When I saw the immense Laconia steaming into the harbour of Labuan, I could have believed myself in a London tube station, looking at the advertisements of winter cruises in the South Seas. But there is something more subtly and essentially real to be got out of the tropics than the amateur’s water-colour and the steamship poster—something which we can all dimly recognise, but to which no professional seer has yet taught us to give a definite outline. English landscapes were beautiful before Gainsborough was born, and men were moved by the contemplation of their beauty; but it was Gainsborough who made the loveliness clearly visible, who gave it a name and a definition.
The best pictures of the tropics are in books. There is more of the essence and the inward reality of the tropics in a book by Conrad or Herman Melville, more in a good passage by H. M. Tomlinson, more even in the rather maudlin Pierre Loti than in any existing painting of the places they describe. But description, even the description of the most accomplished writers, is very unsatisfying and inadequate. And it is no use practising symbolical evocations on those who have never seen the realities, which it is desired to evoke. For those who have eaten a mutton pie, it is all very well to speak of “dreams of fleecy flocks, pent in a wheaten cell.” But we may be quite sure that the congenital vegetarian would never succeed, with the help of only this recipe, in preparing the homely dish. The art of evocation is an admirable one; but when there is nothing in the reader’s mind to be evoked, it is practised in vain.
It is no use whistling to a dog which isn’t there. Symbolical evocation will never create a true picture of the tropics in the minds of those who have passed their lives in Bayswater. No, the only way of explaining to those who have never been there—as well as to those who have—what the tropics are really like, would be to distil them into pictures. The thing has never been done, and it seems to me quite probable, for the reasons I have already given, that it never will be.
KUDAT, NORTH BORNEO
The steamers from Singapore call at all the principal ports of British North Borneo. But the tourist who supposes that he will be able, at those places, to study those romantic beings “the Wild Men of Borneo,” is profoundly mistaken. At Kudat, it is true, we actually did see two small and dirty people from the interior, hurrying apprehensively along the relatively metropolitan street of that moribund little port as though in haste to be back in their forests. Poor specimens they were; but we had to be content with them. They were the nearest approach to wild men we had seen or were destined to see, the only genuine and aboriginal Borneans. For the rest, we saw only Chinese. Except for a few Englishmen they are the sole inhabitants of the ports. Labuan and Jesselton, Kudat and Sandakan are merely Chinese colonies.
And behind the ports, in the land that has been conquered from the forest—there too they are to be found. With the Javanese they work the big company-owned plantations, they cultivate small holdings of their own. And everywhere the shopkeepers, the merchants are Chinese. It is the same all over the archipelago and in the Malay peninsula. Not European capital so much as Chinese labour and perseverance is developing the East Indies. Abolish the Chinese, and European colonisation would be impossible. Or at least it would be a merely platonic and honorary colonisation. Flags might be planted without the assistance of the Chinese—but not rubber. It is pleasant, no doubt, it is soul-satisfying to look at the coloured bunting flapping in the tropical breeze. But it is still pleasanter to draw dividends. For this keener pleasure Europeans must thank the Chinamen.
SANDAKAN
Sandakan, like Jesselton, Kudat and, I suppose, all the other sea-coast towns of North Borneo, is a Chinese colony governed by a few white men inhabiting the bungalows in the suburbs. It is a picturesque place, has a marvellous natural harbour with a great red rock, like a second Gibraltar, to guard its entrance, and is the port and capital of a little hinterland of cocoanut groves, rubber and tobacco plantations. A club-house and a golf course proclaim it to be, if not a part of the British Empire, at least a protectorate. (Examined in detail and at close quarters, our far-flung Empire is seen to consist of several scores of thousands of clubs and golf courses, dotted at intervals, more or less wide, over two-fifths of the surface of the planet. Large blond men sit in the clubs, or swipe the white ball down clearings in the jungles; blackamoors of various shades bring the whisky and carry round the niblicks. The map is painted red. And to the casual observer, on the spot, that is the British Empire.)
But to return to Sandakan. Besides a club and a golf course, it possesses four steam-rollers and a superbly metalled road, eleven miles long. At the eleventh milestone, the road collides with what seems an impenetrable wall of forest and comes abruptly to an end. You get out of your car and, examining the wall of verdure, find it flawed by a narrow crevice; it is a path. You edge your way in and are at once swallowed up by the forest. The inside of Jonah’s whale could scarcely have been hotter, darker or damper. True, the jungle monster sometimes opens its mouth to yawn; there is a space between the trees, you have a glimpse of the sky, a shaft of thick yellow sunlight comes down into the depths. But the yawns are only brief and occasional. For the greater part of our stroll in the belly of the vegetable monster, we walked in a hot twilight. It was silent too. Very occasionally a bird would utter a few notes—or it might have been a devil of the woods, meditatively whistling to himself, as he prepared some fiendishly subtle and ingenious booby trap to terrify the human trespassers on his domain.
Nature is all very well half-way to the pole. Kept on short rations, she behaves decorously. But feed her up, give her huge doses of the tonic tropical sunlight, make her drunk with tropical rain, and she gets above herself. If Wordsworth had been compelled to spend a few years in Borneo, would he have loved nature as much as he loved her on the banks of Rydal Water? If the Excursion had been through equatorial Africa, instead of through Westmoreland, old William’s mild pantheism would have been, I suspect, a little modified.
It was with a feeling of the profoundest relief that I emerged again from the green gullet of the jungle and climbed into the waiting car. The Chinese chauffeur started the machine and we drove away, very slowly (for in Sandakan you hire a car by the hour, not by the mile; the drivers are marvellously cautious) we drove positively majestically down the eleven-mile road. I thanked God for steam-rollers and Henry Ford.
THE SOUTHERN PHILIPPINES
The Dutch and English were never such ardent Christians that they thought it necessary to convert, wholesale and by force, the inhabitants of the countries which they colonised. The Spaniards, on the contrary, did really believe in their extraordinary brand of Catholic Christianity; they were always crusaders as well as freebooters, missionaries as well as colonists. Wherever they went, they have left behind them their religion and with it (for one cannot teach a religion without teaching many other things as well) their language and some of their habits.
The Philippines were Spanish for upwards of three hundred years. They were neglected, it is true, they were governed at one remove, through Mexico; still they were Spanish. That is a fact of which you become aware the moment you set foot on the island of Sulu, the southernmost and, as it happens, the least Hispaniolised and Christian of the Philippines. At Zamboanga you are made more certain of it. At Manila it is fairly drummed into you. The landscape is familiarly tropical and East Indian. (Sulu is like a miniature Java, impossibly beautiful.) But the world into which you have stepped—you realise it at once—is unlike any thing of which you have yet had experience in the equatorial Orient. It is Spain—diluted, indeed, distorted, based on Malayan savagery and overlaid with Americanism, but still indubitably Spain.
The Dutch have been in Java for more than three centuries. Their colonists have freely intermarried with the natives; many have made the island their permanent home, have lived and died there and left their families behind them. But Java remains Javanese. The people have retained their clothes, their language, their religion; even in the towns, at the cosmopolitan ports, they are totally un-Dutch, just as the Malays of the peninsula, the Dyaks and Dusuns of Sarawak and North Borneo are totally un-English. If we had been as passionately Anglican as the Spaniards were passionately Catholic, the urban Malays would now be wearing cotton plus fours, talking cockney and, on Sundays, singing hymns A.
