MALAY SLAVE TRADE.

179

CHAP. XIV.

Malay Slave Trade fostered by the Dutch. - Brutal System pursued by the Portuguese. Slavery doubtless founded by the Mahometans.-Retribution has overtaken the Portuguese. -An enlightened Policy most likely to eradicate Slavery and Piracy. Close Blockade. The Call of the Siamese Sentries. The Call of the Malay Sentries. - Deaths from Want of Water.-Kling Cruelty. - The Trial and Verdict, and Punishment. Siamese Tortures. Novel Mode of impaling a Rebel. - Extraordinary Palm-spears.-Remarks upon Native Governments.

THERE can be no doubt that slavery and the slave trade exist to a very serious extent throughout the Malayan archipelago: it is carried on in a petty way, but still with all the miseries of the middle passage. The great mart for the disposal of the slaves is the pepper plantations of Sumatra, which are in the hands of the natives, although the Dutch claim a sovereignty over them; and the native and Dutch planters on the coast of Borneo readily take the slaves off the hands of the Malay slave-catcher, and work them to death in the plantations and gold or

180 SLAVE TRADE FOSTERED BY THE DUTCH.

antimony mines of those countries. The Dutch say they discountenance the slave trade; they do so, however, merely in outward show. The first law they lay down for their Eastern subjects is, implicit submission to their cold-blooded system of political and commercial monopoly; the next thing is, the Lowland motto of "Mak' money; honestly if you can, but mak' money;" and I was told by both English and French captains of merchantmen employed collecting cargoes of pepper, that boats full of slaves used to arrive as constantly for sale at the different places they had visited on the Sumatran coast, as they formerly did in Rio de Janeiro harbour or the Havannah. We can understand, under such circumstances, what a harvest the slave-trader would reap in a province like Quedah, where the unhappy inhabitants were placed with the alternative of being impaled as rebels by Siamese, on the one hand, or hanged as pirates by Europeans, upon the other. To sell themselves, or fly for life and limb to the nicodar of a prahu, who would carry them elsewhere, and dispose of them for so much a head, was merely, in such a case, a happy alternative; and in this, as in much else connected with the habits of the unfortunate Malay, we have incurred no small amount of responsibility.

SYSTEM PURSUED BY PORTUGUESE.

181

Much, however, as the Dutch are to blame for their present spirit of aggression and selfish monopoly, in awakening the reckless spirit of retaliation, turmoil, and disorganisation of the Malays in the Eastern Archipelago, it falls far short of their former policy; and it is a question whether they or the Portuguese did most for two centuries, by a cold-blooded system of cruelty, towards demoralising the unhappy Malays; and assuredly, but for their warlike and nautical habits, the race would have been exterminated.

A history of the system they pursued, I am not now purposing to write; but inasmuch as it bears upon the Malay's present character of pirates and slave dealers, I may point out that, before European ships had as yet entered the Indian ocean, fleets of Chinese junks, as well as the unwarlike traders of Indostan, used to carry on a brisk commercial traffic with, and through, the Malayan archipelago, which, had piracy been as rife in the thirteenth century as it was in the early part of the present one, would have been utterly impossible; and slavery was, we know, unknown in Java at that time; and that is the only Malayan state of which authentic historical records have been preserved.

Doubtless with the introduction of the Mahometan creed into the Archipelago, slavery became a funda

182

SLAVERY FOUNDED BY MAHOMET.

mental institution of the Malays; but the slavery allowed by Mahomet is of the mildest form, and the Koran especially enjoins kindness to the slave.

But the Pope and Mahomet had a hard race to win the souls of the Malays; indeed, many native states only embraced Islamism after the conquest of Malacca by the Christians! God save the mark! The houris carried the point, maybe, against Purgatory. Indeed, the important group of islands known in the present day as the Celebes only accepted Mahomet in 1495, and that was nine years after Bartolemo Diaz rounded the Cape of Tempests, as he honestly styled the southern promontory of Africa. The Portuguese treated the Malays as infidels; and, as one writer, De Conto, observes of them, "they are well made and handsome, but foul in their lives, and much addicted to heinous sin; ergo, the Portuguese robbed, shot down, and conquered them, just as the Spaniards, more successfully, did the Mexican and Peruvian.

Resistance to this iniquity has, I believe, made the Malay what he now is; and one can only rejoice in the decay, and pray for the total annihilation of a people who, like the Portuguese, so sadly abused the glorious mission the Almighty called upon them to fulfil, when to them were first given the keys of

RETRIBUTION TO THE PORTUGUESE.

183

the golden East its docile millions and untold riches.

When an Englishman, in the Straits of Malacca, sees a man with European features but dark skinned as the natives, wanting in courage, energy, or character-a pariah whom the very Indostanee contemns,—and hears that that man is a Portuguese, he recognises the just retribution of an avenging God; and on reading such a paragraph as the following," All these people (Malays) that have fallen into the hands of the Portuguese have been made prisoners of war. Every year there is taken of them for sale a great number to Malacca." He naturally exclaims, the Malays have had their revenge!

One example of the Dutch policy may be quoted, and it is no singular instance of their phlegmatic cruelty:-John Peterson Koen, their most illustrious Governor-General of the Indies, exterminated the original inhabitants of the Banda, or Spice Islands, and replaced them by slaves. With such examples before them, can it be felony in the Malay to imitate the boasted civilisation of the white man? The piratical acts now committed in the Malayan archi

*The Decade, v. book vii.