A Tale of the Malacca Jungle Aboo Din’s first-born, Baboo, was only four years old when he had his famous adventure with the tiger he had found sleeping in the hot lallang grass within the distance of a child’s voice from Aboo Din’s bungalow. For a long time before that hardly a day had passed […]

An Adventure in the Pahang River There was a scuffle in the outer office, and a thin, piping voice was calling down all the curses of the Koran on the heads of my great top-heavy Hindu guards. “Sons of dogs,” I heard in the most withering contempt, “I will see the Tuan Consul. Know he […]

In the Straits of Malacca Two hours’ steam south from Singapore, out into the famous Straits of Malacca, or one day’s steam north from the equator, stands Raffles’s Lighthouse. Sir Stamford Raffles, the man from whom it took its name, rests in Westminster Abbey, and a heroic-sized bronze statue of him graces the centre of […]

The Malay’s Chief Garment No one knows who invented the sarong. When the great Sir Francis Drake skirted the beautiful jungle-bound shores of that strange Asian peninsula which seems forever to be pointing a wondering finger into the very heart of the greatest archipelago in the world, he found its inhabitants wearing the sarong. After […]

In an old dog-eared copy of Monteith’s Geography, I remember a picture of a half-dozen pirate prahus attacking a merchantman off a jungle-bordered shore. A blazing sun hung high in the heavens above the fated ship, and, to my youthful imagination, seemed to beat down on the tropical scene with a fierce, remorseless intensity. The […]

The Founding of Sarawak In the East Indian seas, by Europeans and natives alike, two names are revered with a singleness and devotion that place them side by side with the national heroes of all countries. The men that bear the names are Englishmen, yet the countless islands of the vast Malayan archipelago are populated […]

A Malayan Story If you run amok in Malaya, you may perhaps kill your enemy or wound your dearest friend, but you may be certain that in the end you will be krissed like a pariah dog. Every man, woman, and child will turn his or her hand against you, from the mother who bore […]

There were many monkeys–I came near saying there were hundreds–in the little clump of jungle trees back of the bungalow. We could lie in our long chairs, any afternoon, when the sun was on the opposite side of the house, and watch them from behind the bamboo “chicks” swinging and playing in the maze of […]

Being an Account of an Ascent of Mount Ophirin Malaya, by His Excellency, the Tuan Hakimof Maur, and the Writer. “And they came to Ophir, and fetchedfrom thence gold, four hundred andtwenty talents, and brought it toKing Solomon.”–1 Kings IX. 28. “For the King’s ships went to Tarshishwith the servants of Huram; everythree years once […]

The Story of a Malayan Girlhood. They called her Busuk, or “the youngest” at her birth. Her father, the old punghulo, or chief, of the little kampong, or village, of Passir Panjang, whispered the soft Allah Akbar, the prayer to Allah, in her small brown ear. The subjects of the punghulo brought presents of sarongs […]

A Crocodile Hunt at the foot of Mount Ophir. The little pleasant-faced Malay captain of his Highness’s three-hundred ton yacht Pante called softly, close to my ear, “Tuan–Tuan Consul, Gunong Ladang!” I sprang to my feet, rubbed my eyes, and gazed in the direction indicated by the brown hand. I saw not five miles off […]

A New Year’s Day in Malaya And some of its Picturesque Customs. My Malay syce came close up to the veranda and touched his brown forehead with the back of his open hand. “Tuan” (Lord), he said, “have got oil for harness, two one-half cents; black oil for cudah’s (horse) feet, three cents; oil, one […]

A Tale of Changhi Bungalow. We had been out all day from Singapore on a wild-pig hunt. There were eight of us, including three young officers of the Royal Artillery, besides somewhere between seventy and a hundred native beaters. The day had been unusually hot, even for a country whose regular record on the thermometer […]

The thermometer stood at 155 degrees in the sun. The dry lallang grass crackled and glowed and returned long irregular waves of heat to the quivering metallic dome above. The sensitive mimosa, at our feet, had long since surrendered to the fierce wooing of the sun-god, submissively folding its leaves and then its branches and […]

The Crowning of a Malayan Prince. Tunku Ibrahim was just past seventeen when his father, the Sultan Abubaker, chose to recognize him as his heir and Crown Prince of Johore. From the day when the little prince had been deemed old enough to leave his mother and the women’s palace until the day he had […]

A Peep at the City of Singapore. Could an American boy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights, be taken by a genie from his warm bed in San Francisco or New York and awakened in the centre of Raffles Square, in Singapore, I will wager that he would be sadly puzzled to even give […]

The Yarn of a Yankee Skipper The Daily Straits Times on the desk before me contained a vivid word picture of the capture of the British steamship Namoa by three hundred Chinese pirates, the guns of Hong Kong almost within sight, and the year of our Lord 1890 just drawing to a close. The report […]