PAGE 2
In The Golden Chersonese
by
Dyaks from Borneo idle by. Parsee merchants in their tall, conical hats, Chinese rickshaw runners and cart coolies, Tamil road-menders, Bugis, Achinese, Siamese, Japanese, Madras serving-men, negro firemen, Lascar sailors, throng the little square,–the agora of the commercial life of the city.
Such is Singapore, embracing all the races of Asia and Europe. Is it any wonder that the American boy is bewildered, standing there under the great banian tree with a Malay in sarong and kris by his side, singing with his syrah-stained lips the glorious promises of the Koran?
Look on the map of Asia for the southernmost point of the continent, and you will find it at the tip of the Malay Peninsula,–a giant finger that points down into the heart of the greatest archipelago in the world. At the very end of this peninsula, like a sort of cut-off joint of the finger, is the little island of Singapore, which is not over twenty-five miles from east to west, and does not exceed fifteen miles in width at its broadest point.
The famous old Straits of Malacca, which were once the haunts of the fierce Malayan pirates, separate the island from the mainland and the Sultanate of Johore.
The shipping that once worked its way through these narrow straits, in momentary fear that its mangrove-bound shores held a long, swift pirate prau, now goes further south and into the island-guarded harbor before Singapore.
Nothing can be more beautiful than the sea approach to Singapore. As you enter the Straits, the emerald-green of a bevy of little islands obstructs the vision, and affords a grateful relief to the almost blinding glare of the Malayan sky, and the metallic reflections of the ocean.
Some seem only inhabited by a graceful waving burden of strange, tropical foliage, and by a band of chattering monkeys; on others you detect a Malay kampong, or village, its umbrella-like houses of attap, close down to the shore, built high up on poles, so that half the time their boulevards are but vast mud-holes, the other half–Venice, filled with a moving crowd of sampans and fishing praus. A crowd of bronzed, naked little figures sport within the shadow of a maze of drying nets, and flee in consternation as the black, log-like head and cruel, watchful eyes of a crocodile glide quietly along the mangrove roots.
On another island you discern the grim breastworks and the frowning mouth of a piece of heavy ordnance.
Soon the island of Singapore reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and the fan-shaped outlines of the traveller’s palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling hills, the monotony of the foliage is relieved in places by objects which it all but hid from view. The granite minaret of the Mohammedan mosque, the carved dome of a Buddhist temple, the slender spire of an English cathedral, the bold projections of Government House, and the wide, white sides of the Municipal buildings all hold the eye.
Then a maze of strange shipping screens the nearing shore–the military masts and yards of British and Dutch men-of-war, the high-heeled, shoe-like lines of Chinese junks, innumerable Malay and Kling sampans, and great, unwieldy Borneo tonkangs.
For six miles along the wharves and for six miles back into the island extend the municipal limits of the city. Two hundred thousand people live within these limits; while outside, over the rest of the island along the sea-coast, in fishing villages, and in the interior on plantations of tapioca and pepper, live a hundred thousand more. Of these three hundred thousand over one hundred and seventy thousand are Chinese and only fifteen hundred are Europeans.
Grouped about Raffles Square, and facing the Bund, are the great English, German, and Chinese houses that handle the three hundred million dollars’ worth of imports and exports that pass in and out of the port yearly, and make Singapore one of the most important marts of the commercial world.