Towards The End Of November The Wet Season Set In, And We Had
Daily And Almost Incessant Rains, With Only About One Or Two
Hours' Sunshine In The Morning.
The flat parts of the forest
became flooded, the roads filled with mud, and insects and birds
were scarcer than ever.
On December Lath, in the afternoon, we
had a sharp earthquake shock, which made the house and furniture
shale and rattle for five minutes, and the trees and shrubs wave
as if a gust of wind had passed over them. About the middle of
December I removed to the village, in order more easily to
explore the district to the west of it, and to be near the sea
when I wished to return to Ternate. I obtained the use of a good-
sized house in the Campong Sirani (or Christian village), and at
Christmas and the New Year had to endure the incessant gun-
firing, drum-beating, and fiddling of the inhabitants.
These people are very fond of music and dancing, and it would
astonish a European to visit one of their assemblies. We enter a
gloomy palm-leaf hut, in which two or three very dim lamps barely
render darkness visible. The floor is of black sandy earth, the
roof hid in a smoky impenetrable blackness; two or three benches
stand against the walls, and the orchestra consists of a fiddle,
a fife, a drum, and a triangle. There is plenty of company,
consisting of young men and women, all very neatly dressed in
white and black - a true Portuguese habit. Quadrilles, waltzes,
polkas, and mazurkas are danced with great vigour and much skill.
The refreshments are muddy coffee and a few sweetmeats. Dancing
is kept up for hours, and all is conducted with much decorum and
propriety. A party of this kind meets about once a week, the
principal inhabitants taking it by turns, and all who please come
in without much ceremony.
It is astonishing how little these people have altered in three
hundred years, although in that time they have changed their
language and lost all knowledge of their own nationality. They
are still in manners and appearance almost pure Portuguese, very
similar to those with whom I had become acquainted on the banks
of the Amazon. They live very poorly as regards their house and
furniture, but preserve a semi-European dress, and have almost
all full suits of black for Sundays. They are nominally
Protestants, but Sunday evening is their grand day for music and
dancing. The men are often good hunters; and two or three times a
week, deer or wild pigs are brought to the village, which, with
fish and fowls, enables them to live well. They are almost the
only people in the Archipelago who eat the great fruit-eating
bats called by us "flying foxes." These ugly creatures are
considered a great delicacy, and are much sought after. At about
the beginning of the year they come in large flocks to eat fruit,
and congregate during the day on some small islands in the bay,
hanging by thousands on the trees, especially on dead ones. They
can then be easily caught or knocked down with sticks, and are
brought home by basketsfull. They require to be carefully
prepared, as the skin and fur has a rank end powerful foxy odour;
but they are generally cooked with abundance of spices and
condiments, and are really very good eating, something like hare.
The Orang Sirani are good cooks, having a much greater variety of
savoury dishes than the Malays. Here, they live chiefly on sago
as bread, with a little rice occasionally, and abundance of
vegetables and fruit.
It is a curious fact that everywhere in the Past where the
Portuguese have mixed with the native races they leave become
darker in colour than either of the parent stocks. This is the
case almost always with these "Orang Sirani" in the Moluccas, and
with the Portuguese of Malacca. The reverse is the case in South
America, where the mixture of the Portuguese or Brazilian with
the Indian produces the "Mameluco," who is not unfrequently
lighter than either parent, and always lighter than the Indian.
The women at Batchian, although generally fairer than the men,
are coarse in features, and very far inferior in beauty to the
mixed Dutch-Malay girls, or even to many pure Malays.
The part of the village in which I resided was a grove of cocoa-
nut trees, and at night, when the dead leaves were sometimes
collected together and burnt, the effect was most magnificent -
the tall stems, the fine crowns of foliage, and the immense
fruit-clusters, being brilliantly illuminated against a dark sky,
and appearing like a fairy palace supported on a hundred columns,
and groined over with leafy arches. The cocoa-nut tree, when well
grown, is certainly the prince of palms both for beauty and
utility.
During my very first walk into the forest at Batchian, I had seen
sitting on a leaf out of reach, an immense butterfly of a dark
colour marked with white and yellow spots. I could not capture it
as it flew away high up into the forest, but I at once saw that
it was a female of a new species of Ornithoptera or "bird-winged
butterfly," the pride of the Eastern tropics. I was very anxious
to get it and to find the male, which in this genus is always of
extreme beauty. During the two succeeding months I only saw it
once again, and shortly afterwards I saw the male flying high in
the air at the mining village. I had begun to despair of ever
getting a specimen, as it seemed so rare and wild; till one day,
about the beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with
large white leafy bracts and yellow flowers, a species of
Mussaenda, and saw one of these noble insects hovering over it,
but it was too quick for me, and flew away.
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