J ..

The Further Side of Silence

By . Sir Hugh Cliftord, K. C. M. G.

Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company

19iO

PREFACE

NOBODY, I am assured, ever reada a preface. I consider, therefore, that I may safely re­gard this foreword 88 a confidential docu­

ment, written for the sole purpose of salving ~ own sensitive conscience. From this point of view I regard it 88 necessary, for it seems to me that the imposture involved in issuing 88 a work of fiction a volume which is in the main a record of fact, should be frankly confessed from the outset. A knowledge of the truth that these initial pages will remain to some extent a secret between me, the proofreader, and the printer, will enable me, however, to write of personal things with a larger measure of freedom than I should otherwise be bold enough to use.

The stories composing this book, with a single ex­ception-"The Ghoul," which reached me at IeCOnd hand-are all relations of incidents in which I have had a part, or in which the principal actors have been familiarly known to me. They faithfully reproduce conditions of life as they existed in the Malayan Peninsula before the white men took a band in the government of the native states, or immediately after our coming-things as I knew them between 1888 and 1903-the twenty years that I paued in that most beautiful and at one time little frequented

vii

PREFACE

ecJI'Iler of Asia. They are written with a full ap­preciation of the native point of view, and of a people for wholJl I entertain much affection and sympathy. Incidentally, however, they will perhaps help to explain why British civil servants in the East oc­eaaionally lay themselves open to the charge of being animated by "a hungry acquisitiveness" and a pauion for annexing the territory of their native Deighbours.

Fate and a rather courageous Colonial Governor ordained that I should be sent on a special mission to the Sultan of Pahang-a large Malayan state on the eastern seaboard of the Peninsula-before I was quite one and twenty years of age. This eourse was not, at the time, as reckless and desperate as it sounds. I had already more than three years' aervice and had acquired · what was reckoned an unusual acquaintance with the vernacular. The mission would entail a long overland journey and an absence of more than three months' duration. Senior men who possessed the necessary qualifica­tions could not be spared for so protracted a period, and thus the choice fell upon me, to my very great eontent.

My object was to obtain from the Sultan the promise of a treaty surrendering the management of his foreign relations to the British Government, and accepting the appointment of a Political Agent at his court. This I obtained and bore in triumph to Singapore, whence I immediately returned to negotiate the details of the treaty, and subsequently

PREFACE IX

to reside at the Sultan's court as the Agent in ques­tion.

This meant that I was privileged to live for nearly two years in complete isolation among the Malays in a' native state which was annually cut off from the outside world from October to March by the fury of the northeast mOIUlOOnj that this befell me at perhaps the most impreuionable period of my liIe; that having already acquired conaiderable fa­miliarity with the people, their ideas and their language, I was afforded an unuaual opportunity of completing and perfecting my knowled,ej and that circumstances compelled me to live in • native hut, on native food, and in native fashion, in the company of a couple of dozen Malays-friends of mine, from the western side of the Peninsula, who had elected to follow my fortunes. Rarely seeing a white face or speaking a word of my own tongue, it thua feD to my lot to be admitted to lei coulul8I of life in • native state, as it was before the in1luence of Euro­peans had tampered with its eccentricities.

Pahang, when I entered it in 1887, preleDted .. almost exact counterpart to the feudal kiD&doma of medireval Europe. I saw it pass under the '.,1'0-0 tection" of Great Britain, which in this ease wu barely distinguishable from '''annexation.'' I 1Ub­sequently spent a year or 80 fighting in denae lOMIta to make that protection a permanency, for lOIIle

of the chiefs resented our encrnachment upGIl their prerogatives; and when I quitted the land tJ. decade and a half later, it wu as safe and al-

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PREFACE

moat as peaceful and orderly as an English country­mde.

Thus at a preposterously early age I was the principal instrument in adding 15,000 square miles ()f territory to the British dependencies in the East; and this fact forces me to the conclusion that my share in the business stands in need of some ex­planation and defence, if readers who are not them­selves Britishers are to be persuaded that I am not merely a thief upon a rather large scale. The stories and sketches contained in this book supply me with both. . I, who write, have with my own eyes seen the Malayan prison; have lived at a Malayan court; have shared the life of the people of all ranks and classes in their towns and villages, in their rice-fields, on their rivers, and in the mag­nificent forests which cover the face of their country. 1 have travelled with them on foot, by boats, and raft. I have fought with and against them. I have camped with the downtrodden aboriginal tribes ()f jungle-dwelling SAkai and ~mang, and have heard from their own lips the tales of their miseries. I have watched at close quarters, and in intolerable impotency to aid or save, the lives which all these people lived before the white men came to defend their weakness against the oppression and the wrong wrought to them by tyrants of their own race; and 1 have seen them gradually emerge from the dark shadow in which their days were passed, into the daylight of a personal freedom such as white men prize above most mundane things.

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PREFACE . Xl

The late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a recent British Prime Minister, once gave vent to the aphorism that "good government can never be a satisfactory IUb.titute for self-government." That mayor may not be true; but the Malays. be it remembered. never possessed "self-government." The rule of their rdJeu and chiefs wu one of.. the most absolute and cynical autocracies that the mind of man has conceived; and the people living under it were mercilessly exploited. and possessed no rights either . of person or of property. To their case. therefore, the phrase quo~ above hu only the most remote and academical application; but no words or sentiments. no matter how generoua or beautiful, would avail to staunch the blood which I saw flow. or to dry the tears which I saw ahed in Pahang when I lived in that native atate under it. own administration.

If, then, my stories move you at aU. and if they inspire in you any measure of pity or of desire to see the weak protected and their wrongs aveupd, you may judge how passionate was the determiDa­tion to make the recurrence of such things impoall"ble whereby I and my fellow workers in Malaya were inspired. For we, alas. lived in the midst of the happenings of which you only read.

Government House, The Gold Coast, /

British West Africa.

HUGH CLIJ'J'ORD.

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CONTENTS

P.OIII

Preface . . . . . . • . vii I. The Further Side of Silence 8

n. The Were-tiger . 40 m. The Experiences of RAja Haji

Hamid ' . ... 66 IV. Droit Du Seigneur . . . . . 66 V. In the Valley of the T~lom. ... . "

VI. The Inner Apartment . lOS VII. The Ghoul . . . . . . • 115

VIII. A Malayan Prison . .. 186 IX. He of the Hairy Face . 148 X. The Flight of CMp, the Bird . . 166

XI. A Daughter of the Muhammadana • 187 XII. The Lone-hand Raid of Kdlop

Sl1mbing . • • . . • • 116 XIII. The Flight of the Jungle-folk . . .... XIV. One Who Had Eaten My Rice. . 171

I

XV. At a Malayan Court . 199 XVI. The Amok of DAto' KAja Blji mrja 819

XVII. A Malayan Actor-manager. • . 841 XVIIL Tl1kang Bl1rok's Story • • S68

XIX. In Chains . • • • 875 L'Envoi . .•••• 40tJ

I

THE FURTHER SIDE OF SILENCE

I

SOME years before the impassive British Government came to disturb the peace .of primitive nature and to put an end to the

strife of primitive man, Kria, son of Mat, a young Malay from one of the western states, sneaked up into the T~lom and established himself as a trader on its banks well within the friDge of the SAkai country.

Aided by a few SAkai-feeble and timid jungle­folk, the aboriginal possessors of the Peninaula­but mainly with his own hands, he built himself a house with walls of thick, brown bark, raised to a height of some six feet above the ground on stout, rough-hewn uprights, and securely thatched with Mrtam palm leaves. It was a rude enough affair, as Malay houses go, but compared with the primitive and lopsided architecture of the SAkai it was palatial. The fact that this stranger had planned and built such a mansion impressed the fact of his innate racial superiority upon the jungle-dwellers once and for all. Here, they saw, was Genius, no less; though their language (which among other things has only three numerals and as many names for colours) con­tained no word even remotely conveying any IUch

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4 THE FURTHER SIDE OF SILENCE

idea. The mere fact that their poor vocabulary was straightway beggared by the effort to express their admiration, left them mentally gasping; where­fore Kria, son of Mat, a very ordinary young Malay, endowed, as it chanced, with few of the forceful qualities of his race, found himself of a sudden an object of almost superstitious hero-worship.

Kria presently made the discovery anent solitude which is attributed to Adam. He was a Malay and a Muhammadan, to whom the naked, pantheistical Sakai is a dog of indescribable uncleanliness. Thirty miles down river there was a Malay village where many maidens of his own breed were to be had, almost for the asking, from their grateful parents by a man so 'well-to-do as Kria had now become; but these ladies were hard-bit, ill-favoured young women, prematurely gnarled by labour in the rice­fields and tanned to the colour of the bottom of a cooking-pot by exposure to sun and weather. Or­dinarily, however, the aggressive plainness of these dams~ls might not have affected the issue; but it chanced that the particular devil whose province it is to look after mesalliances was as busy here in this hidden nook of the forest as ever he is in May­fair. It was surely by his contrivance that Kria, Malay and Muhammadan that he was, fixed his heart upon a Sakai girl-herself the daughter of SAkai, nude, barbarous, and disreputable-and the blame may with greater certainty be allotted to him, because Kria's first meeting with her was in no sense of his seeking.