‘The enchanted island’. This is how the Sumatra-born writer Augusta de Wit describes Java. To her, it was nothing short of a tropical wonderland. Even the most level-headed person feels ‘something of a crimson glow, something like dawn, come over their thoughts’, is how she puts it in her travelogue Java. Feiten en fantasiën (Java. Facts and Fancies, 1905), originally published in English. At the age of ten, she had left the colony with her parents, the family settling down in the Netherlands. Twenty years later, however, in 1894, she returned to the colony, determined to find the Indies of her childhood. De Wit’s journey was not an isolated event. As transport services improved and travelling times shortened, the latter part of the nineteenth century saw more and more Dutch women sailing for ‘the East’. As the steamship arrived in the port of Batavia, De Wit’s first sight of the Indies left an overwhelming impression:
As we now approached the roadstead of Batavia, there came swimming toward the ship numbers of native boats, darting out from between the islets, and diving up out of the shadows along the wooded shore, like so many waterfowl. […] [The Javanese] had a great charm for me, their flatness of features and meagerness of limbs notwithstanding; and I thought that, if not quite the fairies, they might well be the ‘brownies’ of that enchanted garden that men call Java.
Augusta de Wit, Java. Feiten en fantasiën. ’s Gravenhage: Van Stockum, 1905. [MNL 1050 D 35]