supplied us with pieces of the latter to eat—very refreshing and nice, but the juice ran all over your hands. As for pine-apples, we soon got tired of them; but they made good tarts, and, mixed with plantains and lime-juice, a very pleasant and useful jam.
In clearing the hill our workmen disturbed the haunts of many snakes. We were a good deal visited by cobras for some years. The natives said that the Adam and Eve of all the cobras lived in a cave under our hill.
One day we were having asphalte laid down in the printing-room, to keep away white ants. The room had been emptied to do this, and Stahl went in to inspect the work after the men had gone to their breakfast at eleven o'clock. He saw a large cobra at the end of the room, and hit it with a stick he had in his hand; but the stick broke in two, and the cobra reared itself up with inflated hood. Another minute must have seen Stahl a prey to the monster; but the Bishop, passing by, heard him exclaim when the stick broke, and going quickly in saw Stahl standing, white, fascinated, and motionless, before the cobra. Happily he had a stout walking-stick, and at once felled the reptile; but he took a good deal of killing. It was ten feet long.
This was Adam.
Eve was killed under the verandah of the house almost a year afterwards. She was eight feet long.
One night the Bishop had been reading the Rev. F. Robertson's sermon about St. Paul and the viper. It was late, and being rather sleepy he carried the book in one hand and a candle in the other into his dressing-room, and was just going to set the candle down, when his eye fell on a cobra, coiled up on the chair on which he was about to seat himself. No stick was at hand, but he smote the snake with the book. Struck in the right place, they are not difficult to kill. So "St. Paul and the Viper" put an end to the cobra. That the bite of this snake is not, however, certain death we had a curious instance.
One of our servants, a very strict Mahometan, believed himself charmed against poisonous reptiles, and used to bring me centipedes and scorpions in his hands, saying they never hurt him. He left our service and was employed by the Borneo Company, about half a mile from our house. One day, while cutting rattans in a shed, a cobra bit his thumb. He thought nothing of it, but, putting away his work as usual, went home, cooked his rice and ate his supper. By this time, however, his arm began to swell and his head to swim. Instead of going to the doctor, who then lived close by, he must needs go to the Bishop to cure him; so just as we were sitting down to dinner, about seven o'clock, he reeled into the house. The Bishop cauterized the wound, although it seemed too late to be any use; he was getting cold and faint. However, by dint of being walked up and down between two men, and having two whole bottles of brandy administered to him, a glass at a time, besides sal volatile, chloroform, and every stimulant we had, he got through the night. The Bishop sat up with him all night, and I could hear him, when at last I went to bed, calling out at intervals, "Oh, Allah! Oh, Lord Bishop!"—so terrible was the pain he suffered in his arm. His wife, who was my baby's ayah, appeared in the morning. "Come," said she, "make no more noise, keeping everybody awake, but take up your bed (mat) and let us go home." He meekly obeyed; but, poor man, he had abscesses under his arm, and fell into weak health afterwards; so it is evidently unwise to despise a cobra.
There were many other snakes besides cobras, some poisonous, but most of them harmless.
The Marquis Doria and Signor Becarri, two distinguished naturalists, who lived for some months at Sarawak, collecting bird-skins, insects, and plants, told me that the natives often represented a snake to be poisonous which was not so. However, we had the mata hari, sun-snake, black and coral colour, and a metallic green flat-headed creature, Fortrex trigonocephalus, which were venomous enough. I once had a little flower-snake for a pet. It was beautifully marked with green and lilac, and used to catch flies climbing about the room; but one day it mounted to the top of a high door, the wind blew the door to, and my pretty snake was thrown to the ground and broke its back.
The boa-constrictor—sawar, as the Malays called it—lived in the jungle and rice-swamps. Sometimes it attained an enormous size. An Englishman told me that he and some Malays were exploring the jungle to find traces of antimony ore, and came to an opening in the wood, across which they saw the body of a sawar as thick as his own—he was not very stout—moving along; but they never saw either the head or tail of that snake, for, after watching its progress for a long time, they were seized with a panic at its enormous length, and fled.
A Malay whom we knew very well, Abong Hassan by name, and a mighty hunter, told us that once, when he was seeking deer in the forest, towards evening he sat down to rest, and cook his rice, on what he thought was a great fallen tree. While thus occupied, he felt his seat moving from under him, and, starting up, found he had been making use of a huge sawar lying inert and distended with food. He killed it, and found a full-grown deer in its stomach. These snakes must live to a great age, and grow always, to attain such a size.
Some people kept a small boa in their house to kill rats, but we found they were equally fond of chickens, and therefore not desirable inmates; for at Sarawak chickens were the principal animal food to be had, and it was necessary to keep a stock of them.
After some years we built up the lower story of the mission-house with bricks, to make it more substantial and cooler. The ground floor was at first wholly occupied with the school, the dormitory on one side, the matron's and girls' room on the other, and a large schoolroom through the centre of the house. A similar room over it was our dining-room, and was used for divine service until the church was finished. The library and our bedroom were over the boys' dormitory, and bedrooms for missionaries on the other side. There were also three rooms in the roof, which made good bedrooms, but were too hot for use in the daytime. The roof was covered with shingles of balean-wood, which only grows harder and darker coloured from rain and use. They were blown off sometimes in the storms to which we were subject, but were otherwise more lasting than any other kind of roofing. We used to call this house Noah's Ark, from the variety of its occupants. A bell hung in the porch roof, and rung at different hours to call the workmen and regulate the school. The people in the town got so used to it that, when we discontinued it for a time, they sent a petition that it might begin again, for without it they never knew what o'clock it was. When the school outgrew this house we built another for the boys, their master, and the matron, close by; but I always kept the girls with us until Julia married, when they were sent to the Quop, in charge of the missionary's wife there.
Long before we left the court-house, Mr. and Mrs. Wright decided to give up the Sarawak mission, and went to Singapore, where Mr. Wright became master to the Raffles Institution for the education of boys. We were therefore quite alone until February, 1851, when the Bishop of Calcutta paid us a visit to consecrate the church, and brought with him Mr. Fox from Bishop's College, to be catechist, with a view to his future ordination. Very soon after him came the Rev. Walter Chambers from England, and about the same time Mr. Nicholls also arrived from Bishop's College; but, as he only wished to stay for two years in the country, he had scarcely time to learn the language before he returned to Calcutta.
CHAPTER IV.
PIRATES.
When we first lived at Sarawak, the coasts and the seas from Singapore to China were infested with pirates. "It is in the Malay's nature," says a Dutch writer, "to rove the seas in his prahu, as it is in the Arab to wander with his steed on the sands of the desert." Before the English and Dutch Governments exerted themselves to put down piracy in the Eastern seas, there were communities of these Malays settled in various parts of the coast of Borneo, who made it the business of their lives to rob and destroy all the vessels they could meet with, either killing the crews or reducing them to slavery. For this purpose they went out in fleets of from ten to thirty war-boats or prahus. These boats were about ninety feet long; they carried a large