The Chinaman Who "Farms The Opium" - I.E., Who
Purchases From The Government The Exclusive Right To Sell It - Pays For
His Monopoly About 50 Pounds Per Day.
It must be remembered, however,
that every man who smokes opium is not what we understand by an
"opium-
Smoker," and that between the man who takes his daily pipe of
opium after his supper, and the unhappy opium-slave who reduces himself
to imbecility in such dens as I saw in Canton, there is just as much
difference as there is in England between the "moderate drinker" and
the "habitual drunkard." Slavery is prohibited in Malacca, and slaves
from the neighboring State fly for freedom to the shelter of the
British flag; but there is reason to suppose that the numerous women in
the households of the Chinese merchants, though called servants, are
persons who have been purchased in China, and are actually held in
bondage. Apart from these exceptions, the Chinese population is a
valuable one, and is, in its upper classes, singularly public-spirited,
law-abiding, and strongly attached to British rule.
I saw no shops except those for the sale of fish, fruit, and coarse
native pottery, but doubtless most things which are suited to the wants
of the mixed population can be had in the bazaars. As we drove out of
the town the houses became fewer and the trees denser, with mosques
here and there among them, and in a few minutes we were in the great
dark forest of cocoa, betel, and sago palms, awfully solemn and
oppressive in the hot stillness of the evening. Every sight was new,
for though I have seen the cocoa-palm before, the palm-fringes of the
coral islands, with their feathery plumes have little kinship with the
dark, crowded cocoa-forests of Malacca, with their endless vistas and
mysterious gloom. These forests are intersected by narrow, muddy
streams, suggestive of alligators, up which you can go in canoes if you
lie down, and are content with the yet darker shade produced by the
nipah, a species of stemless palm, of which the poorer natives make
their houses, and whose magnificent fronds are often from twenty to
twenty-two feet in length. The soft carriage road passes through an
avenue of trees of great girth and a huge spread of foliage, bearing
glorious yellow blossoms of delicious fragrance. Jungles of sugar-cane
often form the foreground of dense masses of palms, then a jungle of
pine-apples surprises one, then a mass of lianas, knotted and tangled,
with stems like great cables, and red blossoms as large as breakfast
cups. The huge trees which border the road have their stems and
branches nearly hidden by orchids and epiphytes - chiefly that lovely
and delicate one whose likeness to a hovering dove won for it the name
of the "Flower of the Holy Ghost," an orchid (Peristeria elata) which
lives but for a day, but in its brief life fills the air with
fragrance. Then the trees change, the long tresses of an
autumn-flowering orchid fall from their branches over the road; dead
trees appear transformed into living beauty by multitudes of ferns,
among which the dark-green shining fronds of the Asplenium nidus,
measuring four feet in length, specially delight the eye; huge
tamarinds and mimosa add the grace of their feathery foliage; the
banana unfolds its gigantic fronds above its golden fruitage; clumps of
the betel or areca palms, with their slender and absolutely straight
shafts, make the cocoa-palms look like clumsy giants; the gutta-percha,
india rubber, and other varieties of ficus, increase the forest gloom
by the brown velvety undersides of their shining dark-green leafage;
then comes the cashew-nut tree, with its immense spread of branches,
and its fruit an apple with a nut below; and the beautiful bread-fruit,
with its green "cantalupe melons," nearly ripe, and the gigantic jak
and durion, and fifty others, children of tropic heat and moisture, in
all the promise of perpetual spring, and the fulfillment of endless
summer, the beauty of blossom and the bounteousness of an unfailing
fruitage crowning them through all the year. At their feet is a tangle
of fungi, mosses, ferns, trailers, lilies, nibongs, reeds, canes,
rattans, a dense and lavish undergrowth, in which reptiles, large and
small, riot most congenially, and in which broods of mosquitoes are
hourly hatched, to the misery of man and beast. Occasionally a small
and comparatively cleared spot appears, with a crowded cluster of
graves, with a pawn-shaped stone at the head of each, and the beautiful
Frangipani,* the "Temple Flower" of Singhalese Buddhism, but the "Grave
Flower" of Malay Mohammedanism, sheds its ethereal fragrance among the
tombs. The dead lie lonely in the forest shade, under the feathery
palm-fronds, but the living are not far to seek.
[*Plumieria sp.]
It is strange that I should have written thus far and have said nothing
at all about the people from whom this Peninsula derives its name, who
have cost us not a little blood and some treasure, with whom our
relations are by no means well defined or satisfactory, and who, though
not the actual aborigines of the country, have at least that claim to
be considered its rightful owners which comes from long centuries of
possession. In truth, between English rule, the solid tokens of Dutch
possession, the quiet and indolent Portuguese, the splendid memories of
Francis Xavier, and the numerical preponderance, success, and wealth of
the Chinese, I had absolutely forgotten the Malays, even though a dark-
skinned military policeman, with a gliding, snake-like step, whom I
know to be a Malay, brings my afternoon tea to the Stadthaus! Of them I
may write more hereafter. They are symbolized to people's minds in
general by the dagger called a kris, and by the peculiar form of frenzy
which has given rise to the phrase "running amuck."
The great cocoa groves are by no means solitary, for they contain the
kampongs, or small raised villages of the Malays.
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