Cobra! A Cobra!"


S.S. "RAINBOW," MALACCA ROADS, February 1, 5 P.M.

I am once again on board this quaint little Chinese steamer, which is
rolling on a lazy ground-swell on the heated, shallow sea. We were to
have sailed at four P.M., but mat-sailed boats, with cargoes of
Chinese, Malays, fowls, pine-apples, and sugar-cane, kept coming off
and delaying us. The little steamer has long ago submerged her
load-line, and is only about ten inches above the water, and still they
load, and still the mat-sailed boats and eight-paddled boats, with two
red-clothed men facing forward on each thwart, are disgorging men and
goods into the overladen craft. A hundred and thirty men, mostly
Chinese, with a sprinkling of Javanese and Malays, are huddled on the
little deck, with goats and buffaloes, and forty coops of fowls and
ducks; the fowls and ducks cackling and quacking, and the Chinese
clattering at the top of their voices--such a Babel!

An hour later, "Easy ahead," shouts the Portuguese-Malay captain, for
the Rainbow is only licensed for one hundred passengers, and the water
runs in at the scuppers as she rolls, but five of the mat-sailed boats
have hooked on. "Run ahead! full speed!" the captain shouts in
English; he dances with excitement, and screams in Malay; the Chinamen
are climbing up the stern, over the bulwarks, everywhere, fairly
boarding us; and with about a hundred and fifty souls on board, and not
a white man or a Christian among them, we steam away over the gaudy
water into the gaudy sunset, and beautiful, dreamy, tropical Malacca,
with its palm-fringed shores, and its colored streets, and Mount Ophir
with its golden history, and the stately Stadthaus, whose ancient rooms