Java

Java by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore’s Java follows a traveler from Singapore across the equator to Java, presenting the island as a tropical land shaped by commerce, colonial rule, cultivated landscapes, and surviving Buddhist monuments. Singapore appears as a crowded imperial crossroads where peoples from many regions labor, trade, travel, and gather on the wharves. The narrator sails south through still, oppressive heat, past Sumatra and Banka, and reaches Tandjon Priok, the port serving Batavia. Batavia is described as both modern and unhealthy: its old town of canals, business houses, Chinese and Arab kampongs, and colonial buildings contrasts with newer suburbs of broad roads, gardens, and European villas. The narrator sharply criticizes Dutch restrictions on travelers, colonial suspicion, social rigidity, and the treatment of Javanese people, while also describing the Dutch administration, army, racial hierarchy, and the position of Chinese merchants. Hotel life reveals an informal tropical dishabille, elaborate riz tavel meals, afternoon sleep, evening drives, and a society that becomes ceremonious only after dark. The account moves to Buitenzorg, a cooler hill refuge and seat of the governor-general. Its Botanical Garden is celebrated as an extraordinary collection of palms, orchids, fruit trees, bamboos, creepers, and economic plants. The surrounding region seems cultivated from edge to edge, with roads, rice-fields, tea-gardens, coffee estates, and villages beneath palms. The narrator describes native markets, sarongs and battek cloth, betel chewing, basketry, silversmithing, flowers, and a great variety of tropical fruits, especially the mangosteen, praised as the supreme fruit. A long historical discussion recounts Dutch control of Java, the earlier British interval under Sir Stamford Raffles, and the Dutch “culture system,” by which villagers were required to devote land and labor to crops such as sugar, coffee, tea, indigo, and cinchona. The narrative acknowledges accusations of coercion and exploitation but argues that the system expanded cultivation, wealth, roads, public order, and population, before falling prices, blight, political criticism, and changing conditions led the government to withdraw from plantation trade. The narrator portrays the Dutch colony as increasingly troubled by demands for reform and by a more educated, less submissive native population. At Sinagar, a vast tea estate near Buitenzorg, the traveler sees the privileged world of Dutch planters: formal gardens, tropical birds, a swimming pool, factories, stables, horses, social gatherings, and highly ordered tea cultivation. Javanese and Sundanese laborers pick leaves year-round, while machinery wilts, rolls, ferments, fires, sorts, and packs tea. The estate’s village is depicted as a self-contained community, with markets, music, puppet shows, crafts, and workers who had been taken to the Chicago Exposition. Their return is followed by the comic-tragic death of their plantation cat, “Chicago.” Rail travel across the Preanger regencies reveals terraced rice-fields, plantation country, volcanic mountains, native towns, and the spectacular plain of Leles, where entire mountains are carved into rice terraces. The journey then descends into the fever-ridden swamps of the terra ingrata, disappointing the narrator’s expectations of dramatic jungle dangers. The culminating destination is Boro Boedor, reached after the travelers are briefly challenged in Djokjakarta for lacking the required admission papers. The immense Buddhist temple is described as a terraced pyramid covered in miles of bas-reliefs and populated by hundreds of seated Buddhas. Its sculptures depict the life of Gautama Buddha, religious teachings, courtly life, agriculture, ships, animals, costumes, and the arts of an earlier Javanese civilization. The narrator recounts its disappearance beneath jungle growth, its rediscovery under Raffles, its later excavation, damage by weather and souvenir hunters, and the local customs that grew around it. At the quiet passagrahan beside the temple, the repeated images and tropical stillness produce a near-hypnotic sense of Nirvana. The excerpt ends as the afternoon changes, distant voices return, and a boy emerges from a palm-grove and begins to climb a tree.

By Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore · First published 1897 · Genre: Travel literature, Travelogue, Nonfiction · 24 chapters · 77,093 words

First lines

Singapore (or S'pore, as the languid, perspiring, exhausted residents near the line most often write and pronounce the name of Sir Stamford Raffles's colony in the Straits of Malacca) is a geographical and commercial center and cross-roads of the eastern hemisphere, like to no other port in the world. Singapore is an ethnological center, too, and that small island swinging off the tip of the Malay Peninsula holds a whole congress of nations, an exhibit of all the races and peoples and types of men in the world, compared to which the Midway Plaisance was a mere skeleton of a suggestion. The traveler, despite the overpowering, all-subduing influence of the heat, has some thrills of excitement at the tropical pictures of the shore, and the congregation of varicolored humanity grouped on the Singapore wharf; and there and in Java, where one least and last expects to find such modern conveniences, his ship swings up to solid wharves, and he walks down a gang-plank in civilized fashion-something to be appreciated after the excitements and discomforts of landing in small boats among the screaming heathen of all other Asiatic ports.

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travel writing · Indonesia · Southeast Asia · Dutch East Indies · colonial history · nineteenth century · cultural observation · ethnography · geography · landscapes · volcanoes · tropical environment

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