1832.] 
ISLAND OP JAVA. 
299 
lands, the houses being principally of one story, with high walls. 
But there are some pleasing exceptions ; as Batavia contains 
many buildings which may lay claim to architectural taste and 
elegance. The stadt-house, churches, Mahommedan mosque, 
and Chinese temple, are all worthy of a stranger's inspection. 
We wonder not that the Dutch were prone to boast of Batavia, 
in the brightest days of its commercial prosperity. They were 
just the people to be proud of such a city. "With what conde- 
scending self-complacency would a high born-burgher then act as 
a chaperon to his European guest ! He would point out as a 
master-piece of elegance in its design, the large octagon church, 
with its magnificent and fine-toned organ; its pulpit of teak- 
wood ; its curious carving and laborious workmanship ; and with 
affected nonchalance mention that it cost a mere trifle, eighty 
thousand pounds ! Then would follow the citadel, the stadt- 
house, the governor's mansion and chapel, the Lutheran and Por- 
tuguese churches, the mosque, the pagoda, the spin-house, the 
infirmary, the orphan-house, the market, and some of the burghers' 
dwellings, the canals, the city gates, the drawbridges, and the 
suburbs. The European would doubtless be dazzled, and in- 
chned to envy his hospitable host, the luxurious Batavian. 
But a very few days' experience, and a more critical inves- 
tigation would convince the startled stranger that this fair city 
—this boasted mart of the world — this great emporium of ori- 
ental commerce— was but a garnished sepulchre, — a splendid 
iazar-house, teeming with contagion, pestilence, and death. Such 
was pre-eminently the case in the days of its brightest glory 
and proudest magnificence! How could it be otherwise? 
Look at its position ! So near the equator, — surrounded on all 
sides by stagnant waters, fens,, bogs, and oozy ditches— every 
street intersected by canals, bordered with trees, into which every 
description of filth was thrown, with vegetable and animal re- 
mains, there to undergo decomposition in the sun, or find their 
tardy way to the sea, by channels which had scarcely any current !* 
* Independent of their noxious and tinwholesome effluvia, these canals were also 
sources of danger of a different and still more appalling character. Captain Amasa 
Delano, of Boston, who visited Batavia in seventeen hundred and ninety-two, has re- 
corded the following incident :— " I was standing, at noonday, in the door of the 
principal hotel, on one side of a canal seventy or eighty yards from the spot, and saw 
an alligator take a child off from the steps, the opposite side, and eat it !" 
