A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  But the most exciting and joyous experiences of this journey still lay ahead, south of Japan, south of China, where the hot gold Malay Peninsula thrust towards the Equator, full of apes, elephants and weird jungly things that screeched in the night.

  CHAPTER IV

  Malaya

  ‘I HAVE no genius for titles,’ Isabella once explained to her publisher John Murray. She hadn’t; the only one of her books with a really good title is The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither – and that was her sister’s idea. It was rather over-ambitious though, for the name ‘Chersonese’, taken from Ptolemy via Milton, denotes the whole of the Malay Peninsula, and Isabella only visited its western coastal areas for six weeks on her way home from Japan via Singapore. But the title is felicitous because it conjures the book’s flavour – the tale of a sunny, leisurely, exotic journey in an ancient eastern realm. Like several of her more successful journeys, the one to Malaya was quite fortuitous and grew out of a suggestion by the Colonial Secretary of Singapore that she might like to have a look at the nearby Native States. In the grand, but simple, manner of the age, he wrote a few letters of introduction to government officials on the route, arranged free transport for her and told her that a convenient steamer was about to leave. Was she ready to go? ‘I was only allowed five minutes for a decision, but I have no difficulty in making up my mind when an escape from civilisation is possible,’ Isabella commented, and the next day boarded the Chinese-owned steamer Rainbow, bound for Malacca.

  The Golden Chersonese which resulted from this casual arrangement is one of the most delightful and accessible of all Isabella’s books for the modern reader. It bubbles with exuberant anecdotes of funny people and funnier animals, it is colourful but not overwhelmingly lush, sharp with acute observation but not overfreighted with unadorned fact. Isabella herself never thought much of it, probably because it was eventually published in sad personal circumstances and contains such a large assortment of ‘those small details and frequent magnification of trifles’ which, she explained to John Murray, ‘the lesser educated, I believe, greatly prefer’.

  And so, once safely aboard the little coastal steamer Rainbow, she first describes the cheery Welsh engineer who told her that he had a coloured wife and sixteen children under seventeen and kept the lot on thirty-five pounds a month and that, as a ‘family man’, ‘nothing gave him greater pleasure than seeing that ladies were comfortable’. And then, lying on the little poop, she tells us exactly what she saw in Singapore harbour: ‘Black-hulled, sullen-looking steamers from Europe discharging cargo into lighters, Malay prahus of all sizes but one form, sharp at both ends, and with eyes on their bows, like the Cantonese and Cochin China boats, reeling as though they would upset under large mat sails, and rowing-boats rowed by handsome statuesque Klings. A steamer from Jeddah was discharging 600 pilgrims in most picturesque costumes; and there were boats with men in crimson turbans and graceful robes of pure white muslin, and others a mass of blue umbrellas, while some contained Brahmins with the mark of caste set conspicuously on their foreheads, all moving in a veil of gold in the setting of a heavy fringe of coco-palms.’ At four that afternoon, when a cooling breeze rattled the palms at last, they slid out upon the ‘burning waveless sea’ of the Malacca Straits; and early the next morning reached Malacca itself, one of the oldest European settlements in the East and looking its age with crumbled-tile roofs, decayed huts tipping towards the water, a ruined cathedral and a long empty jetty where a few junks creaked at anchor. As she was travelling under semi-official auspices, Isabella was at once given quarters in the old Stadthaus of Malacca that had once been the residence of the Dutch Governor and was now used by the British as ‘Treasury, Post Office and offices generally’. No other building evoked the city’s past so vividly as this rambling old residence with its vaulted ballroom where the stiff plump Hollanders used to tread their stately measures, and its empty rooms with tiled floors, blue walls, whitewashed rafters, ‘their doors and windows consisting of German shutters only, their ancient beds of portentous height, and their generally silent and haunted look’. The Dutch had captured Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641 and during the palmy days when it was a centre of their eastern trade, pink-cheeked Dutch soldiers paraded in the square below the Stadthaus windows, Dutch bells called the merchants and their families to worship in the nearby church, sturdy ships of the Dutch East India Company, freighted with the products of the peninsula – peppers and gold, tapioca and cloves – left the harbour for Macao, Bombay or Amsterdam. But, partly owing to the Company’s policy of monopolisation and an increase of trade at rival Penang, the importance of Malacca declined; the Company wound up its affairs there in 1799, and twenty-five years later the British took the port over. ‘Portuguese and Dutch rule have passed away,’ Isabella noted, ‘leaving as their chief monuments – the first, a ruined cathedral and a race of half-breeds; and the last, the Stadthaus and a flat-faced meeting house.’

  British occupation brought few monuments and little prosperity to Malacca, however, because, six years before it began, Stamford Raffles had landed on a swampy almost uninhabited island in the south called Singapore, and his coming soon resulted in the eclipse of the old port as a crossroads for the Far East trade. By 1879 few westerners lived there, no regular European steamers called, travellers seldom disturbed its somnolent beauty. The occasional visitor, like Isabella, quartered in the Stadthaus, was awakened each morning by a Mohammedan servant in white muslin bringing tea and bananas; before the sun grew molten, Mr Biggs, the colonial chaplain, student of hymnology, emerged from his bungalow and preserved his health and sanity with systematic constitutionals along the dusty streets; clouds massed above distant Mount Ophir and produced a shower every afternoon while the Portuguese half-castes took ‘endless siesta behind their closely covered windows’; after the shower, ‘The Governor’s carriage, with servants in scarlet liveries, rolls slowly out of Malacca, and through the sago-palms and back again’; the Malays spent the time ‘basking in the sun, or crawling at the heads of crawling oxen very like hairless buffaloes, or leaning over the bridge looking at nothing … their very movements making the lack of movement more perceptible’; at the end of the dreamy steamy day, alone in her room, Isabella breathed the languorous perfume of tuberose, bougainvillea, alamanda that twisted about the verandahs, listened to the aggressive whine of mosquitoes and the steps of two Malay guards thudding in the tepid dark below.

  Most of the business that did function was in the hands of the Chinese, who, as Isabella was to discover, wielded considerable economic power throughout the Peninsula. Chinese junks still rolled into harbour during every north-east monsoon stuffed with hopeful coolies from Canton or Fuchow seeking work – thirty years before, a skilled carpenter or tailor could be bought outright for about twelve dollars, a strong coolie for about eight, a sick one for three or less. Descendants of such men who had been especially industrious or fortunate now rode through Malacca’s streets in carriages as grand as the Governor’s, lived in bungalows on their own sugar or pineapple plantations, and loaded their women and children with coronals of diamonds, necklaces of filigree gold and emeralds.

  Lieutenant-Governor of this languid sinecure for many years was one Captain Shaw, a merry Irishman who arranged for Isabella to visit the nearby state of Sungei Ujong and asked her if she would take his two daughters with her to see the sights. Isabella was not at all keen on fledgling females as a rule, and though she agreed, it must have been reluctantly, for she was quite rude about them, even in print. The little party, ‘under the efficient protection of Mr Hayward’ the Police Superintendent, left by steam-launch a few days later, bound for the Sungei Ujong Residency, where the British Resident, Captain P. J. Murray, dwelt in unencumbered solitude.

  One of the questions that greatly exercised the minds of administrators in the Colonial Office and the Straits Settlements Government at the time, and has continued to interest historians of Malayan affairs since, concerned the proper function an
d status of these Residents. It seems to be generally agreed that, by the late 1860s, most of the native states were reduced to a condition of near anarchy by constant warring of rival claimants to the various Sultanates, by violent piracy and bloody feuds between strong-arm Chinese secret societies. It seems agreed too that the British maintained a deliberate policy of non-involvement during the 60s and that their main concern was to secure peaceful conditions for the consolidation of trade in the area rather than any outright extension of British sovereignty.

  By the early 1870s however, commercial pressures were so great and the States in such chaos, that the Colonial Office became convinced that, if it did not take an initiative, other European powers would intervene. Acting, therefore, on the time-honoured big-power strategy of staking the first claim, the new Governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Andrew Clarke, came to office in 1873 with instructions to broach ‘limited interference in the affairs of the Malay States for the preservation of peace and security, the suppression of piracy and for the development of roads, schools and police, through the appointment of a Political Agent or Resident for each State’. By the terms of the Pangkor Agreement which Sir Andrew ratified with certain Malay chiefs and Chinese headmen early in 1874, it was agreed that ‘the collection and control of all revenues and the general administration of the Country be regulated under the advice of these Residents’. Or, as Sir Frank Swettenham, later a Resident himself, put it, their function was ‘to advise the native Rulers and organise a system of government which would secure justice, freedom and safety for all with the benefits of what is known as civilisation’.

  This was quite a tall order, considering that, in the Malay States at the time, there was no centralised system of government and no concept of any form of public institution. Justice depended mainly on the caprice of the Sultan or village headman; freedom was only for those not enmeshed in the widespread and pernicious system of slavery; safety was largely a matter of being able to draw a quicker kris (dagger) than one’s enemy. The Residents were not invested with actual power to enforce the adoption of the counsel they offered, and there was constant disagreement between the Straits Settlement Government and the Colonial Office over how much initiative and authority they should be allowed. In these ambiguous circumstances, they had the choice, in the view of one modern historian, either of doing nothing much, or of giving ‘advice’ and then acting upon it themselves. Consequently it was already notorious that Residents and their Assistants, who were usually men of determination and energy, frequently exceeded their roles as mere counsellors and, to all intents and purposes, organised the affairs of the State to which they were assigned.

  Isabella, as she admits, knew scarcely anything of all this before she went to Malaya, but she happened upon the scene at a time when there was such a dramatic difference in the methods adopted by the three Residents then in office and such exciting potential for experiment, improvement – and error – that she became quite fascinated by the situation. In her view, the position in Sungei Ujong was that the reigning Datu Bandar (ruler), troubled by internal rivalries and external threats, ‘conceived the bright idea of supporting his somewhat shaky throne by British protection’. This roused some hostility from neighbouring chiefs at first, but after a small English force was sent in to kill off a few rebels, the situation stabilised, and by 1879 Resident Murray was ‘practically the ruler’ of the State. She concludes, ‘It is scarcely likely however that Sungei Ujong and the other feeble protected States which have felt the might of British arms and are paying dearly through long years for their feeble efforts at independence, will ever seek to shake off the present system which, on the whole, gives them security and justice’. For Isabella, as for most of the colonial administrators she met, British was Best; she did not question the ethics of prescribing western codes of political and moral order for the ills of an alien eastern people (even though she had just observed, with less than bounding enthusiasm, the process of headlong westernisation in Japan). However, her imperial bias did not preclude her from being sharply critical of some of the colonial administrators’ methods, and it was in this frame of mind – interested, observant, committed but not blindly prejudiced – that she, with the Misses Shaw and stalwart Mr Hayward, went to Sungei Ujong to meet its Resident.

  There were, first of all, difficulties of locomotion. Their steam-launch – ‘unseaworthy, untrustworthy, unrigged’ – chuffed irregularly up the peninsular coast and then inland along the Linggi River. Like most Malayan waterways, this was a turgid, greenish-grey stream eddying between the slimy, dank roots of the mangrove swamp. Lithe vipers slithered; turtles, alligators and allied saurians snoozed on the steamy mudbanks, and birds came in pop-art colours – lime, lemon and post-office-red parrots; jazzy-blue kingfishers; starling-size rainbirds with feathers of rich claret and black, white stripes, cobalt and orange beaks and shining emerald eyes. But, as the noonday sun stabbed white hot, the animal kingdom retired to its holes and shades, the natives slept, only the mad British were about, and even among them conversation flagged. The copper sheath of the launch’s gunwale blistered the touch, the Misses Shaw reclined, limp, pale, gasping under their parasols, the only sounds were the phut-phut of the dubious engine, the shrill of one wideawake insect, the leisurely plop of a submerging alligator.

  At the village of Permatang Pasir it turned out that the messenger who had been sent ahead to make arrangements for the onward journey had ‘served no other purpose than to assemble the whole male population … on the shore’. There they lounged, a sombre, aloof crowd, turbaned ‘Mussalmen’ in short jackets, full white trousers and red sarongs, and pot-bellied boys in ‘silver fig leaves and silver bangles only’. Upon landing, the foreigners were told that it was impossible to proceed far that evening, and they were offered a rest in the local police station while the matter was debated. It was a nice station in its way, perched high on stilts, its verandah shaded with palms, containing two low beds ornamented with red silk and gold embroidery for the constables and displaying on its wooden walls a ‘medley of rifles, krises, handcuffs, a “Sam Slick” clock, an engraving from the Graphic, and some curious Turkish pictures of Stamboul’. One policeman pulled a punkah outside for them, one brought coconut milk, and two mounted guard. Isabella would have enjoyed the experience but for the presence of the Misses Shaw, the younger of whom lay prostrate and shivering, stricken with a violent sick headache from the heat and declaring that she would not and could not move another inch.

  A small police station in the Malay jungle was not suitable for the young lady if she were truly ill with bilious fever, and Mr Hayward and Miss Bird ‘consulted assiduously’ over what should be done. Mr Hayward who ‘positively quailed at having the charge of these two fragile girls’, sat in a chair, mopped his brow, and kept saying, ‘“Oh … if anything were to happen to the Misses Shaw I should never get over it, and they don’t know what roughing it is; they should never have been allowed to come.” So I thought too as I looked at one of them lying limp and helpless on a Malay bed; but my share of the responsibility for them was comparatively limited. Doubtless his thoughts strayed, as mine did, to the days of travelling “without encumbrance”. There was another encumbrance of a literal kind. They had a trunk! This indispensable impediment had been left at Malacca in the morning, and arrived in a four-paddled canoe just as we were about to start.’ For start they did, after the sun went down, and they had dosed the patient with whisky to keep her upright. Worried Mr Hayward led the way, ‘carrying a torch made of strips of palm branches bound tightly together and dipped in gum dammar, a most inflammable resin; then a policeman; the sick girl, moaning and stumbling, leaning heavily on her sister and me; Babu [the servant] who had grown very plucky; a train of policemen carrying our baggage; and lastly, several torchbearers, the torches dripping fire as we slowly and speechlessly passed along. It looked like a funeral or something uncanny.’

  After this dismal traipse, they boarded a long-boat with a low circ
ular roof of attap (palm-leaf thatch), a craft most suitable for wriggling up the ‘muddy hurry’ of the shallow, corkscrew-twisted Linggi. The foreigners shared a blanket under the roof, the servants sat immobile in the prow, the voyage lasted for eighteen hours and was about as many miles long. Trees thrust out of the forest gloom, ‘trees to right of us, trees to left of us, trees before us, trees behind us, trees above us, and, I may write, trees under us, so innumerable were the snags and tree trunks in the river. The night was very still – not a leaf moved, and at times the silence was solemn. I expected indeed an unbroken silence, but there were noises that I shall never forget. Several times there was a long shrill cry, much like the Australian “Coo-ee”, answered from distance in a tone almost human. This was the note of the grand night bird, the Argus pheasant, and is said to resemble the cry of the “orang-utan”, the Jakkuns, or the wild men of the interior. A sound like the constant blowing of a steam-whistle in the distance was said to be produced by a large monkey…. Then there were cries as of fierce gambols, or of pursuit and capture, of hunter and victim; and, at times, in the midst of profound stillness, came huge plungings which I thought were made by alligators, but which Captain Murray thinks were more likely the riot of elephants disturbed while drinking.’