Malay sketches

One afternoon, in 1892, a foreign Malay named Lenggang, who made a living by hawking in a boat on the Perak River, left Bota with his usual cargo and a hundred dollars which his cousin, the son of the Penghulu, had been keeping for him. He was alone in the boat and dropped down stream, saying he would call at some of the villages that line at intervals the banks of the river.

The next day this man’s dead body, lying partly under a mosquito curtain, was discovered in the boat as it drifted past the village of Pulau Tiga. The local headman viewed it, but saw nothing to arouse his suspicions, for the boat was full of valuables and a certain amount of money, while nothing in it seemed to have been disturbed, and there were no marks of violence on the corpse, which was duly buried.

When the matter was reported, inquiries were made but they elicited nothing. Some months after the relatives of the dead man appeared at Teluk Anson, and said they had good reason to believe that he had met with foul play, indeed that he had been murdered at a place called Lambor—a few miles below Bota and above Pulau Tiga. An intelligent Malay sergeant of police proceeded to the spot, arrested a number of people, who denied all knowledge of the affair, and took them to Teluk Anson. Arrived there, these people said they were able to give all the necessary information if that would procure their release, as they had only promised to keep their mouths shut so long as they themselves did not suffer for it.

The details of the story as told in evidence are as follows, and they are very characteristic of the Malay:

It appears that the hawker duly arrived in his boat at Lambor, and there tied up for the night to a stake, about twenty feet from the bank of the river. Shortly afterwards a Malay named Ngah Prang, stopped three of his acquaintances walking on the bank, asked them if they had seen the hawker’s boat, and suggested that it would be a good thing to rob him. They said they were afraid, and some other men coming up asked one of those to whom the proposal had been made what they were talking about, and, being told, advised him to have nothing to do with the business and the party dispersed.

That evening, at 8 P.M., several people heard cries of “help, help, I am being killed,” from the river, and five or six men ran out of their houses down to the bank, a distance of only fifty yards, whence they saw, in the brilliant moonlight, Ngah Prang and two other men in the hawker’s boat, the hawker lying flat on his back while one man had both hands at his throat, another held his wrists, and the third his feet; but it is said that those on the bank heard a noise of rapping as though feet were kicking or hands beating quickly the deck of the boat. It only lasted for a moment and then there was silence.

As those who had been roused by the cries came down the bank they called to the men in the boat, barely twenty feet away, and lighted at their work by the brilliancy of an Eastern moon, to know what they were doing; they even addressed them by their names, but these gave no answer, and, getting up from off the hawker, untied the boat, one taking a pole and another the rudder and disappeared down the river. The hawker did not move. He was dead.

The witnesses of this tragedy appear then to have returned to their homes and slept peacefully. Several of them naïvely remarked that they heard the next day that the hawker had been found dead in his boat, and it appears that when one of these witnesses, on the following day, met one of the murderers, he asked him what he was doing in Lenggang’s boat, and the man replied that they were robbing him, that he held the hawker by the throat, the others by the hands and feet, but that really they had got very little for their trouble.

Meanwhile the three murderers told several of the eye-witnesses of the affair that, if they said anything, it would be the worse for them, and nothing particular occurred till a notice was posted in the Mosque calling upon any one who knew anything about Lenggang’s death to report it to the village Headman. Then Ngah Prang, who apparently was the original instigator of the job, as so often happens, thought he would save himself at the expense of his friends, and actually went himself to make a report, and, meeting on the way one of the eye-witnesses going on a similar errand, he persuaded him to give a qualified promise to help in denying Ngah Prang’s complicity while convicting the others.

Needless to say that, from the moment the first disclosure was made and communicated to the police, resulting in the arrest of a number of those who had actually witnessed the crime, every smallest detail was gradually brought to light, the hawker’s property, even his own clothes, gradually recovered, the money stolen from him traced, and no single link left wanting in the chain of evidence strong enough to convict and hang the guilty men. That indeed was the result.

I have told the story of this crime, which is devoid of sensational incident, because it will give some idea of the state of feeling in a real Malay kampong of poor labouring people far from any outside influence. The man murdered was a Malay; the idea that he was worth something which could be obtained by the insignificant sacrifice of his life seems to have at once suggested that Providence was putting a good thing in the way of poor people, and those who were not afraid determined that the opportunity was not to be lost. The murder is discussed practically in public; it is executed also in public, in the presence of a feebly expostulating opposition, and then every one goes to bed. The only further concern of the community in the matter is as to how much the murderers got. For them the incident ends there, and, if any one has any qualms of conscience, they are silenced by the threats of the men who so easily throttled the hawker.

It is only when inquiries are pushed, and things are made generally unpleasant for every one, that the truth is unwillingly disclosed, and the penalty paid.