In Savage Isles and Settled Lands: Malaysia, Australasia,and Polynesia, 1888–1891

Abstract

THIS book contains the impressions of Lieut. Baden Powell during a journey round the world of over three years’ duration; jottings limited chiefly to his own personal doings and observations. The journey was evidently a leisurely peregrination with many divergences to places of interest off his direct route out to Brisbane in Queensland, whither he was bound to assume official duty on the staff of the governor of that colony, and an equally unhurried saunter home again through the Pacific and America. The author does not propose to look at things with scientific eyes, and it is possible here and there throughout the book to detect that he has no profound acquaintance with the ologies. Consequently his book does not fall to be rigidly criticized in these pages. His eyes, however, if not scientific, were kept at all events very wide open, and what came under his own observation is clearly and accurately described in a chatty and pleasant style and with a good deal of quiet humour. It is easy to see that the “tramp” enjoyed his trip, and the reader, drawn on by his cicerone's mood, accompanies him through savage isles and settled lands with equal satisfaction. Lieut. Baden-Powell started off through the European continent viâ Cologne and Vienna to Rustchuk, thence across Bulgaria, through which “a railway journey is not very interesting.” Nevertheless, “little picturesque villages are seen nestling in the valleys, and distant glimpses of the Balkans gained.” Beyond Shumla we get through the mountains and “pass through miles of swamp, the railway almost level with the water, and reeds growing up all around, in some places so high as to cut out all view from the carriage windows. Passing along the edges of large lakes, the train starts up thousands of wild fowl, which fly around till the air is quite darkened by them, and on we go, mile after mile, with more and more duck rising from the water,” evidently a sportsman's paradise. Thence our guide conducts us to Constantinople and on to Egypt, and though he takes us by welltrodden paths and tells us little that is new or wonderful, he enlivens the way with a constant flow of time-beguiling talk and anecdote. From Egypt Mr. Baden-Powell sets out for southern Australia, but he wanders as usual off his main road for some weeks into Ceylon and India to luxuriate amid their tropic scenery and ancient monuments. Of the three southern colonies of the Australias traversed on his way to Queensland he gives us a few brief notes. Of the latter colony, where he spent some years in the enjoyable and not very arduous duties of A.D.C. to Sir Anthony Musgrave and Sir Henry Norman, he has a great deal that is interesting to tell. He visited much of the country, and saw something of its aboriginal as well as of its adopted natives, and found interest and amusement in both. At a vice-regal ball at Hughenden, a town 240 miles inland, he finds himself a fellow-guest with the butler of the hotel he was staying at, and his host's housemaid, “who was quite the belle of the ball, and who, when supper was served, turned waitress again. Such is society in a Bush town.” “It was in this district,” he continues, “that I first set eyes on some real wild blacks. The aboriginals of Australia are an extraordinary people. To look at they are quite unlike any other human beings I ever saw. A thick tangled mass of black hair crowns their heads; their features are of the coarsest; very large broad and flattened noses; small, sharp, bead-like eyes and heavy eyebrows. They generally have a coarse tangled bit of beard; skin very dark and limbs extraordinarily attenuated like mere bones. But they always carry themselves very erect.… They wander about stark naked over the less settled districts, and live entirely on what they can pick up.… If not the lowest type of humanity they would be hard to beat. They show but few signs of human instinct, and in their ways seem to be really more like beasts.” Mr. Baden-Powell thus summarizes his opinions on Australia as a field for emigration (and those who know the Australasian colonies will recognize their truth): “The labouring man will find it a paradise; the professional man will find his profession overstocked; and the man with money to invest will probably be ruined. … My personal advice to would be emigrants except of the lowest [? lower] class is like Punch's—Don't.”

In Savage Isles and Settled Lands: Malaysia, Australasia,and Polynesia, 1888–1891.

By B. F. S. Baden-Powell Lieut. Scots Guards (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1892.)