the little island at the tip of
the Malay Peninsula which commands the Malacca Straits and the entrance
to the China seas, and founded Singapore, thereby giving Britain
control of the gateway to the Farther East and ending forever the
Dutch dream of making of those waters a _mare clausum_--a Dutch lake.

The thousands of islands, islets, and atolls which comprise Netherlands
India--the proper etymological name of the archipelago is
Austronesia--are scattered over forty-six degrees of longitude, on both
sides of the equator. Although in point of area Java holds only fifth
place, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea and the Celebes being much larger,
it nevertheless contains three-fourths of the population and yields
four-fifths of the produce of the entire archipelago. Though scarcely
larger than Cuba, it has more inhabitants than all the Atlantic Coast
States, from Maine to Florida, combined. This, added to the strategic
importance of its situation, the richness of its soil, the variety of
its products, the intelligence, activity and civilization of its
inhabitants, and the fact that it is the seat of the colonial
government, makes Java by far the most important unit of the Insulinde.
Because of its overwhelming importance in the matters of position,
products and population, it is administered as a distinct political
entity, the other portions of the Dutch Indies being officially
designated as the Outposts or the Outer Possessions.

Westernmost and by far the most important of the Outposts is Sumatra,
an island four-fifths the size of France, as potentially rich in
mineral and agricultural wealth as Java, but with a sparse and
intractable population, certain of the tribes, notably the Achinese,
who inhabit the northern districts, still defying Dutch rule in spite
of the long and costly series of wars which have resulted from
Holland's attempt to subjugate them. The unmapped interior of Sumatra
affords an almost virgin field for the explorer, the sportsman and the
scientist. It has ninety volcanoes, twelve of which are active (the
world has not forgotten the eruption, in 1883, of Krakatu, an island
volcano off the Sumatran coast, which resulted in the loss of forty
thousand human lives); the jungles of the interior are roamed by
elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers and occasional orang-utans,
while in the scattered villages, with their straw-thatched, highly
decorated houses, dwell barbarous brown men practising customs so