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War With The Malays

War With The Malays image
Parent Issue
Day
5
Month
January
Year
1846
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

A few years ago I met an elderly man in the Hartford stage, whose conversation led me to reflect on the baseness and iniquity often concealed behind the apparent glory of war. The thumb of his right hand flung down, as if suspended by a piece of thread; and some of the passengers inquired the case. 'A Malay woman cut the muscle with her sabre,' was the reply.

'A Malay woman!' they exclaimed: 'How came you fighting with a woman?'

'I did not know she was a woman: for they dress alike there,' said he. 'I was on board the United States ship, Potomac, when it was out to chastise the Malays for murdering the I crew of a Salem vessel. We attacked one of their forts and killed some two hundred or more. Many of them were women; and I can tell you the Malay women are as good fighters as the men.'

After answering several questions concerning the conflict, he was silent for a moment, and then added with a sigh, 'Ah, that was a bad business. I do not like to remember it: I wish I never had had anything to do with it. I have been a seaman from my youth, and ' I know the Malays well. They are a brave and honest people. Deal fairly with them, and they will treat you well, and may be trusted with untold gold. The Americans are to blame in that business. The truth is Christian nations are generally to blame in the outset, in all their difficulties with less civilized people. A Salem ship went to Malacca to trade for pepper. They aggreed to give the natives a stated compensation, when a certain number of measures full of pepper were delivered. Men, women and children, were busy picking pepper and bringing it on board. The captain proposed that the sailors should go ashore and help them; and the natives consented, with the most confiding good nature. The sailors were instructed to pick till evening, and then leave the baskets full of pepper among the bushes, with the understanding that they should be brought on board by the natives in the morning. They did so without exciting any suspicion of treachery. But in the night the baskets were all conveyed on board, and the vessel sailed away the Malays unpaid for her valuable cargo. This, of course, excited great indignation, and they made loud complaints to the commander of the next American vessel that arrived on their coast. In answer the demands of redress from the Government, they were assured that the case should be represented, and the wrong repaired. 'But Yankee cuteness' in cheating a few savages was not sufficiently uncommon to make any great stir and the affair was soon forgotten. Some time after another captain of a Salem ship played a similar trick, and carried off a still larger quantity of stolen pepper. The Malays, exasperated beyond measure, resorted to Lynch law, and murdered an American crew that landed there about the same lime. The United States ship Potomac was sent out to punish them for this outrage; and, as I told you, we killed some two hundred men and women. I sometimes think that our retaliation was not more rational, or more like Christians than theirs.'

'Will you please,' said, I, to tell me what sort of revenge would be like Christians?

He hesitated, and said it was a hard question to answer. 'I never felt pleasantly about that affair,' continued he: 'I would rot have killed her if I had known she was a woman.' I asked why he felt any more regret about killing a woman than a man.' I hardly know myself, answered he. 'I don't suppose I should if it were a common thing for women to fight. But we are accustomed to think of them as not defending themselves: and there is something in every human heart that makes a man unwilling to fight those who do not fight in return. It seems mean and dastardly, a man cannot work himself up to it.' Then one nation would not fight, another could not, said I.

'What if a nation, instead of an individual, should make such an appeal to the manly feeling which you say is inherent in the heart? - 'I believe other nations would be ashamed to attack her,' he replied. 'It would take away all of the glory and excitement of war, and the hardest soldier would shrink from it, as from cold-blooded murder.' "such a peace establishment would be at once cheap, and beautiful,' rejoined I; and so we parted. - Mrs. Child.

We saw a fellow the other day, trying, very pertinaciously to shake hands with his shadow. He got on his knees reaching for "t' other hand." He was tipsy.

Twenty-one banks have gone into operation under the general banking law of Ohio, passed last winter, and two more are ready to go into operation,

Article

Subjects
Signal of Liberty
Old News