Word: malacca
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...preparing for war. Two Malayan infantry battalions packed their kit bags and prepared to embark for the steaming jungles of Sarawak and Sabah (North Borneo); in Sarawak, orders were issued to raise a native infantry battalion. A round-the-clock watch was begun on the Malayan shore of the Malacca Straits, and 6,000 British, Gurkha and local troops and constabulary units doubled their patrols along Sarawak's tangled, 400-mile border with Indonesian Borneo...
...terrace of his villa, La Capponcina (Little Capon), overlooking Monte Carlo, William Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, leans on a Malacca cane. He looks as old as he is: 84. Age has bleached his skin to wrinkled parchment; one foot is shoeless, a concession to gout; a floppy, broad-brimmed straw hat shields him from the hot Mediterranean sun. But the sun has not been up much longer than the Beaver, and he is not there merely to bask...
Last week's ceremony of the gold-headed cane harks back to 1689, when Dr. John Radcliffe, physician to the co-sovereigns William and Mary, carried a 40-in. Malacca cane, topped by a crutch-shaped gold head. At Radcliffe's death, the cane was passed on to the first of four eminent successors in the practice of royal medicine. Now a museum piece, it has a hollow head, which may have been used as a vinaigrette, holding aro matic salts to ward off infection. U.S. pathologists revived the tradition of the gold-headed cane...
...Hard Workers. Britain's entry into the Orient brought new swarms of Chinese to Nanyang as indentured coolies to work in tin mines and on plantations, to load ships and build roads and carry burdens. Each new trading city-Penang, Singapore, Malacca, Hong Kong-became heavily Chinese. As agents and middlemen, the ubiquitous Chinese followed the Dutch troops into Sumatra, Borneo and Celebes, the British into Burma, the French into Indo-China. Even in Thailand, which never became a European colony, the Chinese were advisers to the king, and controlled the nation's commerce...
...least of the elements of the power that exists in the Mideast is Admiral Holloway himself, a "black-shoe sailor," (i.e., no airman), whose square, salt-cured features are often belied by a suave, diplomatic air that sometimes spills over into pomposity. In civvies he sports a Malacca cane. He is something of a connoisseur of wines. He interlards his conversation with phrases out of Dickens or Thackeray, loves to write what he calls "erudite letters" (favorite word: vouchsafe). "If he will ever be known for any command, it will be for his command of the English language," said...