The (Acting)
Governor Of The Straits Settlements, Instead Of Representing To The
Sultan The Misconduct, Actual Or Supposed, Of His Officers, Sent A
War-Ship To Seize And Punish Them.
This attempt was resented by the
Selangor chiefs, and they fired on those who made it.
The Rinaldo
destroyed the town in consequence, and killed many of its inhabitants.
When the Viceroy, a brother of the Sultan of Kedah, retook Selangor two
years afterward, he found that what had been a populous and thriving
place was almost deserted, the few hovels which remained were in ruins,
the plantations were overgrown with rank jungle growths, and their
owners had fled; the mines in the interior were deserted, and the roads
and jungle paths were infested by bands of half-starved robbers.*
[*This account of Selangor does not rest on local hearsay, but on the
authority of two of the leading officials of the Colonial Government.]
Selangor is a most wretched place - worse than Klang. On one side of the
river there is a fishing village of mat and attap hovels on stilts
raised a few feet above the slime of a mangrove swamp; and on the other
an expanse of slime, with larger houses on stilts, and an attempt at a
street of Chinese shops, and a gambling-den, which I entered, and found
full of gamblers at noonday. The same place serves for a spirit and
champagne shop. Slime was everywhere oozing, bubbling, smelling putrid
in the sun, all glimmering, shining, and iridescent, breeding fever and
horrible life; while land-crabs boring holes, crabs of a brilliant
turquoise-blue color, which fades at death, and reptiles like fish,
with great bags below their mouths, and innumerable armor-plated
insects, were rioting in it under the broiling sun.
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