TWO WOMEN-WANDERERS.*
THESE two books of travels, both dealing with parts of the East hitherto barely known to English people, and both written by women, are yet very different in style, in character, and in subject. Mrs. Dominic Daly's account of the first per- manent settlement of the Northern Territory of . South Australia, as the extreme North-West of the Australian conti- nent is absurdly called, has the advantage of being written by one who, as the daughter of the first Resident or Governor, and the wife of one of the earliest prospectors for land and gold, had the best opportunities possible for describing the place and the life. But, on the other hand, one Australian, or, for that matter, Anglo-Saxon settlement anywhere is very much,, like another; and Mrs. Daly in the Northern Territory is so very much like Mrs. Smith anywhere from Hudson's Bay to Tas- mania, that there is a comparative tameness and sameness about her work which gives the reader the impression of having read it all before. There are the usual complaints about Government muddling, mosquitoes, snakes, black-fellows, and fevers, mixed with stories of gold-fields and gold-diggers which might have been culled from Bret Harte, or Rider Haggard, or the latest newspaper in any Colony. We know well the heroic young officer who, under the sobriquet of " Gentleman George," is devotedly nursed by and dies in the arms of his former servant and now chum, with a broken heart for the faithless Angelina who has married a rich rival; but though we do not doubt that his pitiful story was first heard by Mrs. Daly in 1873 in the Northern Territory of South Australia, we must confess to have assisted at his burial in a good many.other times and places, and to thinking that a whole chapter of sixteen pages is an undue allowance for so old an acquaintance. There is, however, just one novelty in Mrs. Daly's account of life at Port Darwin (which appears to be as lovely a harbour as was ever crowned with the British flag), and that is, that though, as in duty bound, she devotes whole
• (1.) Insulin& Experiences in the Eastern Archipelago. By Mrs. Forbes. London and Edinbureh : W. Blackwood and Sot s.—(:( ) Digging,Sguatting,and Pioneering Life. By Mrs. Dominic Daly. London : Sampson Low and Co.
pages on the labour question to the abuse of the white working men who object to the Colonies being flooded with Chinese or other cheap coolie labour, and insists on the impossibility of white workers in the Territory, she yet cannot help letting out that in the early days at Port Darwin, when every one, from Resident to cabin-boy, was working his hardest, morning, noon, and night, they were as healthy or healthier than any set of labourers in England. A few early speculators here, as else- where, want to monopolise the land, and make hasty fortunes by the introduction of a system of practical slavery, to the eternal sacrifice of the white colonist. It is devoutly to be hoped that in the interests of the permanent prosperity of Australia, they will not be allowed to have their way, and that the Northern Territory will be gradually developed by white settlers, instead of being prematurely forced by black coolies.
More interesting is Mrs. Forbes's book on the neigh- bouring region of the Dutch and Portuguese East Indian Islands. Mrs. Forbes accompanied her husband, a naturalist., in his wanderings in some of the most out-of-the-way of these out-of-the-way and little-known islands. The Dutch in Insulinde, or Insular India, have certainly shown one striking superiority over the English in Con- tinental India., in that in the East they live much more as the
Easterns do. The sudden plunge into Eastern life in Java, where Mrs. Forbes first landed, must have been like those sudden transportations one reads of in The Arabian Nights,
where a gentleman who went to bed in Cairo wakes up to find himself in airy attire at the gates of Damascus :--
" Hotels here are all similar in plan a quadrangle ;
the front block is the reception-hall, fronted by a verandah. The verandah is faced with marble, and disposed in it are numerous small tables, chairs, and lounges Passing from the verandah through the reception-hall, you find the dining-room extended back into the square. It is simply roofed, and flowers in pots and pendant creepers fill the open sides. The bedrooms out in the courtyard formed by the remaining three sides of the square have each a verandah furnished with a table and a lounging-chair, making, as it were, a parlour for the occu- pant of the bedroom behind As I returned (from the bath), at every cottage-door sat the occupants, the gentlemen lying back in their chairs, with their bare feet extended over the long ledges Ladies sat by them and below, and 'boys ' hurried hither and thither. . . . . The sarong and kabia form the native dress, adopted by the European ladies for comfort and con- venience in the climate, and worn by them as sleeping attire, as also during the day in a richer form Imagine a piece of calico two yards long cut from a web. Sew together the raw edges, and you have a petticoat, without band or hem. Imagine it covered with floral patterns, or curious devices of crawling creatures, or having a village with houses and scenes of daily life depicted on it, and you see a sarong, or skirt. Put this over your head, draw all the fullness in front, and form of this a large plait ; put round your waist to hold it a cord with a rich tassel depending, or a gay silk sash. Then put on a dressing jacket of fine lawn trimmed with lace ; loosen your hair and let it fall down your back ; slip your stockingless feet into Indian-looking pantoffies, with gilt or silver embroidery. Take now a fan in your hand, and promenade before your mirror."
And we wonder that any marriageable young woman in Insulinde remains unmarried for a month. Only in the evening European dress is assumed, when European dress is, of course, almost less than Eastern.
Batavia, the capital of Java., a beautiful city, a reproduc- tion of Holland, intersected with canals, but with the addition of lovely gardens of luxurious growth ; and under Dutch rule the natives appear to be peaceful, prosperous, and happy. From Batavia the Forbeses were going to Amboyna, and thence to Timor-Laut. The islands, Java especially, are splendid with indented creeks, and mountains 12,000 ft. high. Java is
as big, and Celebes—in which is Macassar (where, by-the-way, no one had even heard of Macassar oil)—is bigger than England. There is an extraordinary mixture of races ; Dutch rulers—except in Timor, part of which is Portuguese—
Malays, Arabs, Chinese, and Papuans constituting the popula- tion, Malay being the general language. Banda, the home of the nutmeg, is described as a sort of garden of the Hesperides, guarded by a dragon in the shape of an ever-smoking volcano called " Gunung Api," which, however, does not at present do anything but smoke, and its lower slopes are densely clothed with vegetation and population. The nutmeg at home, "a shining chestnut-brown nut, broidered with the deep-scarlet mace, nestles in the half-open pale-yellow shell, and is indeed a thing of beauty."
When Mrs. Forbes got to Amboyna, where her husband was going to explore as a naturalist, the Dutch Resident utterly
refused to offer them hospitality, or assist them in any way. They arrived on May 12th ; there was no steamer to take them on till June 18th ; no hotels, no English residents, no Euro- peans except Dutch officials ; and they had to take refuge with the " Captain of the Chinese "—who certainly treated them much better than it is to be feared an Englishman would have treated Chinese in a similar plight—and then to throw themselves on the chance friendship of native Rajahs up the country. These people are most of them nominally Christians, and Protestants to boot, but many are Mahommedans ; and Mrs. Forbes found the Mahommedan villagers much better to get on with than the Christians in manners and honesty. The Christians wear black in church, a relic of the influence of the Portuguese ; but these " garments pass from one generation to another, being worn only on Sundays and holidays." They plundered the strangers without mercy. Even the children "walk boldly up with a bright flower, which has dropped from some tree, stuck upon a twig pulled from a hedge,—' Fifty cents, master ; very rare ; never seen before.' Another follows with a butterfly whose wings are all braised and broken, and a beetle mutilated. He [her husband] : I do not care for any which are not perfect.' But, master, this is the kind of the insects in Waai. There are many such here, I assure you." Gin they adore, and the Rajah himself on one occasion got dead-drunk over it. But even the varnished Christian would appear to be superior to the unvarnished savage. In Timor-Iraut, when the travellers arrived there, they found the only representative of European rule in the island was a native " post-holder," or Resident, imported from one of the more civilised islands to set up the Dutch flag and instil some ideas of civilisation into the unadulterated native. The village where the writer made her home was, during the whole time of their stay, in perpetual terror of attack from neighbouring villages with which they were at war, and the trees near were adorned with heads and limbs of the enemy. Their newly born infants are swung in wicker-work cradles over a fire of dense smoke, alike for warmth and shelter from mosquitoes, night and day. The young men dye their hair golden with a preparation.of cocoa-nut, ash, and lime, and bind it with coloured handkerchiefs. The women do all the agricultural work as well as the domestic work, including bread-making and cloth-weaving. The men spend their time in fishing, hunting, and practising warlike sports and war- dances. Their burying arrangements are perhaps the most singular of their customs. " Those who die in war or by a. violent death are buried ; those who die at home are placed on the detached boulders of coral which dot the coast, or, if a. chief, on a platform erected on the shore," with the result that the part of the coast so used is sickening. Of course, they are superstitious to the last degree; and Mrs. Forbes gives an amusing account of a neighbouring native who suspected some of the villagers of having stolen his loin-cloth, rowing hurriedly to the village, springing out, going straight to the village-shed with a red flag, with uplifted hand cursing the village for some minutes, and then retiring as hurriedly as he had come. But all these interesting islands, at all events on the coast, are mere hotbeds of fever, and we do not remember to have read anywhere of such sufferings so pluckily borne as Mrs. Forbes's four attacks, when she was all alone in a but far up the country, and her husband away for a whole month exploring. This story alone would make this thoroughly interesting book worth reading.
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