Where the Strange Trails Go Down / Sulu, Borneo, Celebes, Bali, Java, Sumatra, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Cambodia, Annam, Cochin-China

by E. Alexander Powell

The palace of the Sultan of Koetei stands in the edge of the jungle at a horseshoe bend in the river. You come on it with startling abruptness—miles and miles of primeval wilderness and then, quite unexpectedly, a bit of civilization. In no respect does its exterior come up to what you would expect the palace of an Oriental ruler to be. It is a great barn of a place, two stories in height, painted a bright pink, with the arms of Koetei emblazoned above the entrance. It reminded me of a Coney Island dance hall or one of the tabernacles built for Billy Sunday.

A broad flight of white marble steps leads to a wide, covered terrace of the same incongruous material. This terrace opens directly into the great throne-hall, a lofty apartment of impressive proportions, though its furnishings are a bizarre mixture of Oriental taste and Occidental tawdriness. Its marble floor is strewn with splendid rugs and tiger-skins; hanging from the ceiling are enormous cut-glass chandeliers; set in the walls, on either side of the scarlet-and-gold throne, are life-size portraits of the present Sultan's father and grandfather done in glazed Delft tiles, which seem more appropriate for a bathroom than a throne-hall. From each end of the apartment scarlet-carpeted staircases, with gilt balustrades, lead to the second floor. Under one of these staircases is a sort of closet, with glass doors, which looks for all the world like a large edition of a telephone booth in an American hotel. The doors were sealed with strips of paper affixed by means of wax wafers, but, peering through the glass, I could made out a large table piled high with trays of precious stones, ingots of virgin gold and silver, vessels, utensils and images of the same precious metals. It was the state treasure of Koetei and was worth, so the Resident told me, upward of a million dollars.

When I was at Tenggaroeng the young Sultan, an anaemic-looking youth in the early twenties, had not yet been permitted by the Dutch authorities to ascend the throne, the country being ruled by his uncle, the Regent, an elderly, affable gentleman who, in his white drill suit and round white cap, was the image of a Chinese cook employed by a Californian friend of mine. Upon the formal accession of the young Sultan the seals of the treasury would be broken, I was told, and the treasure would be his to spend as he saw fit. I rather imagine, however, that the Dutch controleur attached to his court in the capacity of adviser will have something to say should the youthful monarch show a disposition to squander his inheritance.

Up-stairs we were shown through a series of apartments filled to overflowing with the loot of European shops—ornate brass beds, inlaid bureaus and chiffoniers, toilet-sets of tortoise-shell and ivory, washbowls and pitchers of Sèvres, Dresden and Limoges, garnish vases, statuettes, music-boxes, mechanical toys, models of all ships and engines, and a thousand other useless and inappropriate articles, for, when the late Sultan paid his periodic visits to Europe, the shopkeepers of Paris, Amsterdam and The Hague seized the opportunity to unload on him, at exorbitant prices, their costliest and most unsalable wares. Opening a marquetry wardrobe, the Regent displayed with great pride his collection of uniforms and ceremonial costumes, most of which, the Resident told me, had been copied from pictures which had caught his fancy in books and magazines. That wardrobe would have delighted the heart of a motion-picture company's property-man, for it contained everything from a Dutch court dress, complete with sword and feathered hat, to a state costume of sky-blue broadcloth edged with white fur and trimmed with diamond buttons. I expressed a desire to see the royal crown, for I had noticed that the pictures of former sultans, which I had seen in the throne-room, showed them wearing crowns of a peculiar design, strikingly similar to those worn by the Emperors of Abyssinia. My request resulted in a whispered colloquy between the Resident, the Controleur, the Regent and the young Sultan. After a brief discussion the Resident explained that the Controleur kept the crown locked up in his safe, but that he would get it if I wished to see it. To the obvious relief of everyone except the young Sultan I assured them that it did not matter. He seemed distinctly disappointed. I imagine that he would have liked to have gotten his hands on it.

Outside the palace—just below its windows, in fact—is a long, low, dirt-floored, wooden-roofed shed, such as American farmers build to keep their wagons and farm machinery under. This was the royal cemetery. Beneath it the former rulers of Koetei lie buried, their resting-places being marked by a most curious assortment of fantastically carved tombs and headstones. Some of the tombs hold the ashes of men who sat on the throne of Koetei when it was one of the great kingdoms of the East, long before the coming of the white man.

Lady luck was kind to me, for shortly after our arrival at Tenggaroeng a delegation of Dyaks from one of the tribes of the far interior appeared at the palace to lay some tribal dispute before the Regent for his adjudication. There were about a score of them, including a rather comely young woman, whose comeliness was somewhat marred, however, according to European standards at least, by the lobes of her ears being stretched until they touched her shoulders by the great weight of the brass earrings which depended from them. The warriors were the finest physical specimens of manhood that I saw in all Malaysia—tall, slim, muscular, magnificently developed fellows, with bright, rather intelligent faces. They had the broad shoulders and small hips of Roman athletes and when the sun struck on their oiled brown skins they looked like the bronzes in a museum. Unlike the natives we had seen along the coast, whose garments made a slight concession to the prejudices of civilization, these children of the wild "wore nothing much before and rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind." Several of them were armed with the sumpitan, or blow-gun, which is the national weapon of the Dyaks, and each of them carried at his waist a parang-ilang, the terrible long-bladed knife which the head-hunter uses to kill and decapitate his victims.

Monsieur de Haan, as well as the other Dutch officials whom I questioned on the subject, attributed the prevalence of head-hunting in Borneo to the vanity of the Dyak women. He explained that, just as American girls expect candy and flowers from the young men who are attentive to them, so Dyak maidens expect freshly severed human heads. The warrior who refused to present his lady-love with such grisly evidences of his devotion would be rejected by her and ostracized by his tribe. Nor does head-hunting end with marriage, for the standing of both the man and his wife in the community depends upon the number of grinning skulls which swing from the ridgepole of their hut. Heads are to a Dyak what money is to a man in civilized countries—the more he has, the greater his importance. The Controleur at Tenggaroeng assured me very earnestly that his Dyak charges were by no means ferocious or bloodthirsty by nature and that they practised head-hunting less from pleasure than from force of custom. But I am compelled to accept such an estimate of the Dyak character with reservations. From all that I could learn, head-hunting is a sport, like fox-hunting in England. Nor does it, as a rule, involve any great risk to the hunters, for the head-hunting raids are usually mere butcheries of defenceless people, the Dyaks either stalking their victim in the bush and killing him from behind, or attacking a village when the warriors are absent and slaughtering everyone whom they find in it—old, men, women, and children. The head of an orang-utan, by the way, is as highly prized in many of the Dyak tribes as that of a human being. Nor is this surprising, for the warrior who single-handed can kill one of the mighty anthropoids is deserving of the trophy.

During my stay in Borneo I heard many theories advanced in explanation of head-hunting. Some authorities claimed that it is the Dyak's way of establishing a reputation for prowess. Others asserted that he takes heads merely to gratify the vanity of his women. There are still others who hold the opinion that the Dyak believes that he inherits the courage and cunning of those he kills. In certain of the Dyak tribes the heads are treated with profound reverence, being wreathed with flowers, offered the choicest morsels of food, and sometimes being given a place at the table, while in other tribes they are hung from the ridgepole and displayed as trophies of the chase. My own opinion is that, though prestige and vanity and superstition all contribute to the prevalence of head-hunting, in the inherent savagery of the Dyak is found the true explanation of the custom.

I have already made passing mention of that characteristic weapon of the Dyaks, the sumpitan, or, as it is called by foreigners, the blow-gun. The sumpitan is a piece of hard wood, from six to eight feet in length and in circumference slightly larger than the handle of a broom. Running through it lengthwise is a hole about the size of a lead-pencil. A broad spear-blade is usually lashed to one end of the sumpitan, like a bayonet, thus providing a weapon for use at close quarters. The dart is made from a sliver of bamboo, or from a palm-frond, scraped to the size of a steel knitting-needle. One end of the dart is imbedded in a cork-shaped piece of pith which fits the hole in the sumpitan as a cartridge fits the bore of a rifle; the other end, which is of needle-sharpness, is smeared with a paste made from the milky sap of the upas tree dissolved in a juice extracted from the root of the tuba. With the possible exception of curare, this is the deadliest poison known, the slightest scratch from a dart thus poisoned paralyzing the respiratory center and causing almost instant death. The dart is expelled from the sumpitan by a quick, sharp exhalation of the breath. In fact, M. de Haan told me that among certain of the Dyak tribes virtually all of the men suffer from rupture as a result of the constant use of the blow-gun. Though I have heard those who have never seen the sumpitan in use sneer at it as a toy, it is, at short distances, one of the most accurate weapons in existence and, when its darts are poisoned, one of the deadliest. In order to show me what could be done with the sumpitan, the Regent stuck in the earth a bamboo no larger than a woman's little finger, and a Dyak, taking up his position at a distance of thirty paces which I stepped off myself, hit the almost indistinguishable mark with his darts twelve times running. That, as the late Colonel Cody would have put it, "is some shooting."

In Borneo the use of the blow-gun is not confined to the Dyaks. They are also used by fish! That is to say, by a certain species of fish. This fish, which is remarkable neither in size nor color, seldom being larger than our domestic goldfish, is known to the natives as ikan sumpit (literally "fish with a sumpitan") and to science as Toxodes jaculator. But it is unique among the finny tribe in possessing the curious power, on corning to the surface, of being able to squirt from its mouth a tiny jet of water. This it uses with unerring aim against insects, such as flies, grasshoppers and spiders, resting on plants along the edge of the streams, causing them to fall into the water, where they become an easy prey to these Dyaks of the deep. It was lucky for us that the crocodiles were not armed with blow-guns!