The Pagan Tribes of Borneo / A Description of Their Physical Moral and Intellectual Condition, with Some Discussion of Their Ethnic Relations

by Charles Hose; William McDougall

Beside the principal spear, two or three short spears or javelins, sometimes merely pointed bars of hardwood, are usually carried in the left hand when an attack is being made.

Beside the sword and the spears the only weapons commonly used are heavy bars of ironwood, sharpened at both ends and flung so as to twirl rapidly in the air. They are chiefly used in defending houses from attack, a store of them being kept in the house. For the defence of a house against an expected attack, short sharp stakes of split bamboo are thrust slantingly into the ground, so as to present the fire-hardened tip towards the feet of the oncoming foe.

The interior peoples have long possessed a certain number of European-made muskets (mostly flint-locks) and small Bruni-made brass cannon, obtained from the Malay and Chinese traders. The latter were chiefly valued for the defence of the house, but were sometimes mounted in the bows of the war-boats. The difficulty of obtaining supplies of gunpowder has always restricted greatly the use of firearms, and in recent years the European governments have strictly limited the sale of gunpowder and firearms; and even at the present day any war-party commissioned by one of the governments to execute any police measure, such as apprehending, or burning the house of, people who have wantonly killed others, has to rely in the main on its native weapons.

The equipment of the fighting-man consists, in addition to his weapons, of a war-cap and war-coat and shield (Pl. 93 and Fig. 26). The former is a round closely-fitting cap woven of stout rattans split in halves longitudinally. It affords good protection to the skull against the stroke of the sword. It is adorned with two of the long black-and-white barred feathers of the hornbill's tail in the case of, any man who has earned this distinction by taking part in successful expeditions.

The war-coat is made of the skin of the goat, the bear, or (in case of distinguished chiefs) of the tiger-cat. The whole of the skin in one piece is used, except that the skin of the belly and of the lower parts of the forelimbs are cut away. A hole for the warrior's head is made in the mid-dorsal line a little behind the skin of the head, which is flattened out and hangs over the chest, descending to the level of the navel; while the skin of the back, flanks, and hind limbs in one large flap, covers the back and hind parts of the warrior as far as the bend of the knees. A large pearly shell usually adorns the lower end of the anterior flap. The warrior's arms are thus left free, but unprotected. In the finest coats there is a patch of brightly coloured beadwork at the nape of the neck, and the back-flap is adorned with rows of loosely dangling hornbills' feathers; but these again are considered appropriate only to the coats of warriors of proved valour.

The Kayan shield is an oblong plate cut from a single piece of soft wood. Its ends are pointed more or less acutely; the length between the points is about four feet. The inner surface forms a flat hollow; the outer is formed by two flat surfaces meeting in a flat obtuse angle or ridge extending from point to point. The grain of the wood runs longitudinally, and a downward falling PARANG is liable to split the wood and become wedged fast in it. In order to prevent the shield becoming divided in this way, and to hold fast the blade of the sword, it is bound across with several stout strips of rattan which are laced closely to the wood with finer strips. The handle, carved out of the same solid block of wood as the body of the shield, is in the middle of the concave surface; it is a simple vertical bar for the grasp of the left hand. The Kayan shield is commonly stained red with iron oxide, and touched up with black pigment, but not otherwise decorated.

Wooden shields of this kind are used by almost all the tribes, but some of them decorate their shields elaborately. The two surfaces of almost all Kenyah shields (Fig. 27) are covered with elaborate designs picked out in colours, chiefly red and black. The designs are sketched out on the wood with the point of a knife, and the pigment is applied with the finger and a chisel-edged stick. The principal feature of the designs on the outer surface is in all cases a large conventionalised outline of a face with large eyes, indicated by concentric circles in red and black, and a double row of teeth with two pairs of canines projecting like huge tusks. This face seems to be human, for, although in some shields there is nothing to indicate this interpretation, in others the large face surmounts the highly conventionalised outline of a diminutive human body, the limbs of which are distorted and woven into a more or less intricate design. Each extremity of the outer surface is covered by a similarly conventionalised face-pattern on a smaller scale. On the inner side each longitudinal half is covered with an elaborate scroll-pattern, generally symmetrical in the two halves; the centre of this pattern is generally a human figure more or less easily recognisable; the two halves sometimes bear male and female figures respectively.

The shields most prized by the Kenyahs are further decorated with tufts of human hair taken from the heads of slain enemies. It is put on in many rows which roughly frame the large face with locks three or four inches in length on scalp, cheeks, chin, and upper lip; and the smaller faces at the ends are similarly surrounded with shorter hair. The hair is attached by forcing the ends of the tufts into narrow slits in the soft wood and securing it with fresh resin.

The Klemantan shields are, in the main, variations on the Kenyah patterns. The Murut shields closely resemble those of the Kayans, though the Dusuns, who have the domesticated buffalo, use a shield of buffalo-hide attached to the forearm by a strap — a feature unknown in all the other types, which are borne by the handle only. The Sea Dayaks nowadays make a greater variety of shields, copying those of the other tribes with variations of their own. The shield originally used by them before coming into contact with many other tribes, but now discarded, was made of strips of bamboo plaited together and stiffened with a longitudinal strip of wood (Fig. 28). It was of two shapes, both oblong, one with rounded, the other with pointed ends.

The Land Dayaks still use a shield of tough bark (Fig. 29), and it is not improbable that these were used by other tribes at no distant date.