BEING
TALES & SKETCHES OF NATIVE LIFE
IN THE MALAY PENINSULA
BY
HUGH CLIFFORD
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
48 LEICESTER SQUARE
First printed April 1897
Reprinted September 1903
To My Wife
| My knowledge of all these things was won Ere to gladden my life You came, But the Land I knew, the Deeds saw done Will be never again the same, For You have come, like the rising Sun, To golden my World with your flame. |
H. C.
The nineteen tales and sketches, which are enclosed within the covers ofthis Book, relate to certain brown men and obscure things in a distantand very little known corner of the Earth. The Malay Peninsula—thatslender tongue of land which projects into the tepid seas at the extremesouth of the Asiatic Continent—is but little more than a name to mostdwellers in Europe. But, even in the Peninsula itself, and to themajority of those white men whose whole lives have been passed in theStraits of Malacca, the East Coast and the remote interior, of which Ichiefly write, are almost as completely unknown.
It has been my endeavour, in writing this book, to give some idea of thelives lived in these lands by Europeans whose lot has led them away fromthe beaten track; by the aboriginal tribes of Sâkai and Sĕmang; but,above all, by those Malays who, being yet untouched by contact withwhite men, are still in a state of original sin. My stories deal withnatives of all classes; dwellers in the Courts of Kings; peasants intheir kampongs, or villages, by the rivers [viii]and the rice-fields; andwith the fisher-folk on the seashore. I have tried to describe thesethings as they appear when viewed from the inside, as I have myself seenthem during the many dreary years that I have spent in the wilder partsof the Malay Peninsula. It will be found that the pictures thus drawnare not always attractive—what man's life, when viewed from the inside,ever is pretty to look at? But I have told my tales of these curiouscompanions of my exile, nothing extenuating, but setting down nought inmalice.
The conditions of life of which I write, more especially in thosesketches and tales which deal with native society in an IndependentMalay State, are rapidly passing away. Nor can this furnish matter forregret to any one who knew them as they were and still are in some ofthe wilder and more remote regions of the Peninsula. One may, perhaps,feel some measure of sentimental sorrow that the natural should here, aselsewhere, be replaced by the artificial; one may recognise withsufficient clearness that the Malay in his natural unregenerate state ismore attractive an individual than he is apt to become under theinfluence of European civilisation; but no one who has seen the horrorsof native rule, and the misery to which the people living under it areofttimes reduced, can find room to doubt that, its many drawbacksnotwithstanding, the only salvation for the Malays lies in the increaseof British influence in the [ix]Peninsula, and in the conseque