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Updated: May 27, 2025
The unfortunate lion-destroyer was therefore reduced to selling the store of guns by retail, rifle by rifle; so went the daggers, the Malay kreeses, and the life-preservers. A grocer purchased the preserved aliments; an apothecary what remained of the medicaments.
You are to picture a capacious apartment adorned with firearms and steel blades from top to bottom: all the weapons of all the countries in the wide world carbines, rifles, blunderbusses, Corsican, Catalan, and dagger knives, Malay kreeses, revolvers with spring-bayonets, Carib and flint arrows, knuckle-dusters, life-preservers, Hottentot clubs, Mexican lassoes now, can you expect me to name the rest?
The men wear either 'sarongs' or trousers, or both, and a cotton jacket, and are always armed either with kreeses or chopping-knives, carried in their belts; the weapons are for cutting down cocoanuts and bamboo, and for protection against snakes and tigers. Both sexes wear their hair long, the men with head-cloths and the women with flowers and herbs, and all go bare-footed.
At about twenty paces from the trees, we Europeans posted ourselves, with our rifles, twelve paces from each other, and in the form of a semicircle. Behind us was a close chain of several hundred Javans, armed with long lances, kreeses, and short swords. If the tiger broke through our ranks, they were to kill him after their fashion.
The Javanese are brave fellows, and though they knew that death awaited them, they drew their swords and daggers and met the enemy as they sprang upon our deck. On came the pirates in overwhelming numbers, their sharp kreeses making fearful havoc among our poor fellows. I saw that all was lost. I was still unwounded.
That the native races are generally well-disposed towards the Dutch is borne out by the number that take service under the Government as police and as soldiers. Every two or three miles along the Government roads in Java one may meet a 'Gardoe, or patrol of the country police, consisting of three bare-footed Javanese constables, in uniform of a semi-European cut and armed with kreeses.
Instantly the room was full six feet up the wall of a tangle and mass of weapons, swords, spears, arrows, tomahawks, fowling pieces, blunderbusses, pistols, revolvers, scimitars, kreeses every kind of weapon you can think of and the four children wedged in among all these weapons of death hardly dared to breathe.
Jack's fears were very natural, for the dark-skinned, half-naked Javanese, with their glittering kreeses or daggers in their hands, which they flourished about while they vociferated loudly, were very ferocious-looking fellows. "They are disappointed," said the Dutchman, "at the escape of your ship, and they accuse the boy of being the cause of the boats going off and giving her warning.
There was not a square foot of the walls which was not adorned by knives, javelins, Malay kreeses, Chinese opium pipes, and such other trifles as old travellers gather round them. By the side of the fire rested the campaigner's straight regulation sword in its dim sheath all the dimmer because the companions occasionally used it as a poker when that instrument happened to be missing.
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