IT is a curious thing, when you stop to think about it, that, though of late the public has been deluged with books on the South Seas, though the shelves of the public libraries sag beneath the volumes devoted to China, Japan, Korea, next to nothing has been written, save by a handful of scientifically-minded explorers, about those far-flung, gorgeous lands, stretching from the southern marches of China to the edges of Polynesia, which the ethnologists call Malaysia. Siam, Cambodia, Annam, Cochi

For the courtesies they showed me, and the assistance they afforded me during the long journey which is chronicled in this book, I am deeply indebted to many persons in many lands. I welcome this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to the Hon. Francis Burton Harrison, former Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, and to the Hon. Manuel Quezon, President of the Philippine Senate, for placing at my disposal the coastguard cutter Negros, on which I cruised upward of six thousand miles, as w

A real wild manof Borneo . . . . . Frontispiece FACING PAGE Hawkinson taking motion-pictures while descending the rapids of the Pagsanjan River in Luzon . . Members of Major Powell's party landing on the south coast of Bali . . ce ee ee The bull-fight at Parang «ee ee ee a Dusun women . . « . « « « 4&4 «oe Dyak head-hunters of North Borneo . . . . . . The Jalan Tiga, Sandakan . . . . « « . A patron of a Sandakan opium farm . . . . Catching a man-eating crocodile in a Borneo river . Major

WHEN I was a small boy I spent my summers at the quaint old fishing-village of Mattapoisett, on Buzzard’s Bay. Next door to the house we occupied stood a low-roofed, unpretentious dwelling, white as an old-time clipper ship, with bright green blinds. I can still catch the fragrance of the lilacs by the gate. The fine old doorway, brass-knockered, arched by a spray of crimson rambler, was flanked on one hand by a great conch-shell, on the other by an enormous specimen of branch-coral, thus subtly

WE sailed at sunset out of Jolo and all through the breathless tropic night the Negros forged ahead at half-speed, her sharp prow cleaving the still bosom of the Sulu Sea as silently as a gondola stealing down the Canale Grande. So oppressive was the night that sleep was out of the question, and I leaned upon the rail of the bridge, the hot land breeze, laden with the mysterious odors of the tropics, beating softly in my face, and listlessly watched the phosphorescent ostrich feathers curling fr

Unie I went to British North Borneo I had considered the British the best colonial administrators in the world. And, generally speaking, I hold to that opinion. But what I saw and heard in that remote and neglected corner of the Empire disclosed a state of affairs which I had not dreamed could exist in any land over which flies the British flag. It was not the iniquitous character of the administration which surprised me, for I had seen the effects of bad colonial administration in other distant

In Singapore stands one of the most significant statues in the world. From the centre of its sunscorched Esplanade rises the bronze figure of a youthful, slender, clean-cut, keen-eyed man, clad in the highcollared coat and knee-breeches of a century ago, who, from his lofty pedestal, peers southward, beyond the shipping in the busy harbor, beyond the palm-fringed straits, toward those mysterious, alluring islands which ring the Java Sea. Though his name, Thomas Stamford Raffles, doubtless holds

THERE is no name between the covers of the atlas which so smacks of romance and adventure as Borneo. Show me the red-blooded boy who, when he sees that magic name over the wild man's cage in the circus sideshow or over the orang-utan’s cage in the zoo, does not secretly long to go adventuring in the jungles of its mysterious interior. So, because there is still in me a good deal of the boy, thank Heaven, I ordered the course of the Negros laid for Samarinda, which, if the charts were to be belie

THE Negros was not fast—thirteen knots was about the best she could do-—so that it took us two days to cross from Samarinda, in Borneo, to Makassar, the capital of the Celebes. Our course took us within sight of “the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,” where, as you may remember, Sir Anthony Gloster, of Kipling’s ballad of The Mary Gloster, was buried beside his wife. Before our hawsers had fairly been made fast to the wharf at Makassar it became evident that among the natives o

I WENT to Bali, which is an island two-thirds the size of Porto Rico, off the eastern extremity of Java, because I wished to see for myself if the accounts 1 had heard of the surpassing beauty of its women were really true. The Dutch officials whom I had met in Samarinda and Makassar had depicted the obscure little isle as a flaming, fragrant garden, overrun with flowers, a sort of unspoiled island Eden, where bronzebrown Eves with faces and figures of surpassing loveliness disported themselves

I ENTERED Java through the back door, as it were. That is to say, instead of landing at Batavia, which is the capital of Netherlands India, and presenting my letters of introduction to the Governor-General, Count van Limburg Stirum, I landed at Pasuruan, at the eastern extremity of the six-hundred-mile-long island. It was as though a foreigner visiting the United States were to land at Sag Harbor, on the far end of Long Island, instead of at New York. I learned afterward, from the American Consu

HAMANGKOE BOEWOENOE SENOPATI SAHADIN Panoro Gomo Karr Pareran Kanpjene VII, Ruler of the World, Spike of the Universe, and Sultan of Djokjakarta, is an old, old man, yet his brisk walk and upright carriage betrayed no trace of the worries which might be expected to beset one who is burdened with the responsibility of supporting three thousand wives and concubines. When one achieves a2 domestic establishment of such proportions, however, he doubtless shifts the responsibility for its administrati

SINCE the world began the peacock’s tail which we call the Malay Peninsula has swung down from Siam to sweep the Sumatran shore. A peacock’s tail not merely in configuration but in its gorgeousness of color. Green jungle—a bewildering tangle of trees, shrubs, bushes, plants, and creepers, hung with ferns and mosses, bound together with rattans and trailing vines —clothes the mountains and the lowlands, its verdant riot checked only by the sea. Penetrating the deepest recesses of the jungle a net

Inpo-CHINA is a great bay-window bulging from the southeastern corner of Asia, its casements opening on the China Sez and on the Gulf of Siam. Of all the countries of the Farther East it is the most mysterious; of them all it is the least known. ILarger than the State of Texas, it is a land of vast forests and unexplored jungles in which roam the elephant, the tiger and the buffalo; a land of palaces and pagodas and gilded temples; of sun-bronzed pioneers and priests in yellow robes and bejewele

From Pnom-Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to Saigon, the capital of Cochin-China, is in the neighborhood of two hundred miles and two routes are open to the traveler. The most comfortable and considerably the cheapest is by the bi-weekly steamer down the Mekong. The alternative route, which is far more interesting, consists in descending the river to Banam, a village some twenty miles below Pnom-Penh, on the opposite bank of the Mekong, where, if a car has been arranged for, it is possible to mot