Empire of the East Read Free Page A

appearance, with enormous tyres, a high ground clearance, and bearing a self-satisfied maker’s claim about the construction of its body. The agreement was that the two boys would take turns to drive. Gawaine got in behind the wheel, I settled myself beside him, and Robin and Andy climbed up into the back. We drove to a filling station to top up with petrol and the man at the pumps asked Andy where we were bound for, and when Andy told him he laughed and drew his hands across his throat. Taking this to be a joke we paid little attention, but the menace it concealed revealed itself and grew until in the end it cast a shadow over the journey.
    The road northwards from Medan to Banda Aceh, capital of the province, keeps close to the sea, and a wide coastal plain, now virtually cleared apart from recent plantations of rubber and coconut palms, is described in one of the guide-books as boring. This was far from being the case, for much of it is flanked by rice-paddies, and there are few livelier and more varied scenes of farming activity than those concentrated in these sparkling wetlands, and nowhere softer colours and more indulgent light. Rice-farmers everywhere enjoy and pride themselves upon their orderly existence, and orderliness is inseparable from the efficient production of their crop. The water in which they work can only be kept under control by exact practice and conformity with natural laws, and this enforces tidiness. One never sees a rice-field with a ragged boundary, and paddies are firmly geometrical and fitted into their surroundings in a lively mosaic of shapes that increases rather than detracts from the charm of the landscape. Monotony is avoided by variation from field to field in the growth of the rice seedlings: some barely pricking through the water’s surface while others already display the viridian brilliance of full growth. The trimness of the paddies is accentuated by that of the little matched shelters where tools are kept, and from which the farmers operate the devices they hope will scare away the birds. These are waders of the most elegant kind: delicately stepping storks, herons and egrets. The familiar coolie hats of the East are normally worn by the rice-farmers here in Aceh, although as we drove north more and more wore black witches’ hats, miraculously kept in place as they bent over their work, which added a stylish and dramatic note to the scene.
    We spent a morning dawdling through this pleasant landscape. Until 1870 the great eastern plain of Sumatra had been covered with the densest of jungles, but with the discovery that the Deli tobacco grown in tiny clearings was probably the finest in the world, plantations on the old American model were introduced. By the end of the century the number of persons contracted to work on these equalled half the population of Holland, and for all the legalistic quibbles they were hardly distinguishable from slaves. It was the Eastern equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps rather worse. Van Stockum’s invaluable Traveller’s Handbook to the Dutch West Indies (1920) regards the plantations with benign interest. ‘These industries brought much prosperity to the district, and they necessitated the importation of Chinese and Javanese labourers who work under contract and are very well looked after, owing to the combined efforts of the employers and the government. The labour legislature and the welfare work are highly developed in this plantation district.’
    Such self-deluding pictures of a tropical near-Arcadia were damaged by the disclosures of a young Hungarian planter, Ladislao Szekely, whose book Tropic Fever was to arouse a frenzy of protest in Dutch colonial circles. Szekely, puffing on an English opium-filled cigarette, was present at the arrival of a new coolie transport. The coolies, including women and children, had been tricked by the recruiting officers of the Coolie Importing Company into accepting a silver coin and putting a