The Penang Pirate | Page 8

board, without any incident of note occurring to break the monotony of the voyage, the English sailors keeping to themselves, and the Malays apart, without either mixing or speaking with the others save when the duties of the ship called them into temporary association.
Kifong, the serang, however, they could see was wide-awake, and observant of all that went on around him. He was particularly anxious about the saloon and the passenger: and was continually trying to interrogate Snowball as to what went on within the privileged retreat, to which none else of the crew were admitted. What struck him more than anything else was the amount of food which the black cook was preparing, and carrying from the galley into the cabin.
"What for you takee so muchee prog, black-man, in dere for?" he said one day to Snowball, much to that individual's indignation at the reference to his colour, which he always most studiously ignored.
"What for, mister yaller man? Why, for eat, sure!"
The Malay's eyes gleamed like a serpent's, and he showed his teeth like a snarling dog.
"Five men no eatee that much prog," he said in an angry tone. "You tell one lie, black-man."
"Lie yourself, yaller nigger," said the darky. "You no tink dat four officers and de passenger gen'leman all eat muchee food; very good appeta-tites havee."
The serang walked away from Snowball with a strong expression of doubt in his face, and ever afterwards seemed to bear a particular ill-will to the darky, laying traps to trip him up on his passage to and fro between the galley and the cabin when heavily laden with dishes for Mr Meredith's gigantic meals.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FOUR.
A STRANGE SAIL.
The ship sailed on serenely, making from two hundred to two hundred and fifty knots in each twenty-four hours run--on some exceptional occasions clearing indeed as much as three hundred, to the great jubilation of the men--until one day, at noon, Captain Morton announced that they were in the same parallel as the Thousand Islands, and rapidly approaching the Straits of Sunda.
This wide channel of the sea, separating the islands of Java and Sumatra, forms one of the main gateways used by the vast number of ships that navigate the China Sea. All vessels bound thither from the western hemisphere pass either to the north or south of Sumatra, entering the Eastern Archipelago through the Straits of Singapore or else by the Straits of Sunda. Steam-vessels bound through the Suez Canal and Indian Ocean use the former route, and those rounding the Cape of Good Hope the latter. The strait is about seventy miles long, sixty miles broad at the south-west end, narrowing to thirteen miles at the north-east; and it was here that the terrible earthquake occurred in the summer of 1883, by which so many thousands of lives were sacrificed in a moment, through the submerging of some of the adjacent islands in the sea, a catastrophe only second in the annals of history to the earthquake at Lisbon in the last century.
Half-way through the strait, equidistant from the two shores, was a group of three islands, the largest of which was Krakatoa, four and a half miles long and three miles broad, its volcanic summit reaching to a height of 2623 feet above the sea-level, about ten times higher than the surrounding sea was deep. Between it and Java, although the floor of the strait was uneven, the channel was clear of dangers; on the Sumatra side were several islands and rocks, the two largest of which, Bezee and Sebooko, rose respectively 2825 feet and 1416 feet above the sea. The tremendous volcanic eruption, with the accompanying earthquake and inundation of the coasts which lately happened here--on the 26th August, 1883--has now wrought a fearful change here. According to all accounts, it appears that the chain of islets on the Sumatra side of the straits has been added to by at least sixteen volcanic craters rising within the eight miles of water that formerly separated them from Krakatoa. With so enormous an upheaval it would not be unnatural to expect the surrounding floor to be depressed; but when it is learned that the whole island of Krakatoa, containing about 8000 million cubic yards of material, has fallen in, and the greater part of it disappeared below the sea, the magnitude of the convulsion becomes more apparent, and it is the easier to realise the formation of the destructive volcanic wave that was thrown on the neighbouring shores. It is almost inconceivable that this island, with a mountain summit which rose nearly 2700 feet above the sea-level, should have been so extensively submerged; but it seems to have been in the very centre of the area of this vast earthquake, which convulsed the whole basin of the sea between Lampong Bay,