THE MAN FROM BORNEO.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VI, Issue 1789, 7 November 1919, Page 6

THE MAN FROM BORNEO.

PROUD HEAD-HUNTERS. "ALLAH TUAN" WHO CANNOT TRAVEL. [By ADAM M'CAY, Special Commissioner of "The Sun," Sydney, and "The Herald," Melbourne.] XLVIII. (Copyright.) He was tall and lean and cleanshaved, with a mouth which would never lose its humour, and his manners entitled him to a lifelong place as an ambassador. As his long legs stretched out from an armchair in the hotel lounge in Tokio, you sized him up as an English baronet, resting after his experiences as a major in the war. . . . Never size men up in a hurry. The major was the little man playing bridge, and the baronet was the fussy fellow with the> red moustache, who had talked about the cost of production of steel plates. The long, thin ambassador was an official taking a holiday after his many years in a corner of British North Borneo—a corner far away from Sandakan where the steamers call. The pretty, fair-haired woman was his wife, who had also been in Borneo all these years, including a day when she was alone among the natives, and a Malay ran amok, killing five men before she went out to have him arrested. The bright little boy and girl were their children, both born in that remote region of the East. British men and women do this kind of thing as their daily work; but when somebody sympathised with Mrs Blank for having had to spend so much of her life in such a terrible place, she laughed, and said: "I might have been much worse off. I might have been condemned to live on a small income in a humdrum London suburb or an English provincial town; and that would have been living burial!" But the Ambassador from Borneo was talking about the Japanese, and their treatment of the savage population in Formosa. As you already know, the recalcitrant* Formosan head-hunters are confined inside a circle of live electric wire, a restraint first imposed by the Chinese, and maintained by their successors in government.

"Think it a bit cruel, don't you know, shuttin' up the poor blighters in that way," said the good Englishman. "The head-hunter has his virtues; good fellow in lots of ways; got to get his point of view. Now my chaps!—didn't shut 'em up behind electric wires; made policemen out of 'em. Dam' good policemen, too." Sometimes an Australian thinks that a "Britisher" is pretty slow in getting the other fellow's point of view, but he certainly seems able to do it with the native races. He does not try to wipe them out as the Huns did 'with the Herreros and other I people are doing with the Formosansr "Of course," the Ambassador went on, "there's a bit of a difficulty in havin' a head-hunter as the local bobby, and sendin' him out when a village has been makin' trouble, because he finds it hard to shake off his old habits, don't you see. Oh, it isn't anything nasty in the chap himself! He knows quite well that he can't take a Government job and keep on head-huntin', and on his own he's quite ready to chuck it. But it's the women who keep eggin' him on. Fellows would come to me and say, 'Tuan, this is no good;. our women won't have anything to do with us. They say to us: "You've been away fighting for two weeks, and you've come home without one head. What's the matter with you? —are you men, or aren't you?"' - "So. you sec, a chap's pet girl would take on another man, who wasn't so particular, and could bring her home a couple of scalps for Borneo, home, and beauty. It was rough on my policemen, and I lost a lot of good men because their women wouldn't let 'em alone. Some chaps would keep their policemen sweet by lettin' 'em go out now and then for a couple of heads, but I never did that. Thought it was bad for discipline. If I found my fellows with some poor blighter's head I made a point of tellin' 'em they shouldn't do it."

The Ambassador pulled at his trusty pipe, and seemed to look back affectionately at the contrition of the head-hunter under the inevitable reproof. There'd be more niggers if there wee fewer crocs.," he remarked. "The rivers just swarm with those beastly reptiles. We tell the nigger not to swim in the river or the crocodile will get him, but he swims just the same. A nigger will go and stand up to his knees in the water for no reason at all, except that he's dashed fool enough to do it. Up comes the croc, swings bis tail, bangs the nigger on the head, knocks him down in the water, and then—no nigger! But, though the crocs, eat 'em, they don't get frightened of the crocs. I've seen a nigger jump into the water to save another, fighting a croc, with nothing but a knife. I wouldn't fight him even on shore with anything less than a rifle. I caught a croc, once—a young one—and chained him to a post on the lawn; but in the night he ate the post and got back to the water!" Then he went on to explain that the Bornese equivalent of "kismet" determined the relation between nigger and crocodile. "It's no use telling him to keep out of the water and not be an ass and be eaten. He trusts to his 'nasib.' That's his fate. If if s his nasib to be eaten by a croc, the croc, will have him, and if it ain't his nasib, he'll die some other way. I'll tell you a yarn about the nasib. When Indian troops went up into Mesopotamia, we tried over our way to raise a native company to so to India. Well, we got volunteers and it was a real good company; but all of a sudden they jibbed and said they wouldn't go. 'Get killed,' they said. I told 'em that was all rot; they'd get killed if it was their nasib, but if it wasn't their nasib they wouldn't get killed. They said, 'No, Tuan. Nasib very good in Borneo, Allah Tuan knows everybody's nasib here; but suppose we go India. Allah Tuan not know Indian nasib; we get killed, no nasib at all.' So, I'm hanged if we could shift 'em, and they stayed at home." Chinese coolies do the hard work on the plantations of Borneo. "Fine workmen, too," said the Ambassador; "I wish everybody would work like 'em. But they sometimes get ideas. "Not long ago, in a fresh draft from China, we had a chap who had been to the war. Workin' somewhere behind the lines in France, you know. Must have been an intelligent chap, because he was up-to-date with all the latest Bolshevik

ideas. We had about 500 Chinks, and there were eight white men. Well, this chap started the revolution in our section. One morning the coolies didn't go to work, but they formed a crowd, and came up to our quarters to let up know all about it. There's one rule in trouble with the Chinks—get hold of the heads. It's no use arrestin' people at the tail, but there's always two of three at the top. Catch them, and the rest will fall to bits. So while they were haranguin' and threatenin we watched 'em, and decided which were the chaps we wanted. Then we just went straight forward and each one of us grabbed a Chink. It was all over. The rest went back to work, and the revolution was done in." Then the Ambassador talked of the glorious climate of Borneo, swearing that it was not hot "except in parts,' and he told I ales of hunting great beasts from elephants downwards; and he broke off to use violent language about a Chinese tailor in Tokio, who had wanted to charge him 05 yen for a pair of dress trousers—him, on his way to London and Bond Street! "I haven't worn evenin' dress for seven years till to-night," he said, "and iOs a luxury to do it. I guess the pants had cot a bit green; but—--65 yen! I wouldn't buy 'cm. I took the old pants and put black ink on 'em where thev were greenest. How do they look?" ■ They were like him, and like the prcttv' woman with fair hair, and like the two limber children. Nobody would have believed, on sight, that they had been seven years in the wilds of Borneo