John Charles Beecham

Well, to get the proper perspective on this book, one should first read its prequel, The Argus Pheasant. As an added bonus, the first book is much better prepared and proofed than the kindle version of the Yellow Spider. Unfortunately, I read this book first. Still, it was a good tale, and although poorly formatted, still readable.

This seems to be one of those "yellow peril" kinds of books that were all the rage back a hundred of so years ago. The best known of the genre, I think, would be the Fu Manchu series. Interestingly, I found The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu to be so hideously racist that I couldn't read past the first few chapters (or perhaps it was just that the plot line was stupid). Well, this book was even more racist, but, somehow, I found it fascinating.

So, we're in northeastern Borneo, a Dutch colony. The "Resident of Bulungan", which means government executive, I think, is Peter Gross. He's a giant of a man and very powerful and cunning. He's traveling incognito on a boat with several other people, the lovely Grace Costain, her "step-mother", Violet (only 3 years older than Grace), her fiancé, Vincent Brady, and also a missionary and a trader. The ship is attacked by pirates, as directed by the infamous Ah Sing, a.k.a. "The Yellow Spider". Peter and Grace escape overboard and make it to land, somehow. Eventually, they make it to the fort that keeps the local native population under control. The others are held for ransom in a secret city, where Ah Sing runs his operation.

Flitting around in the wilds is Koyala, the virgin priestess of the locals, also known as the Argus Pheasant. Koyala is a half-blood, i.e. her father was a French trader and her mother an indigenous person. Thus she has "tainted" blood. She is also the granddaughter of the most famous local priest and has special powers herself. She is much beloved by the indigenous folks, the Dyaks. It seems that Peter has managed in large part to keep the savages at bay with the help of Koyala. In essence, they are a team. But Koyala sees Peter flirting with Grace, and she goes crazy. The sparks of jealousy threaten Peter and Koyala's alliance, and thereby, the peace of the whole region, or something.

So, Ah Sing gets the locals to rebel, and we have a revolution on our hands. Will Koyala and Peter manage to stem the revolt? Will Grace get reconnected with her fiancé and her "mother-in-law". Will Ah Sing prevail or will he be defeated? Well, read it for yourselves to find out.
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Jonkheer Adriaan Adriaanszoon van Schouten, Governor-General of the Netherlands East Indies is unhappy. One of the more remote parts of his colony is in a constant state of turmoil, and worse, isn't returning the taxes it owes the Dutch Crown. The resident of this remote place, Bulungen in northeast Borneo has died, perhaps by encountering a local fever (or perhaps cunningly murdered?). Van Schouten determines to send a new resident to straighten things out. His loyal assistant, Sachsen, suggests an American sailor, Peter Gross.

It seems that Gross is well acquainted with the Dutch East Indies, having sailed on traders since his youth. Gross is also a massively impressive, manly man, who is also impervious to the wiles of women.

This last feature is important because one Koyala, aka the Argus Pheasant, is a much revered priestess of the "hill Dyak". They will pretty much follow her bidding. Koyala is the mongrel daughter of a French trader and a Dyak mother, and the granddaughter of the greatest priest of all time. Something like that. She was sent to missionary schools and was educated as a white woman, but then was sent back to her people because her tainted blood meant that she couldn't be trusted in the "white world". So, she has vowed revenge on the white race. Oh yeah, she is also more beautiful and alluring than Helen of Troy.

So, anyway, Gross knows about Koyala and figures that if he can work out some kind of alliance with her, the two of them can bring peace to the region, allow the crops to flourish again, and drive the Chinese and Malay pirates from their shores. It takes Gross some time to gain Koyala's trust, he is after all one of those white people who turned against her and who have been ravaging her people.

It's a pretty good yarn, despite all the racism, which was a feature of the times. The ending is such as to lay the foundation for a sequel, which indeed came along a couple of years later, entitled The Yellow Spider.
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I'm glad this was short. It wasn't very good. Probably it's greatest fault is in being horribly dated. I'd read two other books by Beecham and liked them quite well [The Argus Pheasant and The Yellow Spider]. This didn't match up. Part of the problem was that the others were adventure stories of the southwest Pacific. This one, on the other hand was rather a sort-of science fiction piece. As nearly as I can tell, it only exists as a two-part story in an old magazine [The Popular Magazine]. I clipped the parts to make an ebook.

So, we have a famous expert in Jurassic reptilia, Bruce Dayton, traveling around in the southwest with a geodetic survey. He gets lost, but eventually finds a cave/cabin/??? in which resides a wild looking elderly man, Eugene Scott. Scott has spent the previous 40 or so years searching for Darwin's missing link. Somehow, Scott has learned how to transport one's soul from one's own body into other bodies, even ones from the long past.

So, Dayton agrees to a test and finds himself suddenly living in a tree, with a hairy body and behaving like an uncultured beast. Slowly, Dayton evolves (probably gets increasingly fairer skin...I forget). We have a back and forth between Dayton's brutish, primitive self and his more evolved, modern self. So, I guess we're supposed to learn what it might be like to turn into a caveman for a time. I dunno, it didn't really work for me. Perhaps I need to evolve a bit more so as to develop a more fanciful imagination.
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