In The Morning And Evening, Spruce
Chinamen Stroll About Or Chat At Each Other's Doors, In Blue
Trousers, White Jacket, And A Queue Into Which Red Silk Is
Plaited Till It Reaches Almost To Their Heels.
An old Bugis hadji
regularly takes an evening stroll in all the dignity of flowing
green silk robe and gay turban, followed by two small boys
carrying his sirih and betel boxes.
In every vacant space new houses are being built, and all sorts
of odd little cooking-sheds are erected against the old ones,
while in some out-of-the-way corners, massive log pigsties are
tenanted by growing porkers; for how can the Chinamen exist six
months without one feast of pig?
Here and there are stalls where bananas are sold, and every
morning two little boys go about with trays of sweet rice and
crated cocoa-nut, fried fish, or fried plantains; and whichever
it may be, they have but one cry, and that is
"Chocolat-t - t!" This must be a Spanish or Portuguese cry, handed
down for centuries, while its meaning has been lost. The Bugis
sailors, while hoisting the main sail, cry out, "Vela a vela, -
vela, vela, vela!" repeated in an everlasting chorus. As "vela"
is Portuguese a sail, I supposed I had discovered the origin of
this, but I found afterwards they used the same cry when heaving
anchor, and often chanted it to "hela," which is so much an
universal expression of exertion and hard breathing that it is
most probably a mere interjectional cry.
I daresay there are now near five hundred people in Dobbo of
various races, all met in this remote corner of the East, as they
express it, "to look for their fortune;" to get money any way
they can. They are most of them people who have the very worst
reputation for honesty as well as every other form of morality, -
Chinese, Bugis, Ceramese, and half-caste Javanese, with a
sprinkling of half-wild Papuans from Timor, Babber, and other
islands, yet all goes on as yet very quietly. This motley,
ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish population live here without the
shadow of a government, with no police, no courts, and no
lawyers; yet they do not cut each other's throats, do not plunder
each other day and night, do not fall into the anarchy such a
state of things might be supposed to lead to. It is very
extraordinary! It puts strange thoughts into one's head about the
mountain-load of government under which people exist in Europe,
and suggests the idea that we may be over-governed. Think of the
hundred Acts of Parliament annually enacted to prevent us, the
people of England, from cutting each other's throats, or from
doing to our neighbour as we would not be done by. Think of the
thousands of lawyers and barristers whose whole lives are spent
in telling us what the hundred Acts of Parliament mean, and one
would be led to infer that if Dobbo has too little law England
has too much.
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