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Updated: May 22, 2025
They also told me there were two kinds of the kulit manis, the one of which, from their account of it, I was in hopes might prove to be the true cinnamon-tree. June 21st, 1772. Next morning we went up the river in sampans, and in about six hours arrived at a place called quallo Lumut. The whole of the land on both sides of the river is low, covered with wood, and uninhabited.
But we then took a steam launch and proceeded some miles farther in order to visit the ruins of the old palace and the elephants' kraal. Skirting in and out, we saw about three miles of houseboats on sampans. This was a most interesting spectacle, all kinds of traffic being carried on, some space aboard being reserved for the family.
Sampans, launches and lighters clustered around the steamer as birds of prey gather to a feast: captains in gilt braid; coolies in blue and white, with their calling-cards stamped in large letters on their backs, and the story of their trade written around the tail of their coats in fantastic Japanese characters. Gentlemen in divided skirts and ladies in kimono and clogs swarmed up the gangway.
Among the fleeting curiosities of the day are a crowd of sampans flying black flags, evidently some military expedition; they are bound down stream, and it occurs to me that they are perhaps a reinforcement of these famous free-lances going to join the hordes of that denomination making things so uncomfortable for the French in Tonquin and Quang-tse.
A portion of the floor was covered with mats on which the occupants sleep, with an earth section for a fire. There was no furniture of any kind. The roof of the building was covered with square pieces of palm like those used on the sampans, and these could be raised in each room when necessary for air.
The crescent water-front, the broad blue river and white sand, the plain dotted with smiling villages opposite, the tall pagodas, the swarms of sampans with their quaint sails, form the composite parts of a very pretty and striking picture, as seen from the northern tip of the crescent.
Gray had gone about half the distance; and as he neared the sampans, whose forms he vainly tried to make out in the darkness, to his horror, he found that something was moving towards him in the water.
Small sampans with three or four sails predominated. Our interest now centred not so much on shore as on boldly defined islands that occasionally came into view. In another place there were five promontories apparently in a direct line, the first, dark green; the next, pale green; the next, brown in tint; the next, rocky; the fifth, foliage, a veritable poem in color.
As they wound up the river past sharp-nosed and round-hooded sampans, and archaic Chinese battle-ships and sea-going junks and gunboats flying their unknown foreign flags, Blake at last began to realize that he was in a new world. The very air smelt exotic; the very colors, the tints of the sails, the hues of clothing, the forms of things, land and sky itself all were different.
So the little steamer stopped here and there, at little, unknown bays, at places not mentioned in the guide books, and from the beautiful, desolate islands came out sampans and junks, with the lonely figure of a white man sitting despondent among the naked rowers, eager to get his letters from home. It was his only eagerness, but very dull and listless at that.
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