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Updated: May 22, 2025
But we were to learn different. The village was on an in- lying island, and its headmen must have sent word across to the mainland; for one morning three big two-masted junks with lateens of rice-matting dropped anchor off the beach. When the sampans came ashore Captain Johannes Maartens was all interest, for here were silks again.
A mother ties very young children to the deck by a long cord, while older children romp at large with a bamboo float fastened about their bodies, which serves at once for clothing and life-preserver. It is a common sight to see sampans propelled up and down stream by women, each rower having an infant strapped to her back.
They moved through the wilderness of floating dwelling-places, and looked them over with wonder and surprise. Many of the sampans were made of three planks; and the people on board of them, mostly women, were exceedingly amusing.
The nor'easter, packed with a cold, penetrating rain, beat down from the Yellow Sea, its insensate fury clearing the highways of all save belated labourers and 'ricksha boys. Along the Chinese Bund the sampans huddled even more closely together, and rocked and creaked and complained. The inscrutable countenance of the average Chinaman is the result of five thousand years of misery.
Bangkok has been called, and not ineptly, the Venice of the East, for it is covered with a net-work of canals, or klongs, which spread out in every direction. In sampans, houseboats and other craft, moored to the banks of these canals, dwells the major portion of the city's inhabitants.
At Canton the river, which is there only a few hundred yards wide, was jammed with craft of all kinds, including one or two small war vessels and hundreds, probably thousands, of sampans. The latter carry passengers and small quantities of freight; they are roofed over more or less completely and serve as the homes of the owners' families, all the members of which take a hand in the rowing.
Now all was ready, but it was not until Friday morning that they sighted what looked like three large palm drifts to seaward off Tanjong Kidorong, to the north-east of the British River. They proved to be three large prahus, with their masts struck, and bristling with men, who were rowing like the Maltese, standing, and pushing for shore, casting off their sampans one by one to make better way.
On leaving the Dido, on the morning of the 8th, they proceeded to the Island of Marundum, a favorite rendezvous for pirates, where they came on a fleet of the Illanum tribe, who, however, did not give them an opportunity of closing; but, cutting their sampans adrift, made a precipitate flight, opening fire as they ran out on the opposite side of a small bay, in which they had been watering and refitting.
There is but a single range, and it is a fact that from the navigable part of the Musi river to a place on that of Bencoolen where rafts and sampans may be used is to the natives a walk of no more than eight hours. Musi is populous, well cultivated, and the soil exceedingly rich.
A cruiser or two lay in the roads, and the French mail, and two or three Japanese cargo-boats, and half a dozen tramp ships from the China Coast, but none of these were unduly buffeted by the gale, which only created havoc among the junks and sampans.
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