Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/41

Rh every house is in a park of its own, and the avenues are broad and straight, and all the distances are magnificent. The city of Batavia, literally "fair meadows," grandiloquently "the queen of the East," and without exaggeration "the gridiron of the East," dates from 1621, when the Dutch removed from Bantam, where quarrels between Portuguese, Javanese, and the East India Company had been disturbing trade for fifteen years, and built Fort Jacatra at the mouth of a river off which a cluster of islands sheltered a fine harbor. Its position in the midst of swamps was unhealthy, and the mortality was so appalling as to seem incredible. Dutch records tell of 87,000 soldiers and sailors dying in the government hospital between 1714 and 1776, and of 1,119,375 dying at Batavia between 1730 and August, 1752—a period of twenty-two years and eight months. The deadly Java fever occasioning this seemingly incredible mortality was worst between the years 1733 and 1738, during which time 2000 of the Dutch East India Company's servants and free Christians died annually. Staunton, who visited Batavia with Lord Macartney's embassy in 1793, called it the "most unwholesome place in the universe," and "the pestilential climate" was considered a sufficient defense against attack from any European power.

The people were long in learning that those who went to the higher suburbs to sleep, and built houses of the most open construction to admit of the fullest sweep of air, were free from the fever of the walled town, surrounded by swamps, cut by stagnant canals, and facing a harbor whose mud-banks were exposed at