Java, the Garden of the East

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

Eliza Rumaha Scidmore was born October 14, 1856 in Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America and died November 3, 1928 in Geneva, Switzerland. She was a journalist and a traveller and spent long periods in in Alaska, Japan, China, Java and India. In this book about Java written in 1912, Scidmore, who clearly loved the subject is very enthusiastic about the country and the traditions that have made Java such a unique place. It still remains a little known country nowadays but by reading Eliza Scidmore, we are transported to the beauty of the tropical gardens, the volcanoes, the magnificent buddhist temple of Borobudur, the impact of the conquest by Islam, its unique culture and so many places that I bet you did not even know they existed.

Genres: Travel, History

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1899

Reviews

[Calvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Scidmore's account of her travel to Java, I cannot help but compare her work with that of Augusta de Wit's (Java: Facts and Fancies). Both were published around the same time and both illuminated the ins and outs of traveling (and to a certain extent, living) in 1890s Java in what was then the Netherlands East Indies.

Yet, whereas de Wit's--perhaps due to her Dutch Indies background, she was after all born in Sumatra--empathetically captured and described the everyday life of "orang blanda" adopting custom and practices more suited to the tropics than to Europe, Scidmore was unambiguously harsher in tone toward the attitudes of whitemen (and women) in the Netherlands East Indies. An exact sentiment she also directed toward other ethnic groups that lived side by side with the Javanese.

Despite the shortcomings on what I feel is the author's thinly-veiled racial prejudice--this seminal work, after all, is a product of the 19th century--Scidmore's exquisite writing provides a vignette of a time (and life) long gone and mostly forgotten.