The S.S. Rainbow - Sunset at Malacca - A Night at Sea - The Residency at
Klang - Our "Next-of-Kin" - The Decay of Klang - A Remarkable
Chinaman - Theatrical Magnificence - Misdeed of a "Rogue Elephant" - "A
Cobra!
A Cobra!"
S.S. "RAINBOW," MALACCA ROADS, February 1, 5 P.M.
I am once again on board this quaint little Chinese steamer, which is
rolling on a lazy ground-swell on the heated, shallow sea. We were to
have sailed at four P.M., but mat-sailed boats, with cargoes of
Chinese, Malays, fowls, pine-apples, and sugar-cane, kept coming off
and delaying us. The little steamer has long ago submerged her
load-line, and is only about ten inches above the water, and still they
load, and still the mat-sailed boats and eight-paddled boats, with two
red-clothed men facing forward on each thwart, are disgorging men and
goods into the overladen craft. A hundred and thirty men, mostly
Chinese, with a sprinkling of Javanese and Malays, are huddled on the
little deck, with goats and buffaloes, and forty coops of fowls and
ducks; the fowls and ducks cackling and quacking, and the Chinese
clattering at the top of their voices - such a Babel!
An hour later, "Easy ahead," shouts the Portuguese-Malay captain, for
the Rainbow is only licensed for one hundred passengers, and the water
runs in at the scuppers as she rolls, but five of the mat-sailed boats
have hooked on. "Run ahead! full speed!" the captain shouts in
English; he dances with excitement, and screams in Malay; the Chinamen
are climbing up the stern, over the bulwarks, everywhere, fairly
boarding us; and with about a hundred and fifty souls on board, and not
a white man or a Christian among them, we steam away over the gaudy
water into the gaudy sunset, and beautiful, dreamy, tropical Malacca,
with its palm-fringed shores, and its colored streets, and Mount Ophir
with its golden history, and the stately Stadthaus, whose ancient rooms
have come to seem almost like my property, are passing into memories.
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