Part 5
The creepers run from tree to tree, and writhe over the ground like gray serpents; ratans and climbing palms one hundred feet in length are common, while uncommon ones stretch to five hundred feet. There is one creeper with a blossom like a magnified white violet, and with all a wood-violet’s fragrance; but with only Dutch and botanical names on the labels, one wanders ignorantly and protestingly in this paradise of strange things. The rarer orchids are grown in matted sheds in the shade of tall trees; and although we saw them at the end of the dry season, and few plants were in bloom, there was still an attractive orchid-show.
But the strangest, most conspicuous bloom in that choice corner was a great butterfly flower of a pitcher-plant (a _nepenthes_), whose pale-green petals were veined with velvety maroon, and half concealed the pelican pouch of a pitcher filled with water. It was an evil-looking, ill-smelling, sticky thing, and its unusual size and striking colors made it haunt one longest of all vegetable marvels. There were other more attractive butterflies fluttering on pliant stems, strange little woolly white orchids, like edelweiss transplanted, and scores of delicate Java and Borneo orchids, not so well known as the Venezuelan and Central American orchids commonly grown in American hothouses, and so impossible to acclimate in Java.
Lady Raffles died while Sir Stamford was governor of Java, and was buried in the section of the palace park that was afterward (in 1817) set apart as a botanical garden, and the care of the little Greek temple over her grave near the kanari avenue was provided for in a special clause in the treaty of cession. The bust of Theismann, who founded the garden and added so much to botanical knowledge by his studies in Java and Borneo, stands in an oval pleasance called the rose-garden; and there one may take heart and boast of the temperate zone, since that rare exotic, the rose, is but a spindling bush, and its blossoming less than scanty at Buitenzorg, when one remembers California’s, and more especially Tacoma’s, perennial prodigalities in showers of roses. In 1895 Professor Lotsy of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, was called to assist the learned curator, Dr. Treub, in the management of this famous _Hortus Bogoriensis_, which provides laboratory and working-space for, and invites foreign botanists freely to avail themselves of, this unique opportunity of study. Over one hundred native gardeners tend and care for this great botanic museum of more than nine thousand living specimens, all working under the direction of a white head-gardener. The Tjiliwong River separates the botanic garden from a culture-garden of forty acres, where seventy more gardeners look to the economic plants—the various cinchonas, sugar-canes, rubber, tea, coffee, gums, spices, hemp, and other growths, whose introduction to the colony has so benefited the planters. Experiments in acclimatization are carried on in the culture-garden, and at the experimental garden at Tjibodas, high up on the slopes of Salak, where the governor-general has a third palace, and there is a government hospital and sanatorium.
Theismann’s famous museum of living twig- and leaf-insects was abandoned some years ago, the curator deciding to keep his garden strictly to botanical lines. One no longer has the pleasure of seeing there those curious and most extraordinary freaks of nature—the fresh green or dry and dead-looking twigs that suddenly turn their heads or bend their long angular legs and move away; or leaves, as delusive in their way, that detach themselves from a tree-branch and fly away. These insects bearing so astonishing a resemblance to their environment may be purchased now and then from Chinese gardeners; but otherwise, if one asks where they can be found or seen, there comes the usual answer, “In Borneo or Celebes,”—always on the farther, remoter islands,—tropic wonders taking wing like the leaf-insects when one reaches their reputed haunts.
All Java is in a way as finished as little Holland itself, the whole island cultivated from edge to edge like a tulip-garden, and connected throughout its length with post-roads smooth and perfect as park drives, all arched with waringen-, kanari-, tamarind-, or teak-trees. The rank and tangled jungle is invisible, save by long journeys; and great snakes, wild tigers, and rhinoceroses are almost unknown now. One must go to Borneo and the farther islands to see them, too. All the valleys, plains, and hillsides are planted in formal rows, hedged, terraced, banked, drained, and carefully weeded as a flower-bed. The drives are of endless beauty, whichever way one turns from Buitenzorg, and we made triumphal progresses through the kanari- and waringen-lined streets in an enormous “milord.” The equipage measured all of twenty feet from the tip of the pole to the footman’s perch behind, and with a cracking whip and at a rattling gait we dashed through shady roads, past Dutch barracks and hospitals, over picturesque bridges, and through villages where the native children jumped and clapped their hands with glee as the great Juggernaut vehicle rolled by. We visited the grave of Raden Saleh, a lonely little pavilion or temple in a tangle of shrubbery that was once a lovely garden shaded by tall cocoa-palms; and we drove to Batoe Toelis, “the place of the written stone,” and in the little thatched basket of a temple saw the sacred stone inscribed in ancient Kawi characters, the original classic language of the Javanese. In another basket shrine were shown the veritable footprints of Buddha, with no explanation as to how and when he rested on the island, nor yet how he happened to have such long, distinctively Malay toes. Near these temples is the villa where the poor African prince of Ashantee was so long detained in exile—an African chief whose European education had turned his mind to geology and natural sciences, and who led the life of a quiet student here until, by the exchange from Dutch to British ownership of Ashantee, a way was opened for him to return and die in his own country. There is a magnificent view from the Ashantee villa out over a great green plain and a valley of palms to the peaks of Gedeh and Pangerango, and to their volcanic neighbor, Salak, silent for two hundred years. Peasants, trooping along the valley roads far below, made use of a picturesque bamboo bridge that is accounted one of the famous sights of the neighborhood, and seemed but processions of ants crossing a spider’s web. All the suburban roads are so many botanical exhibitions approaching that in the great garden, and one’s interest is claimed at every yard and turn.
It takes a little time for the temperate mind to accept the palm-tree as a common, natural, and inevitable object in every outlook and landscape; to realize that the joyous, living thing with restless, perpetually threshing foliage is the same correct, symmetrical, motionless feather-duster on end that one knows in the still life of hothouses and drawing-rooms at home; to realize that it grows in the ground, and not in a pot or tub to be brought indoors for the winter season. The arches of gigantic kanari-trees growing over by-lanes and village paths, although intended for triumphal avenues and palace driveways, overpower one with the mad extravagance, the reckless waste, and the splendid luxury of nature. One cannot accept these things at first as utilities, just as it shocks one to have a servant black his shoes with bruised hibiscus flowers or mangosteen rind, or remove rust from kris- or knife-blades with pineapple-juice, thrusting a blade through and through the body of the pine. The poorest may have his hedge of lantana, which, brought from the Mauritius by Lady Raffles, now borders roads, gardens, and the railway-tracks from end to end of the island. The humblest dooryard may be gay with tall poinsettia-trees, and bougainvilleas may pour a torrent of magenta leaves from every tree, wall, or roof. The houses of the great planters around Buitenzorg are ideal homes in the tropics, and the Tjomson and other large tea and coffee estates are like parks. The drives through their grounds show one the most perfect lawns and flower-beds and ornamental trees, vines, and palms, and such ranks on ranks of thriving tea-bushes and coffee-bushes, every leaf perfect and without flaw, every plant in even line, and the warm red earth lying loosely on their roots, that one feels as if in some ornamental _jardin d’acclimatation_ rather than among the most staple and serious crops of commerce. Yet from end to end of the island the cultivation is as intense and careful, entitling Java to its distinction as “the finest tropical island in the world.” It is the gem of the Indies, the one splendid jewel in the Netherlands crown, and a possession to which poor Cuba, although corresponding exactly to it geographically and politically, has been vainly compared.
There were often interesting _table d’hôte_ companies gathered at noon and at night in the long dining-room of the Buitenzorg hotel. While many of the Dutch officials and planters, and their wives, maintained the wooden reserve and supercilious air of those uncertain folk of the half-way strata in society everywhere, there were others whose intelligence and courtesy and friendly interest remain as green spots in the land. There was one most amiable man, who, we thought, in his love of country, was anxious to hear us praise it. We extolled the cool breezes and the charming day, and said: “You have a beautiful country here.”
“This is not my country,” he answered.
“But are you not Dutch?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then Java is yours. It is the Netherlands even if it is India.”
“Yes; but I am from East Java, near Malang”—a section all of three hundred miles away, off at the other end of the island; but a strong distinction—an extreme aloofness or estrangement—exists between residents of East, West, and Middle Java, and between those of this island and of the near-by Sumatra, Celebes, and Molucca, all Indonesians as they are, under the rule of the one governor-general of Netherlands India, representing the little queen at The Hague.
Often when we spoke of “India” or “southern India,” or referred to Delhi and Bombay as “cities of India,” the Hollanders looked puzzled.
“Ah, when you say ‘India,’ you mean Hindustan or British India?”
“Certainly; that is India, the continent—the greater India.”
“But what, then, do you call this island and all the possessions of the Netherlands out here?”
“Why, we speak of this island as Java. Every one knows of it, and of Sumatra and Borneo, by their own names.”
The defender of Netherlands India said nothing; but soon a reference was made to a guest who had been in official residence at Amboyna.
“Where?” we inquired with keen interest in the unknown.
“Amboyna. Do you in America not know of Amboyna?”
Average Americans must confess if, since early geography days, they have not remembered carefully that one tiny island in the group of Moluccas off the east end of Java—an island so tiny that even on the school atlases used in Buitenzorg it is figured the size of a pea, and on the maps for the rest of the world is but a nameless dot in the clustered dots of the group that would better be named the Nutmeg Isles, since the bulk of the world’s supply of that spicy fruit comes from their shores.
Then, away down there, out of the world, I was taken to task for that chief sin and offending of my country against other countries—the McKinley Bill of so long ago.
“Why, _we_ couldn’t make any money out of tobacco while such a law was in existence,” said one Sumatra planter.
“But we are concerned with the prosperity of our own American tobacco-growers. It is for the Dutch government to make laws to benefit the tobacco-planters of Sumatra.”
“Ah! but you have new and better laws now since that last revolution in the States, and we are all planting all the tobacco we can. We shall be very prosperous now.”
VII
IN A TROPICAL GARDEN
The Buitenzorg passer proper is housed in a long, tiled pavilion facing an open common, on which the country folk gather with their produce twice a week, and, overflowing, stretch in a scattering encampment down the broad street leading from the gate of the Botanical Garden. The permanent passer, or regular bazaar in the covered building, is stocked with the staples and substantials of life, and is open every day. The town tailors have their abode under that cover, and squat in rows before their little American hand-sewing machines, and sew the single seam of a sarong skirt, or reel off a native jacket, while the customer waits. It is the semi-weekly, early morning, outdoor market of chattering country folk that most delights and diverts a stranger, however. The lines of venders, strung along the shady street and grouped under palm-patched umbrellas in the open, provide horticultural and floral exhibits of the greatest interest, and afford the most picturesque scenes of native life. The long street of the Tjina kampong beyond is dull and monotonous by comparison, for when Dutch rules force the Chinese to be clean and orderly all picturesqueness and character are gone from their quarter. All the tasseled lanterns and strips of vermilion paper will not “tell” artistically without their concomitant grease and dirt.
As a very new broom, a clever child pleased with the toy of a new employer, Amat, our mild-mannered Moslem servant, was a treasure and delight during those first days at Buitenzorg. He entered gleefully into the spirit of our reckless purchase from the heaps of splendid fruits poured from the great horn of plenty into the open passer. He gave us the name of each particular strange fruit, taught us the odd tricks and sleight-of-hand methods of opening these novelties of the market-place; and it was quite like kindergarten play when he unbraided and wove together again the ribbed palm-leaf reticules in which _dukus_ and such small fruits are sold. We carried baskets of strange fruits back to the hotel, and Amat added every vegetable curio and market’s marvel he could find to the heaps of fruits and flowers. Our veranda was a testing- and proving-ground, and there seemed to be no end to the delights and surprises the tropics provided.
Tons of bananas were heaped high in the passer each day, the great golden bunches making most decorative and attractive masses of color, and their absurd cheapness tempting one to buy and to buy. The Java _pisang_, or banana, however, is but a coarse plantain with a pinkish-yellow, dry pulp, of a pumpkiny flavor that sadly disappoints the palate. Yet it is nature’s greatest and most generously bestowed gift in the tropics, and it was pleasant to eat it picked ripe in its native home, instead of receiving it steam-ripened from Northern fruiterers’ warehouses. Every tiny village and almost every little native hut in Java has its banana-patch or its banana-tree, which requires nothing of labor in cultivation, save the weeding away of the old stalks. It was intended as a humane concentration of benefits when nature gave man this food-plant, four thousand pounds of whose fruit will grow with so little human aid in the same space of ground required to raise ninety-nine pounds of potatoes or thirty-three pounds of wheat; both those Northern crops acquired, too, only by incessant sweat of the brow and muscular exertion. The pisang is the tropical staff of life for whites as well as natives, as wholesome and necessary as bread, and an equivalent for the latter as a starchy food. It comes to one with the earliest breakfast cup, appears at every meal, arrives with the afternoon tea-tray, and always ends the late dinner as the inevitable accompaniment of cheese, the happiest substitute for bread or biscuits, tropical gourmets insist.
The lovely red rambutans (_Nephelium lappaceum_) we would have bought for their beauty alone—those clusters of seemingly green chestnut-burs, with spines tinted to the deepest rose, affording the most exquisite color-study of all the fruits in the passer. The spiny shell pulls apart easily, and discloses a juicy, half-transparent mass of white pulp around a central core of smooth stones. The duku, looking like a big green grape, a fresh almond, or an olive, contains just such another ball of pulp within its leathery rind, and both fruits much resemble the fresh _lychees_ of China in flavor. The _salak_, or “forbidden fruit,” is a hard, scaly, pear-shaped thing, which very appropriately grows on a prickly bush, and whose strange brown rind reminds one of a pine-cone or a rattlesnake’s skin. This scaly, snaky shell prejudices one against it; but the salak is as solid as an apple, with a nutty flavor and texture. It is not unpleasant, nor is it distinctively anything in flavor—nothing unique or delicious enough to make one seek hard or long for a second taste of it. The _jamboa_, the eugenia or rose-apple (_Eugenia malaccensis_), is a fruit of the same size and shape as the salak, and in spite of its exquisite coloring it impresses one as being an albino, a skinless or some other monstrous and unnatural product of nature. Its outer integument, thinner than any nectarine’s rind, shades from snow-white at the stem to the deepest rose-pink at the blossom end, and it looks as if it were the most fragrant, delicious, and juicy fruit. One bites into the fine, crisp, succulent pulp, and tastes exactly nothing, and never forgives the beautiful, rose-tinted, watery blank for its deluding. The _carambola_ (_Averrhoa_), the five-ribbed yellow “star-fruit,” popularly known in real Cathay as the “Chinese gooseberry,” is a favorite, fragrant study in spherical geometry, and the cutting apart of its triangular sections is the nicest sort of after-dinner amusement and demonstration; but its fine, deliciously acid pulp is usually known to one before he reaches Java. Its relative, the _bilimbi_, is the sharpest of acid fruits, and lends an edge to chutneys and curried conglomerates.
The breadfruit and its gigantic relative, the _nanko_ (_Artocarpus integrifolia_), or jackfruit, which often weighs thirty and even forty pounds, and is sufficient load for a man to bring to market on his back, are the vegetable mainstays of native life; but as both must be cooked to a tasteless mush to be relished, one is satisfied only to look at them in the passer. That swollen monstrosity, the nanko, grows goiter-like on the trunk of a tree, and is supported in ratan slings while the great excrescence ripens. One must speak of the breadfruit with respect, though, after all that scientists have said, philosophers and political economists have argued, concerning it. Since ten breadfruit-trees will support a large family the year round, and a man may plant that many within an hour and need give them no further care, Captain Cook observed that such a man has then “as completely fulfilled his duty to his own and future generations as the native of our less genial climate by plowing in the cold of winter and reaping in the summer heat as often as the seasons return.”
The prickly durian (_Durio Zibethinus_), which is almost as large as the nanko, has a pulp a little like that of a cantaloup melon, only smoother and more solid—a thick, creamy, “almondy-buttery” custard, which is agreeable to the palate, but offends the nose with an odor of onion and stale egg. It is spoken of with bitterness and contempt by most Europeans, is extolled as “the king and emperor of fruits” by Wallace and a few other intrepid ones, and the little English children in Java, who all are fond of it, call it “darling durian.” In 1599 Linschott declared it to surpass in flavor “all the other fruits of the world.” Crawfurd said that it tasted like “fresh cream and filberts,” a description which conjures up the cloying modern fantasia of English-walnut kernels in a mayonnaise. Another great one has said that “to eat durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience”; and Dr. Ward, in his “Medical Topography of the Straits,” says: “Those who overcome the prejudice excited by the disagreeable, fetid odor of the external shell reckon it delicious. From experience I can pronounce it the most luscious and the most fascinating fruit in the universe; the pulp covering the seeds, the only part eaten, excels the finest custards which could be prepared by either Ude or Kitchener.” One sees the monster retailed in segments in every passer; the natives are always munching it inconveniently to windward of one, and they not only praise it, but write poems to it, and respectfully salute the tree they see it growing on. This fruit of discordant opinions hangs high upon a tall tree, and is never picked, but allowed to fall to the ground when it becomes perfectly ripe. A falling durian is justly dreaded and guarded against by the natives, who tell of men whose shoulders have been lacerated and heads half crushed by the sudden descent of one of these great green cannon-balls. Its unpleasant odor is said to come with age, and they tell one that a freshly fallen durian is free from such objection; but the watched durian never falls, I found, after maintaining the attitude of the fox toward the grapes for a reasonable time before a durian-tree.
The papaya, a smaller custard-fruit, with unpleasant little curly gray seeds in the mess, is like a coarse, flavorless melon, but is highly extolled as a febrifuge and tonic. The much-heralded and disappointing cherimoyer is grown too, and mangos ripen in every yard; but the Java mangos are coarse and turpentiny, of a deep pumpkiny hue. Pineapples, the _nanas_, or Portuguese _ananassa_, grow to perfection all over the low, hot country; but one is warned to be careful in eating them, and they are called the most dangerous, the most choleraic and fever-causing of tropical fruits. The native orange on this south side of the equator is not orange at all, even when ripe, but its peel is a deep, dark, beautiful green, and its flavor unequaled. The big _Citrus decumana_, the pomelo of China, the _pumplemoos_ of Java, the Batavian lime in British India, the shaddock of the West Indies, and the grapefruit of Florida, appears in the passers, but is coarse, dry, and tasteless, save for the turpentine flavor, which does not lurk within, but stalks abroad.