I have already told you how Japan and Formosa and the Philippines are merely the outer mountainous edges of the old Asiatic continent which in the course of millions of years got separated from the mainland by the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

The Malay Islands on the other hand(the Dutch East Indies——they are known by so many different names)are not merely part of the old outer edge of Asia. They are the remnants of an enormous peninsula as large as that of China, which reached from Burma and Siam and Cochin-China eastward to Australia.During the earliest ages of our geographical history this peninsula may have been directly connected with the Asiatic continent(then infinitely larger than today)and afterwards, during a period about which we are a little better informed, it was separated from Australia only by a narrow strip of water, not much wider than the present Torres Strait between Queensland and New Guinea.

The reason for the cataclysmic changes which have turned so vast a piece of dry land into a group of oddly shaped islands, running all the way from Borneo, which is as large as the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula, down to thousands of tiny bits of rock located wherever they happen to be most inconvenient to navigation, is not hard to discover. This part of the world was among the most volcanic regions of the earth.Even today Java retains the blue ribbon for volcanic activities.During the last three centuries, however, the hundred and twenty odd volcanoes of Java have on the whole been very well-behaved, as have those of Sumatra, a little towards the west.

When Brahmanism, the old religion of India, was prevalent among the Javanese, the priests used to placate the spirits that dwelled in the bowels of the earth by an occasional offering of human beings, who were pitched bodily into the boiling cauldron of the craters——apparently with success, for although the volcanoes continue to puff and roar and occasionally go on a rampage, there has been no major catastrophe for several centuries.

But the remnants of Krakatoa lie there as a dreadful waning of something that may happen again at any moment. On the morning of the 26th of August of the year 1883 the island of Krakatoa, situated in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, was very much as it had always been since a prehistoric eruption had blown away the top of its crater and had cut the island up into several small pieces.Two days later, the whole northern part of the island was gone.Where there had been hills 1500 feet high there now was a deep hollow, lying more than a thousand feet below the surface of the Indian Ocean.The noise of that explosion was heard 3000 miles away.Ashes were blown 17 miles up in the air.The volcanic dust spread all over Africa, Europe and America and even as far north as the North Cape.The sky for six weeks afterwards was strangely colored as if there had been a forest fire somewhere in the neighborhood.

But the disturbance caused on the ocean was much more disastrous than that caused on land, for Krakatoa was uninhabited. A tidal wave more than 50 feet high swept along the coast of Java and killed 36,000 people.It wiped out harbors and villages and destroyed large vessels as if they had been kindling wood.Ceylon and Mauritius were affected by these waves.They made themselves noticeable near Cape Horn, which is almost 8000 miles away, and they were faintly observed in the British Channel which is 11,000 miles distant from the Strait of Sunda.

A year ago the remnant of the Krakatoa volcano was once more beginning to show signs of activity. And no one can foretell when or where the subterranean lightning will strike next.As for the people who live here, they are like all the others who live under similar circumstances.They pay no more attention than a small boy in one of our tenement districts pays to the trucks that are driven right across his baseball game in one of the most crowded streets of the Italian quarter.

This fatalistic attitude may be due to the Mohammedan faith. It may also be the result of just plain ordinary contentment with life and the conviction that volcanic oruptions, like foreign dominations or floods or fires, are all of them negligible incidents in life and of small importance to the man who tills his fields, whose ancestors ever since the beginning of the world have tilled these same fields, whose children will till these came fields, and who none of them ever want or expect to go without sufficient nourishment.

This sounds as if I were trying to describe Java as a sort of earthly Paradise. It is hardly that, but it has been so Supremely favored by Nature as to deserve a page of its own.

There is the soil,28% of which is of volcanic origin. That soil, if treated at all kindly and understandingly, will yield three complete harvests every twelve months.

There is the climate, which although hot enough to favor the cultivation of every known tropical plant, is not excessive and which in the mountainous regions is much more agreeable than that of New York or Washington during the summer. For Java and the other islands, although so near the equator that the days and nights are almost equally long, is on all sides surrounded by the sea.It therefore has moisture enough for all purposes and the temperature never goes higher than 96°F, nor lower than 66°F with a mean annual temperature of 79°F.The seasons follow each other with sharp regularity.The rainy season of the western monsoon(an Arabic word meaning“season”and the name of those seasonal winds that blow regularly in this part of the world)lasts from November to March.Then it rains every day at a certain hour.This season is followed by the so-called dry monsoon, when it does not rain at all.The short intermediary period is known as the“canting season”.

As a result of these favorable climatic conditions, Java, which is only 622 miles long and 121 miles wide(a sort of rectangular breakwater, protecting the islands of the inner archipelago against the violence of the southern Indian Ocean)is able to support 42,000,000 people, while Sumatra and Borneo, although much larger, have only one-tenth of that population. And because of its great fertility, the island has from the very beginning attracted the attention of the white man.

The Portuguese were the first to appear upon the scene. Then came the English and the Dutch, but the English gradually concentrated all their forces upon the exploitation of British India and left Java and the other Malaysian islands to the Dutch.Having committed every possible mistake of which the European was capable, in dealing with a native populace during the first three centuries of their rule, the Dutch seem at last to have learned a few primary lessons of colonial management.They interfere just as little as possible with the native and are gradually drawing him more and more into the administration of his own country, knowing that the time will come when for good or evil these people will insist upon being given their liberty.With an army of 30,000 men, of which only one-fifth are white, one will never be able to rule a territory fifty times as large as the mother country if the inhabitants, have really made up their minds that the foreigner must go.The old days, therefore, of“forced labor”and“government plantations”are gone forever.Schools and railroads and hospitals are taking the place of the old punitive expeditions.If eventually one will have to give up these regions as the sovereign master, one may hope to remain behind as an indispensable part of the economic fabric.The old guard, which was firmly convinced that“a native was all right as long as he knew his place”,is slowly giving ground to a younger generation, which knows that facts are mightier than slogans and that this universe of ours was created on the principle of eternal change.

As for the other islands that belong to the Dutch group, none of them is as highly cultivated as Java. Celebes, that queerly shaped, spidery island just west of the Moluccas, the original spice-islands for which the English and the Portuguese and the Spaniards and the Dutch fought each other so bitterly all during the seventeenth century, is being slowly groomed by the Dutch to become a second Java.Today Macassar, the town where the oil came from with which our Victorian grandfathers adorned their locks and which made our Victorian grandmothers knit their endless“antimacassars”,is one of the most important cities of the Java Sea, doing a regular buiness with Surabaya and Semarang, the main ports on the northern coast of Java, and being in regular communcation with Tandjong Priok, which is the harbor of Batavia, and Batavia is the capital.

The Molucca Islands themselves are not as rich as they used to be, but their inhabitants, the Amboinese, are still renowned for their ability as sailors. Four hundred years ago these same Amboinase were dreaded far and wide as the most voracious cannibals of the Pacific Ocean.Today they are exemplary Christians although, curiously enough, they have given the Dutch East Indian army its best fighting regiments.

Borneo, the main remnant of the old submerged Asiatic peninsula, suffers from under-population due to the strange native belief that head-hunting makes for holiness. The Dutch have been trying to kill this popular pastime by the most drastic forms of punishment.But in the interior no young man, even today, is allowed to marry until he has at least one head to his credit.This prolonged process of mutual extermination(the Borneo people will exhibit their gruesome conquests as proudly and as unconcernedly as an expert golf player will Show you his cups)has kept the number of the inhabitants way below par.But now at last the rivers are being opened up, and oil and coal and diamond companies are constructing roads, and the savages are gradually being persuaded to turn to the more peaceful pursuits of agriculture.Thus the island, in due course of time, may be able to support twenty times its present population without noticing the difference.

The northern part of Borneo belongs to the English. The north-western corner is an in-dependent state, called Sarawak, and ruled by the descendants of an Englishman, the famous Rajah Brooks, who arrived in the island as Sir James Brooks to suppress a local rebellion and who remained to become its independent sovereign.

Another island of tremendous importance is Sumatra in the east, which runs parallel with the Malay peninsula. It is highly volcanic and will grow almost anything, but unfortunately it is cut into two distinct halves by a high mountain-range which has greatly retarded its development until the introduction of railroads.The automobile and the flying machine will do more to open up this territory to western commerce than any other mechanical agency would ever have been able to do.

Between Sumatra and Borneo lie the islands of Banka and Billiton which, being a continuation of the Malay peninsula, are also exceedingly rich in tin. East of Java lies the famous island of Bali, where the ancient native form of life has been best preserved, and then come Flores and Timor, just north of Australia, and finally New Guinea, which is really part of the Australian mainland and of which only the western half is in Dutch hands.The island, which would cover the greater part of central Europe, from Paris to Odessa, has hardly been touched.There are no rivers leading to the interior and the population is very small, due in part to cannibalism and in part to the backwardness of the natives, forever decimated by disease and man-hunting.Here and there in the interior there are remnants of pygmy tribes, indicating that the island must have been settled at a very early age.

But then, this whole part of the world is very old and according to one theory at least, it is in this region that Man first of all bade farewell to his anthropoid cousins, the apes. Hence the skull of that earliest man-like creature, the famous Pithecanthropus Erectus, which was found in the island of Java, and the presence in Borneo and Sumatra of those big, manlike apes which are known as the orang-utan.

This is indeed a curious world, this world of ours. One branch of the family progressed until it was able to build zoos.And the other half went to live in them.