large, therefore, as the United States) were not fully explored until Flinders circumnavigated Australia in 1803.
If Australia suffered from its situation its climate must also have seemed little attractive to those early visitors, for the coastal districts are, generally speaking, less comfortable than the areas which lie just behind them, and in the north the damp heat makes the coastal strip not only uncomfortable, but positively unhealthy. This is in contrast to the great mass of the western tableland, which is almost waterless. Such a description, of course, gives an e
ntirely false impression of the Australian climate, which ranges from tropical heat in some parts to a cool, temperate variety as healthy and invigorating as that of Scotland in others, but we have to remember that the most immediately attractive portions of the continent were also the farthest removed from the likely routes in those early days, and that explorers could judge only by what they themselves saw and felt.
Dampier described Australia as having “a dry sandy soil, destitute of water, except you make wells.” It is true that there are artesian basins of vast extent where subterranean water-supplies make up to some extent for the lack of surface-water, but this obviously could not serve as any great mitigation of the lot of the first settlers, and even to-day the alkaline nature of much of this water renders it useless for irrigation, though it serves for watering stock.
The highest parts of Australia are practically everywhere along or near the outer edges of the continent. The interior, therefore, roughly resembles a hollow bowl, and since water does not flow uphill Australia has singularly few rivers for so vast an area. The Murray, the largest of all Australian rivers, is, with its tributary the Darling, 2310 miles long. The Darling rises among the mountains of Queensland, not so many miles away from the Coral Sea, a part of the Pacific Ocean. But instead of running eastward into the Pacific it flows about 2000 miles in a direction mainly south-west to join the lower Murray. For a considerable part of the year (remember that it is winter in the southern hemisphere when it is summer in the northern, and vice versa) the Darling for much of its course dwindles to a series of pools, and so is useless for navigation, though even the pools are invaluable to the sheep-farmers whose lands border upon them.
Australia offers a unique example of a great land-mass which at some time in the remote past was cut off from the rest of the world. Thus people, plants, and animals have developed for thousands of years strictly along their own lines, being neither helped nor hindered by any outside influences.
The Home of Mankind Page 33