Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/30

10 thousand Chinese coolies–the Chinese, the one Asiatic who toils with ardor and regularity, whom the tropics cannot debilitate, and to whom malaria and all germs, microbes, and bacilli seem but tonic agents.

When the British returned Java, after the Napoleon scare was over, they retained Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and sovereign rights over Sumatra, relinquishing this latter suzerainty in 1872, in exchange for Holland's extensive rights in Ashantee and the Gold Coast of Africa. The Dutch then attempted to reduce the native population of Sumatra to the same estate as the more pliant people of Java; but the wild mountaineers and bucaneers, of the north, or Achin, end of the island in particular, warned by the sad fate of the Javanese, had no intention of being conquered and enslaved, of giving their labor and the fruit of their lands to the strangers from Europe's cold swamps. The Achin war continued for thirty-three years long resulting in a general loss of Dutch prestige in the East, an immense expenditure of Dutch gulden, causing a deficit in the colonial budget every year, a fearful mortality among Dutch troops, and partial abandonment, in one decade of trade depression, of the aggressive policy. Dutch commanders were well satisfied to hold their chain of forts along the western hills, and to punish the Achinese in a small way by blockading them from their supplies of opium, tobacco, and spirits. In one four years of active campaigning the Achin war cost seventy million gulden, and seventy out of every hundred Dutch soldiers succumbed to the climate before going into an encounter. The Achinese merely retired to their swamps and jungles and waited, and