“Oh, yes, you do; that is why you send so many missionaries among us. But,” he
went on pleasantly, “look around my table. Not one of my court has touched the
wine. A Mohammedan never drinks. Can you say as much for your people?”
Then he raised his glass once more to his lips and said quietly, while his eyes
twinkled at my confusion:—
“Tell your great President that Abubaker, Sultan of Johore, drank his health in
simple pineapple juice.”
As the sun sank behind the misty dome of Mount Pulei we embarked once more
at the broad palace steps in the royal barges, amid the booming of guns and the
strains of the international “God Save the Queen,” “My Country, ’tis of Thee,”
and bared our heads to the royal standard of Johore that floated so proudly above
the palace, thankful for this short peep into the heart of an Oriental court.
So the young Prince received the crown from the hands of his father. To-day, the
bones of that grand old statesman, the Sultan of Johore, rest beside those of his
royal fathers within the shadow of the mosque.
In 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased the island on which Singapore
now stands from the father of the late Sultan of Johore, the royal palace was a
palm-thatched bungalow, the country an unbroken jungle, and the inhabitants
pirates and fishermen by turns; the notorious Strait of Malacca was infested with
long, keen, swift pirate praus, and the snake-like kris menaced the merchant
marine of the world.
The advancement of the United States has not been more rapid since that date
than the advancement of Johore. The attap istana, or palace, has given place to a
series of palaces that rival those of many a much better-known country; the
jungle has given place to plantations of gambier, tea, coffee, and pepper; the few
elephant tracks and forest paths, to a network of macadamized roads and
projected railways; and the native praus, to English-built barks and deeply laden
cargo steamers.
Two hundred thousand hard-working, money-making Chinese have been added