Expedition leaves Java—The “Nias”—Escort—Macassar—Raja of Goa—Amboina—Corals and Fishes—Ambonese Christians—Dutch Clubs—Dobo.

On December 21st we left Batavia, and on Christmas Day, 1909, we sailed from Soerabaja in the Government steamer Nias, Capt. Hondius van Herwerden. The Nias, a ship of about six hundred tons, formerly a gun-boat in the Netherlands Indies Marine, is now stripped of her two small guns and is used by the Government as a special service vessel. Her last commission before embarking us has been to transport Mr. Lorentz on his expedition to the Noord River in New Guinea three months earlier. Now she was full to the brim of stores and gear of all sorts and her decks were crowded with men. There were five of us and ten Gurkhas. The Dutch escort consisted of Lieutenant H. A. Cramer in command, two Dutch sergeants and one Dutch medical orderly, forty native Javanese soldiers and sixty convicts, most of them Javanese. The convicts were nearly all of them men with more or less long sentences of imprisonment and some of them were murderers in chains, which were knocked off them to their great relief the day after we left Soerabaja. One of the best of the convicts, a native of Bali, was a murderer (see illustration, page 12), who did admirable service to the expedition, and was subsequently promoted to be mandoer.1

At Macassar we stopped a few hours only to add to our already excessive deck cargo, and to hear a little of the gossip of Celebes. I was interested to learn that the power of the Raja of Goa, whom I had visited a few years before, had come to an end. That monarch was an interesting survivor of the old native princes of the island. His kingdom extended to within three miles of Macassar, and he was apparently not answerable to any law or authority but his own. The place became a refuge for criminals fleeing from justice, and it was a disagreeable thorn in the side of the Dutch authorities, who were at last compelled to send a small expedition to annex the country. The Raja himself, it was said, came to a very unpleasant end in a ditch.

There had also been a small war on the east side of the island, which resulted in the pacification of the large and prosperous district of Boni. Now the Island of Celebes, which only a few years ago was dominated by savage tribes and where it was unsafe for an European to travel, has been almost completely brought within the Dutch administration, and it seems likely that its enormous mineral and agricultural wealth will soon make it one of the most prosperous islands of the Archipelago.

On December 30th we anchored in the harbour of Amboina, where we were joined by the last member of the expedition, Mr. W. Stalker, who had been for some months collecting birds in Ceram, and recently had been engaged in Amboina in recruiting coolies for the expedition. It had been expected that he would go to engage coolies in the KÉ Islands, a group of islands about three hundred miles to the south-east of Amboina, where the natives are more sturdy and less sophisticated than the people of Amboina; but circumstances had prevented him from going there, and we had to put up with the very inferior Ambonese, a fact which at the outset seriously handicapped the expedition. We stayed for two days at Amboina, or, as the Dutch always call it, Ambon, buying necessary stores and making arrangements with the Dutch authorities, who agreed to send a steamer every two months, if the weather were favourable, to bring men and further supplies to us in New Guinea.

Amboina is an exceedingly pretty place, and a very favourite station of the Dutch on account of its climate, which is remarkably equable, and its freedom from strong winds or excessive rain. There is a volcano at the north end of the island which has slumbered since 1824, and the place is very subject to earthquakes. A very serious one occurred as recently as 1902, which destroyed hundreds of lives and houses, whose walls may still be seen lying flat in the gardens, but as in other volcanic places the inhabitants have conveniently short memories, and the place has been re-built ready for another visitation.

Like most of the other Dutch settlements in the East, Amboina has been laid out on a rectangular plan, but the uniformity of the arrangement is saved from being monotonous by the tree-planting habits of the Dutch. The roads and open spaces are shaded by Kanari trees, which also produce a most delicious nut, and the gardens are hedged with flowering Hibiscus and Oleander and gaudy-leafed Crotons. Roses, as well as many other temperate plants, in addition to “hothouse” plants, flourish in the gardens, and the verandahs of the houses themselves are often decorated with orchids from Ceram and the Tenimber Islands. Birds are not common in the town itself except in captivity, and you see, especially in the gardens of the natives’ houses, parrots and lories, and pigeons from the Moluccas and New Guinea, and you may even hear the call of the Greater bird of paradise. Attracted by the many flowering plants are swarms of butterflies, some of them of great beauty. One of the most gorgeous of these is the large blue Papilio ulysses, which floats from flower to flower like a piece of living blue sky.

The harbour of Amboina is a wide deep channel, which nearly divides the island into two, and in it are the wonderful sea-gardens, which aroused the enthusiasm of Mr. Wallace.2 They are not perhaps so wonderful as the sea-gardens at Banda and elsewhere, but to those who have never seen such things before the many coloured sea-weeds and corals and shells and shoals of fantastic fishes seen through crystal water are a source of unfailing interest. The sea is crowded with fish of every size and form and colour. Nearly eight hundred species have been described from Ambonese waters, and it is worth while to visit the market in the early morning, when the night’s haul is brought in, and before the very evanescent colours of the fish have faded. Nearly every man in the place is a fisherman during some part of the day or night, and nobody need starve who has the energy to throw a baited hook into the sea. Most of the fish are caught either in nets very similar to our seine-net or in more elaborate traps which are mostly constructed by Chinamen.

The market is also worth visiting to see the variety of fruit and spices that grow in the island. Amboina has a peculiar form of banana, the Pisang Ambon, with white flesh, dark green skin, and a very peculiar flavour. Besides this there are many other kinds of bananas, mangoes, mangostines, guavas, sour-manilla, soursop, pineapples, kanari nut, nutmeg, cloves, and a small but very delicious fruit, the garnderia.

The native inhabitants of Amboina are a curious mixture of the aboriginal native with Portuguese, Dutch, and Malay blood. There is a strong predominance of the Portuguese type, which shows itself in the faces of many of the people, who still use words of Portuguese origin, and preserve many Portuguese names. A large number of them are Christians, and they rejoice in such names as Josef, Esau, Jacob, Petrus and Domingos.

New Year’s Eve was celebrated by a confusion of fireworks and gun-firing, which lasted from sunset until the small hours of 1910, and by an afternoon service in the Church attended by many hundreds of people. The women, who are usually in Amboina dressed entirely in black, wore for the occasion long white coats, black sarongs and white stockings. The men went more variously clad in straw hats, dinner jackets, low waistcoats, white or coloured starched shirts, coloured ties, black trousers, and brown boots. We were interested to find that the great bulk of the stuff from which clothes are made in Amboina is imported from England, and we were assured by a merchant who was interested in the trade that a man can dress himself in so-called European fashion as cheaply in Amboina as he can in this country.

An agreeable feature of life at Amboina, as at other places in the Netherlands Indies, is the hospitality of the Dutch people. A stranger of at all respectable social position is expected to introduce himself to the club, and the residents in the place feel genuinely hurt if he fails to do so. The Societat, or “Soce,” as it is everywhere called, is more of a cafÉ than a club according to English ideas, and it exists for conviviality and gossiping rather than for newspaper reading and card playing. It is not even a restaurant in the sense that many English clubs are; the members meet there in the evening but they invariably dine, as they lunch, at home. On the verandah in front of the club is a round table, at which sit after dark large men in white clothes smoking cigars and drinking various drinks. The foreigner approaches with what courage he may and introduces himself by name to the party severally. They make a place for him in the circle and thereafter, with a courtesy which a group of Englishmen would find difficulty in imitating, they continue the conversation in the language of the foreigner. An Englishman is at first a little staggered by the number of pait (i.e. bitter, the name for gin and bitters) and other drinks that his hosts consume, and which he is expected to consume also, but, as I remember noticing in the case of their neighbours the Belgians in the Congo, it appears to do them little if any harm.

In the larger places there is a concert at the club once or twice a week—at Bandoeng in Java I heard a remarkably good string quartette—and in almost every place there is a ladies’ night at the club once a week, when the children come to dance to the music of a piano or gramophone, as the case may be. It is a pretty sight and one to make one ponder on the possible harmony of nations—“Harmonie” is commonly a name for the clubs in the Netherlands Indies—to see small Dutch children dancing with little half-castes and, as I have more than once seen, with little Celestials and Japanese.

We left Amboina on New Year’s Day in a deluge of rain, and all that day we were in sight of the forest-covered heights of Ceram to the North. On January 2nd we passed Banda at dawn, and at sunset we got a view of the most South-west point of New Guinea, Cape Van de Bosch. On the morning of January 3rd we dropped anchor in the harbour of Dobo in the Aru Islands. For several miles before we arrived there we had noticed a marked difference in the appearance of the sea. Since we left Batavia we had been sailing over a deep sea of great oceanic depths, sometimes of two or three thousand fathoms, which was always clear and blue or black as deep seas are. Approaching the Aru Islands we came into the shoal waters of the Arafura Sea, which is yellowish and opaque and never exceeds one hundred fathoms in depth. We were, in fact, sailing over that scarcely submerged land, which joins the Aru Islands and New Guinea with the Continent of Australia.

Dobo has doubtless changed a good deal in appearance since Mr. Wallace visited it in 1857, the majority of the houses are now built of corrugated iron in place of the palm leaves of fifty years ago; but it cannot have increased greatly in size, for it is built on a small spit of coral sand beyond which are mangrove swamps where building is impossible. The reason of its existence has also changed since the time when it was the great market of all the neighbouring islands, for now it exists solely as the centre of a pearl-fishing industry controlled by an Australian Company, the Celebes Trading Company. Messrs. Clarke & Ross Smith, the heads of this business, rendered us assistance in very many ways, and the sincerest thanks of the expedition are due to them. The primary object of pearl-fishing is of course the collection of pearl-shell which is used for knife handles, buttons, and a hundred other things. Shell of a good quality is worth more than £200 a ton. The pearls, which are occasionally found, are merely accidentals and profitable extras of the trade. Some idea of the extent of this business may be learnt from the fact that more than one hundred boats employing about five thousand men are occupied in the various fleets.

We left Dobo, the last place of civilisation that many of us were to see for a year and more, on January 3rd; and here, as we are almost within sight as it were of our destination, it may be opportune to state briefly the geographical position of New Guinea, and to give a short account of its exploration.