with ideal attractions. The island, seven hundred miles long, and described by Marianne North as "one magnificent garden of tropical luxuriance," has not yet become a popular resort of the average tourist, but though lacking some of those comforts and luxuries found under the British flag, it offers many compensations in the wealth of beauty and interest afforded by scenery, architecture, and people. The two days' passage from Singapore lies through a green chain of countless islets, once the refuge of those pirates who thronged the Southern seas until suppressed by European power. The cliffs of Banka, honeycombed with tin quarries, and the flat green shores of Eastern Sumatra, stretching away to the purple mountains of the interior, flank the silvery straits, populous with native proas, coasting steamers, sampans, and the hollowed log or "dug-out" which serves as the Malayan canoe. Patched sails of scarlet and yellow, shaped like bats' wings, suggest gigantic butterflies afloat upon the tranquil sea. The red roofs of whitewashed towns, and the tall shafts of white lighthouses emphasise the rich verdure between the silvery azure of sky and water. The little voyage ends at Tandjon Priok, nine miles from Batavia, for a volcanic eruption of Mount Salak in 1699 filled up the ancient harbour, and necessitated the removal of shipping to a deep bay, as the old city was landed high and dry through the mass of mud, lava, and volcanic sand, which dammed up the lower reaches of the Tjiligong river, and destroyed connection with the sea. The present model harbour, erected at tremendous cost, permits ships of heavy burden to discharge passengers and cargo with comfort and safety at a long wharf, without that unpleasant interlude of rocking sampans and reckless boatmen common to Eastern travel. A background of blue peaks and clustering palms rises beyond the long line of quays and breakwaters flanked by the railway, and a wealth of tropical scenery covers a marshy plain with riotous luxuriance. No Europeans live either in Tandjon Priok or Old Batavia, and the locality was known for two centuries as "the European graveyard." Flourishing Arab and Chinese campongs or settlements appear immune from the terrible Java fever which haunts the morasses of the coast, and the industrial Celestial who absorbs so much of Oriental commerce, possesses an almost superhuman imperviousness to climatic dangers.
In the re-adjustment of power after the Fall of Napoleon, Java, invaded by England in 1811, after a five years' interval of British rule under the enlightened policy of Sir Stamford Raffles, was restored to the Throne of Holland. The supremacy of the Dutch East India Company, who, after a prolonged struggle, acquired authority in Java as residuary legatee of the Mohammedan Emperor, ended at the close of the eighteenth century. Perpetual warfare and rebellion, which broke out in Central Java after the return of the island to the Dutch, taxed the resources of Holland for five years. Immense difficulties arrested and delayed the development of the fertile territory, until the "culture system" of forced labour within a certain area relieved the financial pressure. One-fifth of village acreage was compulsorily planted with sugar-cane, and one day's work every week was demanded by the Dutch Government from the native population. The system was extended to tea and coffee; and indigo was grown on waste land not needed for the rice, which constitutes Java's staff of life. Spices and cinchona were also diligently cultivated under official supervision, and the lives of many explorers were lost in search of the precious Kina-tree, until Java, after years of strenuous toil, now produces one-half of that quinine supply which proves the indispensable safeguard of European existence on tropic soil. The ruddy bark and scarlet branches of the cinchona groves glow with autumnal brightness amid the evergreen verdure of the Javanese hills, and the "culture system," as a financial experiment, proved, in spite of cavillers, a source of incalculable benefit to the natives as well as to the colonists of Java. As we travel through the length and breadth of an island cultivated even to the mountain tops with the perfection of detail common to the Dutch, as the first horticulturists of the world, we realise the far-reaching wisdom, which in a few decades transformed the face of the island, clearing vast tracks of jungle, and pruning that riot of tropical nature which destroys as rapidly as it creates. A lengthened survey of Java's political economy and past history would be out of place in a slight volume, written as a "compagnon de voyage" to the wanderer who adds a cruise in the Archipelago to his Eastern itinerary, but the colonial features of Dutch rule which have produced many beneficial results demand recognition, for the varied characteristics of national genius and racial expansion suggest the myriad aspects of that creative power bestowed on humanity made in the Divine Image, and fulfilling the great destiny inspired by Heavenly Wisdom.
JAVA.
BATAVIA AND WELTEVREDEN.
From the railway station at Batavia the comfortless "dos-a-dos," colloquially known as the sado, a vehicle resembling an elementary Irish car, and drawn by a rat-like Timor pony transports us to the fashionable suburb of Weltevreden, away from the steamy port and fever-haunted commercial capital. The march of modern improvement scarcely affects old-world Java, where jolting sado and ponderous milord remain unchanged since the early days of colonisation, for time is a negligeable quantity in this lotus-eating land, too apathetic even to adopt those alleviations of tropical heat common to British India. The Java of the ancient world was considered "The Jewel of the East," and possesses many claims to her immemorial title, but the stolid Dutchman of to-day contents himself with the domestic arrangements which sufficed for his sturdy forefathers, scorning the mitigations of swinging punkah or electric fan. The word Batavia signifies "fair meadows," and these swampy fields of rank vegetation, exhaling a deadly miasma, were considered such an adequate defence against hostile attack, that forts were deemed unnecessary in a locality where 87,000 soldiers and sailors died in the Government Hospital during the space of twenty years. Batavia proper is a commonplace city of featureless streets, brick-walled canals, and ramshackle public buildings, but the residential town of Weltevreden, suggesting a glorified Holland, combines the quaint charm of the mother country with the Oriental grace and splendour of the tropics. The broad canals bordered by colossal cabbage-palms, the white bridges gay with the many coloured garb of the Malay population, the red-tiled roofs embowered in a wealth of verdure, and the pillared verandahs veiled with gorgeous creepers, tumbling in sheets of purple and scarlet from cornice to floor, compose a characteristic picture, wherein Dutch individuality triumphs over incongruous environment. Waving palms clash their fronds in the sea-breeze; avenues of feathery tamarind and bending waringen trees surround Weltevreden with depths of green shadow; the scarlet hybiscus flames amid tangled foliage, where the orange chalices of the flowering Amherstia glisten from sombre branches, and hang like fairy goblets from the interwoven roofs of tropical tunnels, pierced by broad red roads. On this Sunday afternoon of the waning year which introduces us to Weltevreden, family groups are gathered round tea tables canopied with flowers and palms, in the white porticos of the Dutch villas, and the startling déshabille adopted by Holland in the Netherlands India almost defies description. The ladies, with stockingless feet thrust into heelless slippers, and attired in the Malay sarong (two yards of painted cotton cloth), supplemented by a white dressing-jacket, display themselves in verandah, carriage, or street, in a garb only fit for the bath-room; while the men, lounging about in pyjamas, go barefoot with the utmost sangfroid. The sarong, as worn by the slender and graceful Malay, appears a modest and appropriate garb, but the grotesque effect of native attire on the broad-built Dutchwoman affords conclusive proof that neither personal vanity nor a sense of humour pertain to her stolid personality. Dutch Puritanism certainly undergoes startling transformations under the tropical skies, and the Netherlands India produces a modification of European ideas concerning what have been called "the minor moralities of life," unequalled in colonial experience. An identical exhibition fills the open corridors of the Hotel Nederlanden, built round a central court, and the general resort of the guests during the hot hours of the January days. Evening dress is reserved for State occasions, and though sarong and kabaja be discarded at the nine o'clock dinner, the blouse and skirt of morning wear in England suffices even at this late hour for the fair Hollander, who also concedes so far to the amenities of civilisation as sometimes to put on her stockings. So much of life in Java is spent in eating, sleeping, and bathing, that but a small residuum can