April 11, 1904.
Pontianak Port.
Russia's Second Fleet had yet to set out when Pontianak Port welcomed a flotilla—the East African immigrant fleet.
As the fleet advanced along the river toward Pontianak Port, the immigrants aboard began to acquaint themselves with this unfamiliar land for the first time.
"Pontianak looks fairly good. The river is broad and the current swift, but the environment is somewhat hard to get used to. The forests on both banks are dense and lush, vastly different from the mainland."
Although East Africa also had tropical rainforest climates, most of its population was concentrated in savanna or subtropical rainforest regions. Thus, after arriving in Pontianak, the East African immigrants were seeing a typical tropical rainforest climate and vegetation for the first time.
"The Equator runs through Pontianak, and the city lies on Borneo's coastal plain, so the tropical rainforest climate here is especially typical. That also doomed Pontianak to difficult development. Fortunately, the history of outside civilization here is somewhat longer than in Africa, so we will not have to start from scratch."
In truth, civilization was difficult to define. Take Africa's indigenous peoples, for instance—one could not say they had no civilization, since they had their own languages and had developed tribes and slave kingdoms. Yet their level of civilization was too low, leaving nearly all of southern Africa no different from undeveloped land.
Thus, East Africa's ability to develop and build up the country was, in a sense, truly starting from zero—and it had achieved astonishing results.
Without question, the fundamental reason East Africa had achieved such astonishing accomplishments was that the East African colonizers had brought advanced agricultural civilization, and were now slowly transitioning toward industrial civilization.
Lanfang Overseas Province, though also relatively backward, had reached the level of agricultural civilization after development