PART IV.
INDIA
A regular and uniform system of spelling of native names and other words has lately been brought into common use in India, and adopted by the government. Not without hesitation, I have decided upon ignoring this improvement, and confining myself to spellings known to and used by the English in England, for whom especially I am writing.
I am aware that there is no system in the spelling, and that it is scientifically absurd; nevertheless, the new government spelling is not yet sufficiently well understood in England to warrant its use in a book intended for general circulation. The scientific spelling is not always an improvement to the eye, moreover: Talookdars of Oude may not be right, but it is a neater phrase than “Taâlukhdars of Awdh;” and it will probably be long before we in England write “kuli” for coolie, or adopt the spelling “Tátá hordes.”
CHAPTER I.
MARITIME CEYLON
WE failed to sight the Island of Cocoas, a territory where John Ross is king – a worthy Scotchman, who having settled down in mid-ocean, some hundreds of miles from any port, proceeded to annex himself to Java and the Dutch. On being remonstrated with, he was made to see his error; and, being appointed governor of and consul to himself and laborers, now hoists the union-jack, while his island has a red line drawn under its name upon the map. Two days after quitting John Ross‘s latitudes, we crossed the line in the heavy noonday of the equatorial belt of calms. The sun itself passed the equator the same day; so, after having left Australia at the end of autumn, I suddenly found myself in Asia in the early spring. Mist obscured the skies except at dawn and sunset, when there was a clear air, in which floated cirrocumuli with flat bases – clouds cut in half, as it seemed – and we were all convinced that Homer must have seen the Indian Ocean, so completely did the sea in the equatorial belt realize his epithet “purple” or “wine-dark.” All day long the flying-fish – “those good and excellent creatures of God,” as Drake styled them – were skimming over the water on every side. The Elizabethan captain, who knew their delicacy of taste, attributed their freedom from the usual slime of fish, and their wholesome nature, to “their continued exercise in both air and water.” The heat was great, and I made the discovery that Australians as well as Americans can put their feet above their heads. It may be asserted that the height above the deck of the feet of passengers on board ocean steamers varies directly as the heat, and inversely as the number of hours before dinner.
In the afternoon of the day we crossed the line, we sighted a large East Indiaman lying right in our course, and so little way was she making that, on coming up with her, we had to port our helm, in order not to run her down. She hailed us, and we lay-to while she sent a boat aboard us with her mail; for although she was already a month out from Calcutta and bound for London, our letters would reach home before she was round the Cape – a singular commentary upon the use of sailing ships in the Indian seas. Before the boat had left our side, the ships had floated so close together, through attraction, that we had to make several revolutions with the screw in order to prevent collision.
When we, who were all sleeping upon deck, were aroused by the customary growl from the European quartermaster of “Four o‘clock, sir! Going to swab decks, sir! Get up, sir!” given with the flare of the lantern in our eyes, we were still over a hundred miles from Galle; but before the sun had risen, we caught sight of Adam‘s Peak, a purple mass upon the northern sky, and soon we were racing with a French steamer from Saigon, and with a number of white-sailed native craft from the Maldives. Within a few hours, we were at anchor in a small bay, surrounded with lofty cocoa-palms, in which were lying, tossed by a rolling swell, some dozen huge steamers, yard-arm to yard-arm – the harbor of Point de Galle. Every ship was flying her ensign, and in the damp hot air the old tattered union-jacks seemed brilliant crimson, and the dull green of the cocoa-palms became a dazzling emerald. The scene wanted but the bright plumage of the Panama macaws.
Once seated in the piazza of the Oriental Company‘s hotel, the best managed in the East, I had before me a curious scene. Along the streets were pouring silent crowds of tall and graceful girls, as we at the first glance supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices; their hair carried off the face with a decorated hoop, and caught at the back by a high tortoise-shell comb. As they drew near, mustaches began to show, and I saw that they were men, while walking with them were women naked to the waist, combless, and far more rough and “manly” than their husbands. Petticoat and chignon are male institutions in Ceylon, and time after time I had to look twice before I could fix the passer‘s sex. My rule at last became to set down everybody that was womanly as a man, and everybody that was manly as a woman. Cinghalese, Kandians, Tamils from South India, and Moormen with crimson caftans and shaven crowns, formed the body of the great crowd; but, besides these, there were Portuguese, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Englishmen, Malays, Dutchmen, and half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled Arabian woman or a Veddah – one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle. Ceylon has never been independent, and in a singular mixture of races her ports bear testimony to the number of the foreign conquests.
Two American missionaries were among the passers-by, but one of them, detecting strangers, came up to the piazza in search of news. There had been no loss of national characteristics in these men; – they were brimful of the mixture of earnestness and quaint profanity which distinguishes the New England puritan: one of them described himself to me as “just a kind of journeyman soul-saver, like.”
The Australian strangers were not long left unmolested by more serious intruders than grave Vermonters. The cry of “baksheesh” – an Arabian word that goes from Gibraltar to China, and from Ceylon to the Khyber Pass, and which has reached us in the form of “boxes” in our phrase Christmas-boxes – was the first native word I heard in the East, at Galle, as it was afterward the last, at Alexandria. One of the beggars was an Albino, fair as a child in a Hampshire lane; one of those strange sports of nature from whom Cinghalese tradition asserts the European races to be sprung.
The beggars were soon driven off by the hotel servants, and better licensed plunderers began their work. “Ah safeer, ah rupal, ah imral, ah mooney stone, ah opal, ah amtit, ah!” was the cry from every quarter, and jewel-sellers of all the nations of the East descended on us in a swarm. “Me givee you written guarantee dis real stone;” “Yes, dat real stone; but dis good stone – dat no good stone – no water. Ah, see!” “Dat no good stone. Ah, sahib, you tell good stone: all dese bad stone, reg‘lar England stone. You go by next ship? No? Ah, den you come see me shop. Dese ship-passenger stone – humbuk stone. Ship gone, den you come me shop; see good stone. When you come? eh? when you come?” “Ah, safeer, ah catty-eye, ah pinkee collal!” Meanwhile every Galle-dwelling European, at the bar of the hotel, was adding to the din by shouting to the native servants, “Boy, turn out these fellows, and stop their noise.” This cry of “boy” is a relic of the old Dutch times: it was the Hollander‘s term for his slave, and hence for every member of the inferior race. The first servant that I heard called “boy” was a tottering, white-haired old man.
The gems of Ceylon have long been famed. One thousand three hundred and seventy years ago, the Chinese records tell us that Ceylon, then tributary to the empire, sent presents to the Brother of the Moon, one of the gifts being a “lapis-lazuli spittoon.” It is probable that some portion of the million and a half pounds sterling which are annually absorbed in this small island, but four-fifths the size of Ireland, is consumed in the setting of the precious stones for native use; every one you meet wears four or five heavy silver rings, and sovereigns are melted down to make gold ornaments.
Rushing away from the screaming crowd of peddlers, I went with some of my Australian friends to stroll upon the ramparts and enjoy the evening salt breeze. We met several bodies of white-faced Europeans, sauntering like ourselves, and dressed like us in white trowsers and loose white jackets and pith hats. What we looked like I do not know, but they resembled ships’ stewards. At last it struck me that they were soldiers, and upon inquiring I found that these washed-out dawdlers represented a British regiment of the line. I was by this time used to see linesmen out of scarlet, having beheld a parade in bushranger-beards and blue-serge “jumpers” at Taranaki in New Zealand; but one puts up easier with the soldier-bushranger than with the soldier-steward.
The climate of the day had been exquisite with its bright air and cooling breeze, and I had begun to think that those who knew Acapulco and Echuca could afford to laugh at the East, with its thermometer at 88°. The reckoning came at night, however, for by dark all the breeze was gone, and the thermometer, instead of falling, had risen to 90° when I lay down to moan and wait for dawn. As I was dropping off to sleep at about four o‘clock, a native came round and closed the doors, to shut out the dangerous land-breeze that springs up at that hour. Again, at half-past five, it was cooler, and I had begun to doze, when a cannon-shot, fired apparently under my bed, brought me upon my feet with something more than a start. I remembered the saying of the Western boy before Petersburg, when he heard for the first time the five o‘clock camp-gun, and called to his next neighbor at the fire, “Say, Bill, did you hap to hear how partic‘lar loud the day broke just now?” for it was the morning-gun, which in Ceylon is always fired at the same time, there being less than an hour‘s difference between the longest and shortest days. Although it was still pitch dark, the bugles began to sound the réveille on every side – in the infantry lines, the artillery barracks, and the lines of the Malay regiment, the well-known Ceylon Rifles. Ten minutes afterward, when I had bathed by lamplight, I was eating plantains and taking my morning tea in a cool room lit by the beams of the morning sun, so short is the April twilight in Ceylon.
It is useless to consult the thermometer about heat: a European can labor in the open air in South Australia with the thermometer at 110° in the shade, while, with a thermometer at 88°, the nights are unbearable in Ceylon. To discover whether the climate of a place be really hot, examine its newspapers; and if you find the heat recorded, you may make up your mind that it is a variable climate, but if no “remarkable heat” or similar announcements appear, then you may be sure that you are in a permanently hot place. It stands to reason that no one in the tropics ever talks of “tropical heat.”
In so equable a climate, the apathy of the Cinghalese is not surprising; but they are not merely lazy, they are a cowardly, effeminate, and revengeful race. They sleep and smoke, and smoke and sleep, rousing themselves only once in the day to snatch a bowl of curry and rice, or to fleece a white man; and so slowly do the people run the race of life that even elephantiasis, common here, does not seem to put the sufferer far behind his fellow-men. Buddhism is no mystery when expounded under this climate. See a few Cinghalese stretched in the shade of a cocoa-palm, and you can conceive Buddha sitting cross-legged for ten thousand years contemplating his own perfection.
The second morning that I spent in Galle, the captain of the Bombay was kind enough to send his gig for me to the landing-steps at dawn, and his Malay crew soon rowed me to the ship, where the captain joined me, and we pulled across the harbor to Watering-place Point, and bathed in the shallow sea, out of the reach of sharks. When we had dressed, we went on to a jetty, to look into the deep water just struck by the rising sun. I should have marveled at the translucency of the waters had not the awful clearness with which the bottoms of the Canadian lakes stand revealed in evening light been fresh within my memory, but here the bottom was fairly paved with corallines of inconceivable brilliancy of color, and tenanted by still more gorgeous fish. Of the two that bore the palm, one was a little fish of mazarine blue, without a speck of any other color, and perfect too in shape; the second, a silver fish, with a band of soft brown velvet round its neck, and another about its tail. In a still more sheltered cove the fish were so thick that dozens of Moors were throwing into the water, with the arm-twist of a fly-fisher, bare hooks, which they jerked through the shoal and into the air, never failing to bring them up clothed with a fish, caught most times by the fin.
In the evening, two of us tried a native dinner, at a house where Cinghalese gentlemen dine when they come into Galle on business. Our fare was as follows: First course: a curry of the delicious seir-fish, a sort of mackerel; a prawn curry; a bread-fruit and cocoanut curry; a Brinjal curry, and a dish made of jackfruit, garlic, and mace; all washed down by iced water. Second course: plantains, and very old arrack in thimble-glasses, followed by black coffee. Of meat there was no sign, as the Cinghalese rarely touch it; and, although we liked our vegetarian dinner, my friend passed a criticism in action on it by dining again at the hotel-ordinary one hour later. We agreed, too, that the sickly smell of cocoanut would cleave to us for weeks.
Starting with an Australian friend, at the dawn of my third day in the island, I took the coach by the coast road to Columbo. We drove along a magnificent road in an avenue of giant cocoanut-palms, with the sea generally within easy sight, and with a native hut at each few yards. Every two or three miles, the road crossed a lagoon, alive with bathers, and near the bridge was generally a village, bazaar, and Buddhist temple, built pagoda-shape, and filled with worshipers. The road was thronged with gayly-dressed Cinghalese; and now and again we would pass a Buddhist priest in saffron-colored robes, hastening along, his umbrella borne over him by a boy clothed from top to toe in white. The umbrellas of the priests are of yellow silk, and shaped like ours, but other natives carry flat-topped umbrellas, gilt, or colored red and black. The Cinghalese farmers we met traveling to their temples in carts drawn by tiny bullocks. Such was the brightness of the air, that the people, down to the very beggars, seemed clad in holiday attire.
As we journeyed on, we began to find more variety in the scenery and vegetation, and were charmed with the scarlet-blossomed cotton-tree, and with the areca, or betel-nut palm. The cocoanut groves, too, were carpeted with an undergrowth of orchids and ipecacuanha, and here and there was a bread-fruit tree or an hibiscus.
In Ceylon we have retained the Dutch posting system, and small light coaches, drawn by four or six small horses at a gallop, run over excellent roads, carrying, besides the passengers, two boys behind, who shout furiously whenever vehicles or passengers obstruct the mails, and who at night carry torches high in the air, to light the road. Thus we dashed through the bazaars and cocoa groves, then across the golden sands covered with rare shells, and fringed on the one side with the bright blue dancing sea, dotted with many a white sail, and on the other side with deep green jungle, in which were sheltered dark lagoons. Once in a while, we would drive out on to a plain, varied by clumps of fig and tulip trees, and, looking to the east, would sight the purple mountains of the central range; then, dashing again into the thronged bazaars, would see little but the bright palm-trees relieved upon an azure sky. The road is one continuous village, for the population is twelve times as dense in the western as in the eastern provinces of Ceylon. No wonder that ten thousand natives have died of cholera within the last few months! All this dense coast population is supported by the cocoanut, for there are in Ceylon 200,000 acres under cocoa-palms, which yield from seven to eight hundred million cocoa-nuts a year, and are worth two millions sterling.
Near Bentotté, where we had lunched off horrible oysters of the pearl-yielding kind, we crossed the Kaluganga River, densely fringed with mangrove, and in its waters saw a python swimming bravely toward the shore. Snakes are not so formidable as land-leeches, the Cinghalese and planters say, and no one hears of many persons being bitten, though a great reward for an antidote to the cobra bite has lately been offered by the Rajah of Travancore.
As we entered what the early maps style “The Christian Kyngdom of Colombo,” though where they found their Christians no one knows, our road lay through the cinnamon gardens, which are going out of cultivation, as they no longer pay, although the cinnamon laurel is a spice-grove in itself, giving cinnamon from its bark, camphor from the roots, clove oil from its leaves. The plant grows wild about the island, and is cut and peeled by the natives at no cost save that of children‘s labor, which they do not count as cost at all. The scene in the gardens that still remain was charming: the cinnamon-laurel bushes contrasted well with the red soil, and the air was alive with dragon-flies, moths, and winged-beetles, while the softness of the evening breeze had tempted out the half-caste Dutch “burgher” families of the city, who were driving and walking clothed in white, the ladies with their jet hair dressed with natural flowers. The setting sun threw brightness without heat into the gay scene.
A friend who had horses ready for us at the hotel where the mail-coach stopped, said that it was not too late for a ride through the fort, or European town inside the walls; so, cantering along the esplanade, where the officers of the garrison were enjoying their evening ride, we crossed the moat, and found ourselves in what is perhaps the most graceful street in the world: – a double range of long low houses of bright white stone, with deep piazzas, buried in masses of bright foliage, in which the fire-flies were beginning to play. In the center of the fort is an Italian campanile, which serves at once as a belfry, a clock-tower, and a light-house. In the morning, before sunrise, we climbed this tower for the view. The central range stood up sharply on the eastern sky, as the sun was still hid behind it, and to the southeast there towered high the peak where Adam mourned his son a hundred years. In color, shape, and height, the Cinghalese Alps resemble the Central Apennines, and the view from Columbo is singularly like that from Pesaro on the Adriatic. As we looked landwards from the campanile, the native town was mirrored in the lake, and outside the city the white-coated troops were marching by companies on to the parade-ground, whence we could faintly hear the distant bands.
Driving back in a carriage, shaped like a street cab, but with fixed venetians instead of sides and windows, we visited the curing establishment of the Ceylon Coffee Company, where the coffee from the hills is dried and sorted. Thousands of native girls are employed in coffee-picking at the various stores, but it is doubted whether the whole of this labor is not wasted, the berries being sorted according to their shape and size – characteristics which seem in no way to affect the flavor. The Ceylon exporters say that if we choose to pay twice as much for shapely as for ill-shaped berries, it is no business of theirs to refuse to humor us by sorting.
The most remarkable institution in Columbo is the steam factory where the government make or mend such machinery as their experts certify cannot be dealt with at any private works existing in the island. The government elephants are kept at the same place, but I found them at work up country on the Kandy road.
In passing through the native town upon Slave Island, we saw some French Catholic priests in their working jungle dresses of blue serge. They have met with singular successes in Ceylon, having made 150,000 converts, while the English and American missions have between them only 30,000 natives. The Protestant missionaries in Ceylon complain much of the planters, whom they accuse of declaring, when they wish to hire men, that “no Christian need apply;” but it is a remarkable fact that neither Protestants nor Catholics can make converts among the self-supported “Moormen,” the active pushing inhabitants of the ports, who are Mohammedans to a man. The chief cause of the success of the Catholics among the Cinghalese seems to be the remarkable earnestness of the French and Italian missionary priests. Our English missionaries in the East are too often men incapable of bearing fatigue or climate; ignorant of every trade, and inferior even in teaching and preaching powers to their rivals. It is no easy matter to spread Christianity among the Cinghalese, the inventors of Buddhism, the most ancient and most widely spread of all the religions of the world. Every Buddhist firmly believes in the potential perfection of man, and is incapable of understanding the ideas of original sin and redemption; and a Cinghalese Buddhist – passionless himself – cannot comprehend the passionate worship that Christianity requires. The Catholics, however, do not neglect the Eastern field for missionary labor. Four of their bishops from Cochin China and Japan were met by me in Galle, upon their way to Rome.
Our drive was brought to an end by a visit to the old Dutch quarter – a careful imitation of Amsterdam; indeed, one of its roads still bears the portentous Batavian name of Dam Street. Their straight canals, and formal lines of trees, the Hollanders have carried with them throughout the world; but in Columbo, not content with manufacturing imitation canals, that began and ended in a wall, they dug great artificial lakes to recall their well-loved Hague.
The same evening, I set off by the new railway for Kandy and Nuwara Ellia (pronounced Nooralia) in the hills. Having no experience of the climate of mountain regions in the tropics, I expected a merely pleasant change, and left Columbo wearing my white kit, which served me well enough as far as Ambe Pusse – the railway terminus, which we reached at ten o‘clock at night. We started at once by coach, and had not driven far up the hills in the still moonlight before the cold became extreme, and I was saved from a severe chill only by the kindness of the coffee-planter who shared the back seat with me, and who, being well clad in woolen, lent me his great-coat. After this incident, we chatted pleasantly without fear of interruption from our sole companion – a native girl, who sat silently chewing betel all the way – and reached Kandy before dawn. Telling the hotel servants to wake me in an hour, I wrapped myself in a blanket – the first I had seen since I left Australia – and enjoyed a refreshing sleep.