I
The Captain’s Yarn
The captain helped himself to one of my manilas and began:—
I’ve nothing to say about the fate of the poor fellows on the Namoa, seeing the
captain was killed at the first fire, but it looks to me like a case of carelessness
which was almost criminal. The idea of allowing three hundred Chinese to come
aboard as passengers without searching them for arms. Why! it is an open bid to
pirates. Goes to show pretty plain that these seas are not cleared of pirates.
Sailing ships nowadays think they can go anywhere without a pound of powder
or an old cutlass aboard, just because there is an English or Dutch man-of-war
within a hundred miles. I don’t know what we’d have done when I first traded
among these islands without a good brass swivel and a stock of percussion-cap
muskets.
Let me see; it was in ’58, I was cabin boy on the ship Bangor. Captain Howe,
hale old fellow from Maine, had his two little boys aboard. They are merchants
now in Boston. I’ve been sailing for them on the Elmira ever since. We were
trading along the coast of Borneo. Those were great days for trading in spite of
the pirates. That was long before iron steamers sent our good oaken ships to rot
in the dockyards of Maine. Why, in those days you could see a half-dozen of our
snug little crafts in any port of the world, and I’ve seen more American flags in
this very harbor of Singapore than of any other nation. We had come into
Singapore with a shipload of ice (no scientific ice factories then), and had gone
along the coast of Java and Borneo to load with coffee, rubber, and spices, for a
return voyage. We were just off Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and about
loaded, when the captain heard that gold had been discovered somewhere up
near the head of the Rejang. The captain was an adventurous old salt, and
decided to test the truth of the story; so, taking the long-boat and ten men, he
pulled up the Sarawak River to Kuching and got permission of Rajah Brooke to
go up the Rejang on a hunting expedition. The Rajah was courteous, but tried to
dissuade us from the undertaking by relating that several bands of Dyaks had