Greater Britain Part 32

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, Pa.r.s.ees, 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 pa.s.sers-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 Pa.s.s, 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 a.s.serts 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 amt.i.t, 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-pa.s.senger 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 _reveille_ 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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-gla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed 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 paG.o.da-shape, and filled with worshipers. The road was thronged with gayly-dressed Cinghalese; and now and again we would pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sengers, two boys behind, who shout furiously whenever vehicles or pa.s.sengers 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 Bentotte, 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 ma.s.ses 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sing 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--pa.s.sionless himself--cannot comprehend the pa.s.sionate worship that Christianity requires. The Catholics, however, do not neglect the Eastern field for missionary labor. Four of their bishops from Cochin China and j.a.pan 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 ca.n.a.ls, and formal lines of trees, the Hollanders have carried with them throughout the world; but in Columbo, not content with manufacturing imitation ca.n.a.ls, 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 (p.r.o.nounced 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 p.u.s.s.e--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.

CHAPTER II.

KANDY.

The early morning was foggy and cold as an October dawn in an English forest; but before I had been long in the gardens of the Government House, the sun rose, and the heat returned once more. After wandering among the petunias and fan-palms of the gardens, I pa.s.sed on into the city, the former capital of the Kandian or highland kingdom, and one of the holiest of Buddhist towns. The kingdom was never conquered by the Portuguese or Dutch while they held the coasts, and was not overrun by us till 1815, while it has several times been in rebellion since that date. The people still retain their native customs in a high degree: for instance, the Kandian husband does not take his wife's inheritance unless he lives with her on her father's land: if she lives with him, she forfeits her inheritance. Kandian law, indeed, is expressly maintained by us except in the matters of polygamy and polyandry, although the maritime Cinghalese are governed, as are the English in Ceylon and at the Cape, by the civil code of Holland.

The difference between the Kandian and coast Cinghalese is very great.

At Kandy, I found the men wearing flowing crimson robes and flat-topped caps, while their faces were lighter in color than those of the coast people, and many of them had beards. The women also wore the nose-ring in a different way, and were clothed above as well as below the waist.

It is possible that some day we may unfortunately hear more of this energetic and warlike people.

The city is one that dwells long in the mind. The Upper Town is one great garden, so numerous are the sacred groves, vocal with the song of the Eastern orioles, but here and there are dotted about paG.o.da-shaped temples, identical in form with those of Tartary two thousand miles away, and from these there proceeds a roar of tomtoms that almost drowns the song. One of these temples contains the holiest of Buddhist relics, the tooth of Buddha, which is yearly carried in a grand procession. When we first annexed the Kandian kingdom, we recognized the Buddhist Church, made our officers take part in the procession of the Sacred Tooth, and sent a State offering to the shrine. Times are changed since then, but the Buddhist priests are still exempt from certain taxes. All round the sacred inclosures are ornamented walls, with holy sculptured figures; and in the Lower Town are fresh-water lakes and tanks, formed by damming the Mavaliganga River, and also, in some measure, holy. An atmosphere of Buddhism pervades all Kandy.

From Kandy, I visited the coffee-district of which it is the capital and center, but I was much disappointed with regard to the amount of land that is still open to coffee-cultivation. At the Government Botanic Garden at Peredenia (where the jalap plant, the castor-oil plant, and the ipecacuanha were growing side by side), I was told that the shrub does not flourish under 1500 nor over 3000 or 4000 feet above sea-level, and that all the best coffee-land is already planted. Coffee-growing has already done so much for Ceylon that it is to be hoped that it has not reached its limit: in thirty-three years it has doubled her trade ten times, and to England alone she now sends two millions' worth of coffee every year. The central district of the island, in which lie the hills and coffee-country, is, with the exception of the towns, politically not a portion of Ceylon: there are English capital, English management, and Indian labor, and the cocoa-palm is unknown; Tamil laborers are exclusively employed upon the plantations, although the carrying trade, involving but little labor, is in the hands of the Cinghalese. No such official discouragement is shown to the European planters in Ceylon as that which they experience in India; and were there but more good coffee-lands and more capital, all would be well. The planters say that, after two years' heavy expenditure and dead loss, 20 per cent. can be made by men who take in sufficient capital, but that no one ever does take capital enough for the land he buys, and that they all have to borrow from one of the Columbo companies at 12 per cent., and are then bound to ship their coffee through that company alone. It is regarded as an open question by many disinterested friends of Ceylon whether it might not be wise for the local government to advance money to the planters; but besides the fear of jobbery, there is the objection to this course, that the government, becoming interested in the success of coffee-planting, might also come to connive at the oppression of the native laborers. This oppression of the people lies at the bottom of that Dutch system which is often held up for our imitation in Ceylon.

Those who narrate to us the effects of the Java system forget that it is not denied that in the tropical islands, with an idle population and a rich soil, compulsory labor may be the only way of developing the resources of the countries, but they fail to show the justification for our developing the resources of the country by such means. The Dutch culture-system puts a planter down upon the crown lands, and, having made advances to him, leaves it to him to find out how he shall repay the government. Forced labor--under whatever name--is the natural result.

The Dutch, moreover, bribe the great native chiefs by princely salaries and vast percentage upon the crops their people raise, and force the native agriculturists to grow spices for the Royal Market of Amsterdam.

Of the purchase of these spices the government has a monopoly: it buys them at what price it will, and, selling again in Europe to the world, clears annually some 4,000,000 sterling by the job. That plunder, slavery, and famine often follow the extension of their system is nothing to the Dutch. Strict press-laws prevent the Dutch at home from hearing anything of the discontent in Java, except when famine or insurrection calls attention to the isle; and 4,000,000 a year profit, and half the expenses of their navy paid for them by one island in the Eastern seas, make up for many deaths of brown-faced people by starvation.

The Dutch often deny that the government retains the monopoly of export; but the fact of the matter is that the Dutch Trading Company, who have the monopoly of the exports of the produce of crown lands--which amount to two-thirds of the total exports of the isle--are mere agents of the government.

It is hard to say that, apart from the nature of the culture-system, the Dutch principle of making a profit out of the countries which they rule is inconsistent with the position of a Christian nation. It is the ancient system of countries having possessions in the East, and upon our side we are not able to show any definite reasons in favor of our course of scrupulously keeping separate the Indian revenue, and spending Indian profits upon India and Cinghalese in Ceylon, except such reasons as would logically lead to our quitting India altogether. That the Dutch should make a profit out of Java is perhaps not more immoral than that they should be there. At the same time, the character of the Dutch system lowers the tone of the whole Dutch nation, and especially of those who have any connection with the Indies, and effectually prevents future amendment. With our system, there is some chance of right being done, so small is our self-interest in the wrong. From the fact that no surplus is sent home from Ceylon, she is at least free from that bane of Java,--the desire of the local authorities to increase as much as possible the valuable productions of their districts, even at the risk of famine, provided only that they may hope to put off the famine until after their time--a desire that produces the result that subaltern Dutch officers who observe in their integrity the admirable rules which have been made for the protection of the native population are heartily abused for their ridiculous scrupulosity, as it is styled.

Not to be carried away by the material success of the Dutch system, it is as well to bear in mind its secret history. A private company--the Dutch Trading Society--was founded at Amsterdam in 1824, the then King being the largest shareholder. The company was in difficulties in 1830, when the King, finding he was losing money fast, sent out as Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies his personal friend Van den Bosch. The next year, the culture-system, with all its attendant horrors, was introduced into Java by Van den Bosch, the Dutch Trading Society being made agents for the government. The result was the extraordinary prosperity of the company, and the leaving by the merchant-king of a private fortune of fabulous amount.

The Dutch system has been defended by every conceivable kind of blind misrepresentation; it has even been declared, by writers who ought certainly to know better, that the four millions of surplus that Holland draws from Java, being profits on trade, are not taxation! Even the blindest admirers of the system are forced, however, to admit that it involves the absolute prohibition of missionary enterprise, and total exclusion from knowledge of the Java people.

The Ceylon planters have at present political as well as financial difficulties on their hands. They have pet.i.tioned the Queen for "self-government for Ceylon," and for control of the revenue by "representatives of the public"--excellent principles, if "public" meant public, and "Ceylon," Ceylon; but, when we inquire of the planters what they really mean, we find that by "Ceylon" they understand Galle and Columbo Fort, and by "the public" they mean themselves. There are at present six unofficial members of the Council: of these, the whites have three members, the Dutch burghers one, and the natives two; and the planters expect the same proportions to be kept in a Council to which supreme power shall be intrusted in the disposition of the revenues.

They are, indeed, careful to explain that they in no way desire the extension of representative inst.i.tutions to Ceylon.

The first thing that strikes the English traveler in Ceylon is the apparent slightness of our hold upon the country. In my journey from Galle to Columbo, by early morning and mid-day, I met no white man; from Columbo to Kandy, I traveled with one, but met none; at Kandy, I saw no whites; at Nuwara Ellia, not half a dozen. On my return, I saw no whites between Nuwara Ellia and Ambe p.u.s.s.e, where there was a white man in the railway-station; and on my return by evening from Columbo to Galle, in all the thronging crowds along the roads there was not a single European. There are hundreds of Cinghalese in the interior who live and die and never see a white man. Out of the two and a quarter millions of people who dwell in what the planters call the "colony of Ceylon," there are but 3000 Europeans, of whom 1500 are our soldiers, and 250 our civilians. Of the European non-official cla.s.s, there are but 1300 persons, or about 500 grown-up men. The proposition of the Planters'

a.s.sociation is that we should confide the despotic government over two and a quarter millions of Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Hindoo laborers to these 500 English Christian employers. It is not the Ceylon planters who have a grievance against us, but we who have a serious complaint against them; so flourishing a dependency should certainly provide for all the costs of her defense.

Some of the mountain views between Kandy and Nuwara Ellia are full of grandeur, though they lack the New Zealand snows; but none can match, for variety and color, that which I saw on may return from the ascent to the Kaduganava Pa.s.s, where you look over a foreground of giant-leaved talipot and slender areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the scarlet blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with banyan-tree groves and broken by wooded hills. On either side, the deep valley-bottoms are carpeted with bright green--the wet rice-lands, or terraced paddy-fields, from which the natives gather crop after crop throughout the year.

In the union of rich foliage with deep color and grand forms, no scenery save that of New Zealand can bear comparison with that of the hill country of Ceylon, unless, indeed, it be the scenery of Java and the far Eastern Isles.

CHAPTER III.

MADRAS TO CALCUTTA.

SPENDING but a single day in Madras--an inferior Columbo--I pa.s.sed on to Calcutta with a pleasant remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs about the chief city of what is still called by Bengal civilians "The Benighted Presidency." Small as are the houses, poor as are the shops, every one looks well-to-do, and everybody happy, from the not undeservedly famed cooks at the club to the catamaran men on the sh.o.r.e.

Coffee and good government have of late done much for Madras.

The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is altogether inferior to the fine-weather swell on the west coast of New Zealand, and only to be dignified and promoted into surfship by men of that fine imagination which will lead them to sniff the spices a day before they reach Ceylon, or the pork and mola.s.ses when off Nantucket light-ship. The row through the first roller in the lumbering Ma.s.sullah boat, manned by a dozen sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the first and second lines of spray, and then the dash for sh.o.r.e, the crew singing their measured "Ah! lah! lalala!--ah! lah! lalala!" the stroke coming with the accented syllable, and the helmsman shrieking with excitement, is a more pretentious ceremony than that which accompanies the crossing of Hokitika bar, but the pa.s.sage is a far less dangerous one. The Ma.s.sullah boats are like empty hay-barges on the Thames, but built without nails, so that they "give" instead of breaking up when battered by the sand on one side and the seas upon the other. This is a very wise precaution in the case of boats which are always made to take the sh.o.r.e broadside on. The first sea that strikes the boat either shoots the pa.s.senger on to the dry sand, or puts him where he can easily be caught by the natives on the beach, but the Ma.s.sullah boat herself gets a terrible banging before the crew can haul her out of reach of the seas.

Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm-tree, but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly, steaming between light-houses, guard-ships, and buoys, but not catching a glimpse of the low land of the Sunderabunds till we had been many hours in "the river." After lying right off the tiger-infested island of Saugur, we started on our run up to Calcutta before the sun was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene was English; there was nothing tropical about it except the mist upon the land; and low villas and distant factory-chimneys reminded one of the Thames between Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, where large ships anchor before they sail, we had a long, low building on our right, gaudy and architecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost imposing: it was the palace of the dethroned King of Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried on deeds become impossible in Lucknow.