[127] “Jana,” by mistranscription doubtless.
[128] His Java vaguely represents the Archipelago generally, with some special reference to Sumatra.
[129] Polo, in one chapter on Sumatra, tells how stuffed pygmies were manufactured for the western markets by shaving monkeys, “for neither in India, nor in any other country however savage, are there men so small as these pretended ones.” Yet, in another chapter, his incredulity gives way, and he tells of hairy men with tails, who remain in the mountains, never visiting the towns. No doubt the orang-utang, which exists in Sumatra, is at the bottom of these pygmy stories. The pygmies and cannibals together identify Sumatra as the scene of one of Sindbad’s adventures; not the Andamans, as a reviewer in the Athenæum lately said.
[130] This seems to be a jumble of the myths about the spice-groves and the upas tree.
[131] The cubeb (Piper cubeba and P. caricum) is the only one of the spices named which grows in Java proper. In those days it was probably exported as a condiment chiefly. This statement that pepper was not produced in the islands confirms the inference of the sagacious Crawfurd, that it is exotic in Sumatra. (See his Dict. of the Archip., article Pepper.)
[132] In Sumatra, we read, “Man’s flesh, if it be fat, is eaten as ordinarily there as beefe in our country. Marchants comming vnto this region for traffique do vsually bring to them fat men, selling them vnto the inhabitants as we sel hogs, who immediately kil and eate them.” (Odoricus, in Hakluyt, vol. ii.)
“In one part of the island, called Batech, the inhabitants eat human flesh,” etc. (Conti in India in the Fifteenth Century, p. 9.) The cannibalism of certain tribes in Sumatra is noticed with more or less exaggeration by several other old travellers, and has been confirmed in the present century. The tribe is that of the Battas or Battaks, as correctly named by Conti, a race presenting the singular anomaly of Anthropophagi with a literature. Some have supposed that they may be the cannibal Paddaei of Herodotus (iii. 99). It is not impossible, for the more we learn the further goes back the history of Eastern navigation.
[133] “Now, in all this province of Maabar, there is not a tailor, for the people go naked at every season. The air is always so temperate, that they wear only a piece of cloth round the middle. The king is dressed just like the others, except that his cloth is finer, and he wears a necklace full set with rubies, etc. He wears also round three parts both of his arms and legs, bracelets of gold, full of goodly stones and pearls.” (Polo, iii. 20.)
[134] For the continued existence of this remarkable custom of inheritance among the Nairs of Malabar, and for a description of the singular relations of the sexes out of which it springs, see a statement in Mr. Markham’s late Travels in Peru and India, p. 345. I am collecting, for another paper, the various examples of this law of inheritance in detail, and will only here mention that it exists, or has existed, also in Canara, (but there derived from the Nairs); among the aborigines of Hispaniola, and tribes of New Granada and Bogota; among negro tribes of the Niger; among certain sections of the Malays of Sumatra; in the royal family of Tipura, and among the Kasias of the Sylhet mountains (both east of Bengal); in a district of Ceylon adjoining Bintenne; in Madagascar; in the Fiji islands; and among the Hurons and Natchez of North America.
[135] Barbosa says that the King of Quilacare (Coilacaud), a city near Cape Comorin, after reigning twelve years, always sacrificed himself to an idol. See also Odoricus, in Hakluyt, ii. 161. The singular narrative in the text reminds us of Sir Jonah Barrington’s story of the Irish mower, who, making a dig at a salmon in a pool with the butt end of his scythe, which was over his shoulder, dropt his own head into the water. There is a remarkably parallel story in Ibn Batuta. When he was at the court of the pagan king of Mul-Java (which is certainly not Java, as the editors make it, but, as I hope to show elsewhere, Cambodia, or some country on the main in that quarter), he says, “I one day saw, in the assembly of this prince, a man with a long knife in his hand, which he placed upon his own neck; he then made a long speech, not a word of which I could understand; he then firmly grasped the knife, and its sharpness, and the force with which he urged it, were such that he severed his head from his body, and it fell on the ground. I was wondering much at the circumstance, when the king said to me: ‘Does any one among you do such a thing as this?’ I answered, ‘I never saw one do so.’ He smiled, and said: ‘These, our servants, do so out of their love to us.’ One who had been present at the assembly, told me that the speech he made was a declaration of his love to the sultan, and that on this account he had killed himself, just as his father had done for the father of the present king, and his grandfather for the king’s grandfather.” (Lee’s Ibn Batuta, p. 205.) Also we are told by Abu Zaid al Hasan, in Reinaud’s Relation des Voyages faits par les Arabes, etc. (Paris, 1845), how a young man of India, tying his hair to a great elastic bamboo stem, which was pulled down to the ground, cut his own head off, telling his friends to watch that they might see and hear how the head would laugh, as it sprung aloft with the resilient bamboo (i. 124). I wish I could relate, with the interesting detail with which it was told to me, a narrative which I heard from my friend Lieut.-Colonel Keatinge, V.C., of the Bombay Artillery. When encamped near a certain sacred rock on the Nerbudda, in the province of Nimar which was under his charge, a stalwart young man was brought to him, who had come thither from a distance, for the purpose of sacrificing himself by casting himself from the cliff, in fulfilment of a vow made by his own mother before his birth, in case she should, after long sterility, have a living son. After long remonstrance Colonel Keatinge at last succeeded in convincing him that it would be quite lawful to sacrifice a goat instead, and this having been done he departed with a relieved mind.