"He Is A Man Over
Middle Age, And Is Described As Being Of Considerable Ability, Feared
And Hated By Many
Of the chiefs, and as being of a fierce and cruel
disposition, but he was a proved man as to
His loyalty" (to British
interests), "and there being no desire on the part of the Government to
annex the State of Perak, his appointment was the wisest course that,
under the circumstances, could be pursued." This is all that the
greatest apologist for British proceedings in Perak has to say.
I was not prepossessed in his favor before I came, for among other
stories of his cruel disposition, I was told that it was "absolutely
true" that three years ago he poured boiling water down the back of a
runaway female slave who had been recaptured, and then put a red ant's
nest upon it. If "piracy" is to be the term applied to levying
blackmail, he was certainly a pirate, for he exacted a tenth of the
cargo of every boat which passed up his river, a Rajah higher up doing
the same thing. He is said to have a very strong character, to be
grasping, and to be a "brute;" but Mr. Low gets on very well with him
apparently. He is an elderly man, wearing a sort of fez on a shaven
head. He has a gray mustache. His brow is a fine one, and his face has
a look of force, but the lower part of it is coarse and heavy. He was
fanning himself with his fez, and when I crossed the veranda and gave
him a fan, he accepted it without the slightest gesture of thanks, as
if I had been a slave. When Mr. Low told him that I had been at
Koto-lamah, he said that the chief in whose house I had rested deserved
to be shot, and ought to be shot. He and Mr. Low talked business for an
hour; but all important matters are transacted in what is called a
native council.
I wrote that I believed myself to be the only European in Kwala Kangsa,
but I find that there was another at the time when I wrote thus - a
young man of good family, who came out here seeking an appointment. He
was sun-stricken three days ago, and violent fever and delirium set in,
during the height of which he overpowered four Sikhs who were taking
care of him, rushed out of doors, fell down exhausted, was carried
home, and died at four in the morning, his last delirious dreams being
of gambling and losing heavily.
The lamentable burial took place in the evening as the shadows fell.
This sums up the story - a career of dissipation, death at twenty-one, a
rough, oblong box, no one to be sorry. It made my heart ache for the
mother, who would have given much to be where I was, and see "the
dreary death train" move slowly to the dreary inclosure on a hill-top,
where the grass grows rank and very green round a number of white
wooden crosses, which mark the graves of the officers and soldiers who
fell in 1876.
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