Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/327

Rh clever young men—for it is only the clever who can do it.

We arrived at Pandjong Priak, the port of Batavia in Java, about 11 a.m. on December 27th, after passing various small islands. A mole of some size is entered by a narrow passage, and Pandjong Priak consists of wharves with great rows of “godowns,” or goods sheds, and the railway station at the back. How horribly civilised and ordinary! Where have I got to? Letters and a telegram—fancy a telegram—awaited me from Baron Carel van Haeften, who, they tell me, has already been down to see if the Stettin had arrived. I am asked to go to the telephone—a telephone!—and I have just been writing about pirate phraus and Sultans chucking millions of sovereigns into a lake—and as I do so I see a ship with the British flag, the first I have seen since leaving Australia! Think of it—the first British flag! “All German man now; Englishman no good now”’—is it a wonder impudent natives say and think that? These rich, rich islands full of “trade’”’—this splendid route—all this lying between our possessions of Singapore and Australia —and never a ship carrying our flag amidst it all.

There is such a strong smell of bilge water or bad drains—the Dutch must have forgotten to look after sanitary matters, or else it must be this German ship—the Germans again!

, January 1901.

From Pandjong Priak I went by train up to Batavia, and taking one of the small pony-carriages plying for hire, drove to the Hotel de Nederlanden. The way from Priak is through low marshy land, thick with tropical vegetation and smelling to heaven, so I wondered if, after all, it could have