"Well, Some Day - All I Can Say Is, God Help Him!" But Then If
An Official Were To Be Krissed,
No matter how deservedly in Malay
estimation, a gunboat would be sent up the river to "punish," and would
kill,
Burn, and destroy; there would be a "little war," and a heavy war
indemnity, and the true bearings of the case would be lost forever.
Yesterday, after a detention on the bar, we steamed up the broad, muddy
Selangor river, margined by bubbling slime, on which alligators were
basking in the torrid sun, to Selangor. Here the Dutch had a fort on
the top of the hill. We destroyed it in August, 1871. Some Chinese
whose connection with Selangor is not traceable, after murdering nearly
everybody on board a Pinang-owned junk, took the vessel to Selangor. We
demanded that the native chiefs should give up the pirates, and they
gave up nine readily, but refused the tenth, against whom "it does not
appear that there was any proof," and drew their krises on our police
when they tried to arrest the man in defiance of them. 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.
We landed by a steep ladder upon a jetty with a gridiron top, only safe
for shoeless feet, and Mr. Hawley and I went up to the fort by steps
cut in the earth.
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