Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub
[graphic][ocr errors][merged small]

either boiled or raw. It forms an excellent hedge, but occupies an inconvenient degree of room. The leaves are composed of tough white longitudinal fibers, well adapted for the fabrication of matting and cordage, for the manufacture of sacks and similar articles. An allied and very fragrant species is common in Tahiti, where it is called the Wharra tree; others are found in the Mauritius, where they are known as the Vaquois plant. Long roots are thrown off from the sides of the stems of these screw-pines, for the purpose of holding them more steadily in the loose sandy or coral-formed soil in which they grow. The fruit consists of

a mass of seed berries or ovaries, collected into a tuberculated head. In some species they are dry and fibrous, in others fleshy and succulent.

This slight description of the general character of the Pandanus, or screw-pine, will suffice to show that the ascent of these arborescent plants, having the stem furnished with a rigging of cord-like roots, and bearing a multitude of firm, long, and spirally-arranged leaves, will be by no means a work of difficulty, as would necessarily be that of the tall, feathery-topped cocoa-nut tree, destitute of all available points of aid or support. Hence the contradiction in the two accounts referred to

is seeming, and not real, and both statements are easily reconciled. We may here observe that fine specimens of the Birgus are to be seen in the British Museum.

That, among such animals as the Crab tribes, a tree-climbing species is to be found is certainly curious, but it is not without a parallel among fishes. Among these latter, many leave the water, some even for a long period, and perform overland journeys, aided in their progress by the structure of their fins. In these fishes the gills and gill-chambers are constructed for the retention of water for a considerable time, so as to suffice for the necessary degree of respiration. In our own country we may mention the eel, which, as we know, from personal experience, often voluntarily quits the river or lake, and wanders during the night over the adjacent meadows, probably in quest of dew-worms.

But the marshes of India and China present us with fishes much more decidedly terrestrial, and which (some of them, at least) were known to the ancients.

Among these are several members of a genus called Ophicephalus, (from their snake-like form). These fishes, having an elongated and cylindrical body, creep on land to great distances from their native waters. The boatmen of India often keep these fishes for a long time out of their true element, for the sake of diverting themselves and others by their terrestrial movements; and children may be often seen pursuing this sort of sport. Of these terrestrial or land-haunting fishes the most remarkable is the Pannei-eri, (tree-climber,) as it is called in Tranquebar. This fish inhabits India, the Indian islands, and various parts of China, Chusan, etc.; living in marshes, and feeding on aquatic insects, worms, etc. Not only does this fish wander on land, but, according to Daldorf, a Danish gentleman, who, in 1797, communicated an account of its habits to the Linnæan Society, (Trans. Linn., iii., p. 62), it mounts up the bushes or low palms to some elevation. This gentleman states that he has himself observed it in the act of ascending palmtrees near the marshes, and had taken it at a height of no less than five feet, measured from the level of the adjacent water. It effects its ascent by means of its pectoral and under fins, aided by the action

of the tail and the spines which border the gill covers. It is by the same agency that it traverses the land. The statement of M. Daldorf is corroborated by M. John, also a Danish observer, to whom we are indebted for the knowledge of its name in Tranquebar, which alludes to its arboreal proceedings.

IN

THE CHINESE EMIGRANT.

N no country in the world, perhaps, are so many laws made only to be broken, as in China. If many of these statutes and regulations are excellent in themselves, and conceived in a wise moral spirit, others are unwise, and even preposterous, while not a few are rendered impracticable by natural causes. Thus, for example, emigration is strictly prohibited, so that, overpeopled as the empire is, no Chinese can lawfully leave his country to settle in another. Nevertheless, during the last fifty years, want of room, and scarcity of bread at home, have annually driven many thousands to migrate to other lands; and the officers of government have been obliged to wink and connive at their departure. It could not, indeed, be otherwise, in districts where the population had far outrun its means of subsistence, and where people, in years of bad harvests, were not unfrequently reduced to the frightful extremity of selling their children, and even eating one another. Horrible as is this alternative, it is yet a well-ascertained fact. Within these last twelve years, or since the conclusion of the English war with the Celestial Emperor, these streams of emigration have been greatly swollen. In all the neighboring seas, wherever there is an island, peninsula, or promontory, held by the English, Dutch, or other European nation, we are now pretty sure to find a colony of industrious Chinese; while other individuals of that nation have transported themselves as far as St. Helena, Australia, California, and other distant regions. The following story of an emigrant occurred a few years ago.

In a very poor, crowded, and hungry district, in the province of Fokien, there lived a distressed agricultural family, consisting of wife and husband, two sons and a daughter. They had struggled hard through two seasons of drought and dearth, and were anticipating better fortune in the

third year, when a river burst its banks, and deluged and destroyed nearly all that neighborhood. Absolute want now stared them in the face, and in the mere dread of it the daughter sickened and died. The second son, Fanpi by name, resolved to seek a living elsewhere, as others were doing; and his parents and elder brother reluctantly consented to his departure. Fanpi embarked in a junk, which carried him to Singapore, where he landed as poor as it was possible for him to be. He was, however, an industrious, persevering, ingenious young man, and he soon obtained plenty of work, and the means of improving himself in mechanical skill. Although he never rose to a higher station than that of packing-case maker to the English merchants and shippers, he, in time, be- | came possessed of a comfortable house and of a considerable sum of money besides, which he left to accumulate in the hands of the worthy merchant who was his chief employer.

Being thus comparatively affluent, Fanpi married a woman of the country, a young, well-favored Malay, who had lived in service with a European family at Singapore, and had there acquired some general notions of Christianity. Fanpi continued to thrive until he had three children, and three thousand hard Spanish dollars of his own. He had many friends in the colony, and only one known enemy. This was a Fokien man, who came from a seaport town not far from Fanpi's district. He might have done well at Singapore; but he was an idle, worthless fellow, constantly getting into scrapes and difficulties. On one occasion, to relieve him from his embarrassments, Fanpi generously lent him a hundred dollars; but instead of making a proper use of the money, the Fokien man gambled it away at cock-fights and quail-fights, and in those horrible dens, the opium smoking houses. This money squandered, he repeatedly applied for another loan, and was very properly refused. Exasperated at the denial, he one night, when drunk and mad with the fumes of the opium pipe, violently assulted Fanpi in the streets, vowing that he was unmindful of his country, that he was no true man of Fokien, and that he would have his life. The police interfered; and as the fellow had made himself notorious by his vicious conduct and turbulent disposition, he was turned out of the colony a few days after

ward, with a significant hint that if he ever returned he might expect to be hanged.

Fanpi, during all this time, had rarely, if ever, had the opportunity of communicating with his parents, or of receiving any news from them; but about this period, a Fokien junk arrived, having on board several emigrants from his native district. From these people he learned that his elder brother was dead, and that his now aged father and mother were in great distress and want. Many fabulous virtues have been attributed to the Chinese; but, generally, their warm filial affection has not been exaggerated. Every true Chinaman holds it to be a sacred duty, not only to honor his father and mother, but to toil for them, and support them when they can no longer work for themselves. Fanpi, accordingly, told his Malay wife that he must return to the home of his fathers. She hesitated not a moment in saying that she would go with him, and take her children. He plainly apprised her that there would be danger, or at least the risk of danger, in so doing; since, by the laws of China, foreign women were prohibited from setting foot on the soil of the Celestial Empire. The affectionate wife, however, declared that she had no fear; that life, indeed, would be insupportable without her husband and children. Fanpi, therefore, who loved her well, and who could not bear the idea of leaving either wife or children behind him, although with his means he could have left them in a condition of comfort or even of prosperity, resolutely took a cheerful view of the whole matter.

"The laws of the empire," he said, "prohibit, under pain of death, all emigration, and yet my countrymen emigrate by thousands at a time; the same laws and the same penalty stand against the introduction of foreign women; and yet Chinese do return to their own country, and take foreign wives with them, and are allowed to be at peace. Once free of the seaport, we shall do well in my own district, which is too poor to feed a single mandarin; none will question or molest us there. I will redeem the mortgage which presses on our patrimonial acres; I will purchase more land, and hire my poorer neighbors to till it; we shall thrive, I trust, even in that district; and I shall have the satisfaction of succoring my father and mother, of closing their eyes, of interring them among our ancestors, of dying on the spot

[ocr errors]
[graphic][merged small]

where I was born, and of being buried by | found quiet and convenient lodgings in the the side of my parents."

Thus reasoned Fanpi with himself, as he engaged passage room in a return junk for himself, wife, and children. And all, no doubt, would have gone well and as he wished, had it not been for the malice and revenge of that wicked, debauched, opiumsmoking man of Fokien.

Dressed as people of the country, and putting themselves in a boat which mixed with a shoal of other shore boats, Fanpi and his family, without being challenged or noticed, landed at the seaport, and easily

inner part of the populous town, where everybody was too busy or too much occupied with his own pleasures to bestow a thought upon them. But the day after their arrival, as Fanpi was going down to the port to see to the landing of some goods which he had left in the junk, he encountered the Fokien man who had vowed his destruction. The fellow at once geve him in charge to a mandarin of the lowest grade, who exercised the functions of a police officer, alleging, in a loud voice, that Fanpi was a most desperate character,

who had not only broken the laws by emigrating, but who had been also actively engaged as a pirate; and then finished his charge by whispering in the mandarin's ear that his prisoner was very rich.

The last accusation was the most fatal of all to poor Fanpi. He was carried to the house of the chief mandarin, being followed by his accuser. This great officer and administrator of justice was neither better nor worse than the majority of Chinese mandarins. In the absence of any evidence, except that of a man who had made himself notorious here, as he had done at Singapore, and who at the moment was intoxicated, he would have imposed some slight fine upon the returned emigrant, and have let him go; but the opiumsmoker swore that Fanpi possessed the enormous sum of 30,000 dollars; and it would have been against all precedent, as well as against his own nature and official habits, for the sordid minister of justice to let such a prize escape toll-free. He ruled and ordered that Fanpi should be thrown into prison, and bastinadoed on the morrow, to extort a confession of his guilt.

The arrest made little or no noise in the town, being a matter of such common occurrence; but, happily, the news reached the Malay wife as she was wondering at Fanpi's long absence. Being naturally a shrewd woman, and having learned much during her service at Singapore, Mrs. Fanpi went quietly and cautiously to work, and, first of all, she hid the bags which contained her husband's money in the garden of the house where they had procured lodging. She then made inquiries of the people of the house, and of some of the most respectable of their neighbors, as to the character of the chief mandarin. They said that he was much like all other mandarins, excessively venal and rapacious, and apt to be very cruel where he could not attain his ends by gentler means. But they all spoke with affection, respect, and almost reverence, of the mandarin's wife, who was well known by her gentleness, her acts of charity, and especially by her dispensing of healing Frangi medicines to the afflicted poor.

From the last circumstance, the Malay wife concluded that the lady must have had friendship with some of the European or American missionaries. "If," thought she, “the mandarin's wife knows the virtue of those foreign drugs, she may know VOL. XI.-34

something of the precepts of the foreign books." To those whom she had consulted, she said, "I will try and see this lady." "You cannot do better," said they; "for her influence over her husband is great, and has often turned him from evil-doing."

So, taking one of her children in each hand, and bidding the eldest of the three to follow her, the Malay stranger went to the mandarin's house, and, seating herself under a verandah, patiently waited in the outer court until a female servant passed by. She then rose, gave the woman a small gold ring, and implored her to tell her mistress that a distressed stranger, a wife and mother, from a far-distant land, had a prayer and petition to put up to her.

In a very brief space of time, the poor Malay and her children were admitted into the inner garden of the house, and conducted to a pleasant detached pavilion, which overhung an artificial lake. In this quiet apartment was the lady, and no other person. She was young, very handsome, and had a most benevolent countenance. All this was encouraging; and what was yet more so, was a little book of devotion which she held in her hand, and which the poor Malay knew to be of the sort distributed by the Christian missionaries. She would have prostrated herself to kiss the lady's feet, but was prevented, and was gently told to relate her misfortunes. While she did this, the lady caressed the children, who at first stood in great awe and fear of her.

Fanpi's wife told her tale well and even eloquently, as people mostly do when they speak from the heart. Having insisted that her husband was an upright and honest man, without offense or blame, except that, like so many others, he had emigrated to avoid starvation, and had returned to succor his starving parents, she said: “If the law be against me, let me suffer, but let my husband go free; for what could I do but follow my husband wherever he might go? Lady, make the case your own! Would you not rather brave danger than be parted from your husband and children?"

The tears stood in the lady's eyes, and a redness came to her pale cheek, as she said, "I would rather face sudden death than do it."

She then inquired what money Fanpi might really have brought back with him, well knowing that the mandarin's greed must, in some measure, be satisfied.

« VorigeDoorgaan »