“FROM FAR FORMOSA”
George Leslie Mackay—A lawless land—The Malay and the Chinaman—Dentistry and the Gospel— A cruel plot—The capture of Bang-kah—The barbarians of the plain—The Kap-tsu-lan fishermen—The mountain head-hunters—A Christmas night in a headhunter's house.
FOR the title of this chapter we have taken the name of a book by Dr. George Leslie Mackay, of the Canadian Presbyterian Church, whose acquaintance with Formosa and its people—the people of the mountains as well as of the plains—is of an altogether unique kind. The title is appropriate, for though on the map Formosa is not more distant than China or Japan, it is much farther off than the moon to the vast majority of people, so far as any knowledge of it is concerned. Indeed, until it became a storm center of the Chino-Japanese War of 1895, and passed under the sway of the Mikado, and was thus made an object of fresh interest to the Western world, there were numbers of fairly well-informed people who knew no more about it than that it was an island somewhere in the Eastern Seas. But more than thirty years ago it had attracted the attention of Mr. Mackay, a young Canadian of Highland Scottish descent. Sent out to China as a missionary by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, which gave him a pretty free hand in the selection of a definite sphere, he chose the northern part of Formosa—perfectly virgin soil so far as any Christian work was concerned. The evangelization of North Formosa was a hard and dangerous task to be attempted by a single man, but Mackay flung himself into it with all the enthusiasm of a Celt, as well as the steady devotion of a brave soldier of the Church militant.
Formosa was a wild and lawless land, with its mixture of mutually hostile races, its debased Mongolians and savage Malayans, its men of the plains and men of the mountains, its corrupt officials in the towns and savage head-hunters in the hill forests. Mackay, however, went about fearlessly, with a dentist's forceps (a wonderful talisman) in one hand and a Bible in the other. At one time we find him sleeping contentedly in the filthy cabin of a farmer on the swampy rice plains with a litter of pigs, it might almost be said, for his bed-fellows, the pig being a highly domesticated animal in Formosa, and treated by its master as an Englishman treats his pet dog. Again, he is far up amongst the mountains in the land of the head-hunters, where his sleeping apartment, which is also the sleeping apartment of the whole family, is adorned with a row of grinning skulls and queues that testifies to the prowess of his host in murdering Chinamen and other dwellers on the plains. It was by a courage and persistence which nothing could daunt that this young Scoto-Canadian won his way in Formosa, until to those who are interested in the history of missions, "Mackay of Formosa" seems as natural and inevitable a title as "Mackay of Uganda" or "Chalmers of New Guinea.”
Apart from the Japanese settlers who have planted themselves in the island since the war of 1895, the population of Formosa is divided between the aborigines, who are of a Malayan stock, and the Chinese, who in ever-increasing numbers have poured in from the adjacent mainland. Though only half the size of Scotland, the island is dominated by a range of mountains quite Alpine in their height, the loftiest rising to between 14,000 and 15,000 feet above the sea. Along the coast, however, there are fertile stretches, perfectly flat, formed by the alluvial deposits washed down in the course of ages. On the richer of these plains, as well as on the lower reaches of the hills, the incoming Chinamen settled, usually by no better title than the right of might. "Rice-farms and tea-plantations took the place of forest tangle and wild plateau; the rude hamlets of another race vanished; towns and cities with their unmistakable marks of the Middle Kingdom' took their place; and the Chinese became a superior power in Formosa.”
To the Chinese, of course, the original inhabitants without exception were "barbarians," but the Malayan population, though comprising a great many different tribes, may be roughly divided into two well-defined sections. First there are those who have accepted Chinese authority, and in a modified form have adopted the Chinese civilization and religion. These go by the name of Pe-po-hoan, or "barbarians of the plain." Then there are those who have absolutely refused to acknowledge the Chinese invaders as the masters of Formosa, and, though driven into the mountains and forests, have retained their ancestral freedom. These are the much-dreaded Chhihoan or "raw barbarians," whose manner of life in many respects recalls that of their kinsmen the Hill Dyaks of Borneo. Among these mountain savages, as formerly among the Dyaks, head-hunting is cultivated as a fine art. They hate the Chinese with a deadly hatred, and hardly less their own Pe-po-hoan kinsfolk who have yielded to the stranger and accepted his ways. Pe-po-hoan and Chinaman alike are considered as fair game, and their skulls are mingled indiscriminately in the ghastly collection which is the chief glory of the mountain brave, as it forms the principal adornment of his dwelling.
Naturally it was among the Chinese in the towns that Mackay began his work. He was fortunate in gathering round him very early some earnest young men, who not only accepted Christianity for themselves, but became his disciples and followers with a view to teaching and helping others. These students, as they were called, accompanied him on all his tours, not only gaining valuable experience thereby, but being of real assistance in various ways. For instance, Mackay soon discovered that the people of Formosa, partly because of the prevalence of malarial fever, and partly because they are constantly chewing the betel-nut, have very rotten teeth and suffer dreadfully from toothache. Though not a doctor, he knew a little of medicine and surgery, having attended classes in these subjects by way of preparing himself for his work abroad; but he found that nothing helped him so much in making his way among the people as his modest skill in dentistry. The priests and other enemies of Christianity might persuade the people that their fevers and other ailments had been cured not by the medicines of the "foreign devil," but by the intervention of their own gods. The power of the missionary, however, to give instantaneous relief to one in the agonies of toothache was unmistakable, and tooth-extraction worked wonders in breaking down prejudice and opposition. It was here that some of the students proved especially useful. They learned to draw teeth almost if not quite as well as Mackay himself, so that between them they were able to dispose of as many as 500 patients in an afternoon.
The usual custom of Mackay and his little band of students as they journeyed about the country was to take their stand in an open space, often on the stone steps of a temple, and after singing a hymn or two to attract attention, to proceed to the work of tooth-pulling, thereafter inviting the people to listen to their message. For the most part the crowd was very willing to listen. Sudden relief from pain produces gratitude even towards a "foreign devil," and the innate Chinese suspicion of some black arts or other evil designs was always guarded against by scrupulously placing the tooth of each patient in the palm of his own hand. The people began to love Mackay, and this opened their hearts to his preaching. Men and women came to confess their faith, and in one large village which was the center of operations there were so many converts that a preaching-hall had to be secured, which Sunday after Sunday was packed by an expectant crowd.
Opposition is often the best proof of success, and in Mackay's case it soon came in cruel and tragic forms. A cunning plot was laid between the priestly party and the civil officials to accuse a number of these Chinese Christians of conspiring to assassinate the mandarin. Six innocent men were seized and put in the stocks in the dungeons of the city of Bang-kah. Mock trials were held, in the course of which the prisoners were bambooed, made to kneel on red-hot chains, and tortured in various other ways. At last one morning two of the heroic band, a father and son, were taken out of their dungeon and dragged off to the place of execution. The son's head was chopped off before his father's eyes, after which the old man too was put to death. Then their heads, placed in baskets, were carried slowly back to Bang-kah with the notice fixed above them, Jip kon-e Lang than ("Heads of the Christians"). All along the way the town-crier summoned the multitude to witness the fate of those who followed the "barbarian". And when the walls of Bangkah were reached the two heads were fastened above the city gate, just as the heads of criminals or martyrs used to be set above the Netherbow at Edinburgh or Temple Bar in London, for a terror and a warning to all who passed by. It was a cruel fate, and yet better than that of the remaining prisoners. Their lot was to be slowly starved or tortured to death in their filthy dungeons.
But in spite of these horrors—partly, we might say, because of them—the number of Christians in North Formosa steadily grew, until at length, as Dr. Mackay puts it, "Bang-kah itself was taken." Not that this important place, "the Gibraltar of heathendom" in the island, was transformed into a Christian city. But it ceased, at all events, to be fiercely anti-Christian, and came to honor the very man whom it had hustled, hooted at, pelted with mud and rotten eggs, and often plotted to kill. A striking proof of the change was given by and by when Mackay was about to return to Canada on a visit. The head men of the city sent a deputation to ask him to allow them to show their appreciation of himself and his work by according him a public send-off. He was not sure about it at first, not caring much for demonstrations of this kind, but on reflection concluded that it might be well, and might do good to the Christian cause, to allow them to have their own way. So he was carried through the streets of Bang-kah to the jetty in a silk-lined sedan-chair, preceded by the officials of the place, and followed by three hundred soldiers and bands of civilians bearing flags and banners, to a musical accompaniment provided by no fewer than eight Chinese orchestras made up of cymbals, drums, gongs, pipes, guitars, mandolins, tambourines, and clarionets. Heathens and Christians alike cheered him as he boarded the steam-launch which was to take him off from the shore, while the Christians who had stood firmly by him through troublous times broke into a Chinese version of the old Scottish paraphrase, "I'm not ashamed to own my Lord.”
But while Mackay found his base of operations among the Chinese in the north and west of Formosa, he did not forget the Malayan aborigines, whether those of the plains or those of the mountains. As soon as he had got a firm footing and gathered a band of competent helpers around him, he began to turn his attention to the Pe-po-hoan, the "barbarians of the plain," who cultivate their rice-farms in the low-lying and malarial districts along the northeast coast. He had already experienced many of the drawbacks of Formosan travel. He had known what it was to be swept down the current in trying to ford dangerous streams, to push his way through jungles full of lurking serpents, to encounter hostile crowds in village or town who jeered at the "foreign devil," or regarded him, as the boy said of birds in his essay on the subject, as being "very useful to throw stones at." And night when it came he had often found not less trying than day, possibly still more so. The filthy rest-houses were not places of much rest to a white man. Pigs frisked out and in, and slept or grunted beneath the traveler's bed. The bed itself was a plank with brick legs, the mattress a dirty grass mat on which coolies had smoked opium for years. And when, overpowered by weariness, he fell asleep, he was apt to be suddenly awakened by the attacks of what he humorously describes as "three generations of crawling creatures.”
Greater dangers and worse discomforts than these, however, had now to be faced in carrying the Gospel to the country of the Pe-po-hoan. In the mountains over which it was necessary to pass in order to cross from the west coast to the east, Mackay and his students had to run the gauntlet of the stealthy head-hunters. They had more than one narrow escape. Passing by the mouth of a gorge one day, they heard in the distance blood-curdling yells and screams, and presently a Chinese came rushing up all out of breath and told them that he and four others had just been attacked by the savages, and that his companions were all speared and beheaded, while he had only managed to escape with his life. When the plains were reached the Pe-po-hoan did not prove at first a friendly or receptive people. From village after village they were turned away with reviling, the inhabitants often setting their wolfish dogs upon them. The weather was bad, and in that low-lying region the roads were soon turned into quagmires where the feet sank into eighteen inches of mud. When night fell a Chinese inn would have been welcome enough; but sometimes no better sleeping-place could be had than the lee side of a dripping rice-stack.
But after a while things began to improve. Like Jesus in Galilee, Mackay found his first disciples in the Kaptsu-lan plain among the fishermen—bold, hardy fellows, who live in scattered villages along that coast. Three of these fishers came to him one day and said, "You have been going through and through our plain, and no one has received you. Come to our village, and we will listen to you." They led Mackay and his students to their village, gave them a good supper of rice and fish, and then one of them took a large conch shell, which in other days had served as a war-trumpet, and summoned the whole population to an assembly. Till the small hours of the morning Mackay was kept busy preaching, conversing, discussing, and answering questions. The very next day these people determined to have a church of their own in which to worship the true God. They sailed down the coast to the forest country farther south to cut logs of wood, and though they were attacked by the savages while doing so, and some of them wounded, they returned in due course with a load of timber. Bricks were made out of mud and rice-chaff, and a primitive little chapel was soon erected, in which every evening at the blowing of the conch the entire village met to hear the preacher. Mackay stayed two months in this place, and by that time it had become nominally Christian. Several times, he tells us, he dried his dripping clothes at night in front of a fire made of idolatrous paper, idols, and ancestral tablets which the people had given him to destroy. One reason for this rapid and wholesale conversion to Christianity no doubt lay in the fact that the Chinese idolatry which these Pe-po-hoan fishermen had been induced to accept never came very near to their hearts. Originally they or their fathers had been nature-worshippers, as all the mountain savages still are, and many of them were inclined to look upon the rites and ceremonies to which they submitted as unwelcome reminders of their subjection to an alien race.
What took place in this one village was soon repeated in several others on the Kap-tsu-lan plain. Even in places where men, women, and children had rejected him at first and hurled "the contumelious stone" at his head, Mackay came to be welcomed by the people as their best friend. And by and by no fewer than nineteen chapels sprang up in that plain, the preachers and pastors in every case being native Christians, and several of them being drawn from among the Pe-po-hoan themselves.
But something must now be said about the Chhi-hoan, or savage barbarians of the mountains. More than once in the course of his tours among the Pe-po-hoan Mackay narrowly escaped from the spears and knives of these warriors, who live by hunting wild animals in the primeval forests, but whose peculiar delight it is to hunt for human heads, and above all for the heads of the hated Chinese.
On one occasion a party of Chinese traders with whom he was staying in an outpost settlement was attacked by a band of two dozen savages; and though the latter were eventually beaten off, it was not till they had secured the heads of three of Mackay's trading friends.
According to the unwritten law of the mountain villages, no man is permitted to marry until he has proved his prowess by bringing at least one head to his chief, while eminence in the estimation of the tribe always depends upon the number of skulls which a brave can display under the eaves or along the inside walls of his hut. Mackay tells of one famous chief who was captured at last by the Chinese authorities, and who said, as he was led out to execution, that he was not ashamed to die, because in his house in the mountains he could show a row of skulls only six short of a hundred.
A head-hunter's outfit consists, in the first place, of a long, light thrusting-spear with an arrow-shaped blade eight inches in length. In his belt he carries a cruel-looking crooked knife with which to slash off his victim's head. Over the shoulder he wears a bag of strong, twisted twine, capable of carrying two or three heads at a time. From the attacks of these bloodthirsty savages none who live or move on the borderland between mountain and plain are ever secure by day or by night. In the daytime the hunters usually go out singly, concealing themselves in the tall grass of the level lands, or behind some stray boulder by a path through a glen along which sooner or later a traveler is likely to pass. When his quarry is within spear-thrust, the crouching hunter leaps upon him, striking for his heart; and soon a headless corpse is lying on the ground, while the savage, with his prize slung round his neck, is trotting swiftly, by forest paths known only to himself, towards his distant mountain home.
But more commonly the attack is made at night, and made by a party of braves. In this case everything is carefully planned for weeks before. Watchers on the hill-tops, or scouts lurking in the bush along the edge of the forests, report as to when a village festivity is likely to make its defenders less watchful, or when the fishermen have gone off on a distant fishing expedition, leaving their homes to the care of none but womenfolk. Having selected a house for attack, the savages silently surround it in the darkness, creeping stealthily nearer and nearer until, at a signal from the leader, one of them moves on before the rest and sets fire to the thatch. When the unfortunate inmates, aroused from sleep by the crackle of the flames and half-stifled by the smoke, attempt to rush out of the door, they are instantly speared and their heads secured. In a few moments, before the nearest neighbors have had time to come to the rescue, or even been awakened from their slumbers, the hunters have disappeared into the night.
The return to the village of a successful head-hunting party is a scene of fiendish delight, in which men, women, and children alike all take a part. Hour after hour dancing and drinking is carried on, as the Chhi-hoan gloat over the death of their enemies and praise the prowess of their warriors. On rare occasions the heads of the victims are boiled and the flesh eaten, but it is quite common to boil the brain to a jelly and eat it with the gusto of revenge. Dr. Mackay has himself been present in a mountain village on the return of a head-hunting party, and has been offered some of this brain jelly as a rare treat.
One who goes among such people must literally take his life in his hands, for he may at any moment fall a victim to treachery or to the inherited passion for human blood. But perfect courage and unvarying truth and kindness will carry a traveler far, and Mackay had the further advantage of being possessed of medical and surgical skill. He owed something, moreover, to his not having a pigtail. "You must be a kinsman of ours," the Chhi-hoan said, as they examined the missionary's back hair. And so by degrees Mackay came to live in close touch with these savages, and found that, apart from their head-hunting instincts, they had some good and amiable qualities of their own. From time to time he visited them as he got opportunity, and was even able in some cases to bring a measure of light to very benighted minds.
One year Mackay spent a Christmas holiday high up among the mountains as the guest of one of the barbarian chiefs. The house was a single large room, fully thirty feet long, in which at night a fire blazed at either end. Around one fire the women squatted spinning cord for nets, around the other the braves smoked and discussed a head-hunting expedition which they proposed to undertake before long. On the walls were the customary rows of skulls, their grinning teeth lighted up fitfully by the flickering gleams from the burning fir logs. In the midst of this promiscuous crowd, which included a mother and her newborn babe, Mackay with his students had to sleep that night. But before the time came to lie down and rest, he proposed that he and his Christian companions should give a song, a proposal which secured silence at once, for the aborigines are much more musical than the Chinese, and are very fond of singing. And so on Christmas night, in that wild spot where no white man had ever been before, and to that strange audience, Mackay and his little band of Chinese converts sang some Christian hymns. And after that he told the listening savages the story of the first Christmas night, and of the love of Him who was born in the stable at Bethlehem for the head-hunters of Formosa, no less than for the white men whose home was over the sea.
NOTE.—The material for this chapter is derived from Dr. Mackay's book, From Far Formosa (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier).