height of a man, which usually follows here upon spots that have been once cultivated and are afterwards abandoned, and which, if once taken root, can only with the utmost difficulty be eradicated. From this peak, barely 200 feet in height, it is practicable to descend by a small footpath to the cove of Ulàla, whose shores are entirely overrun with dense impassable mangrove swamp, and accordingly present a most dreary, gloomy aspect.
Our next excursion was to the village of Enuang or Enong, where lay at anchor, under the British flag, two Malay prahus from Pulo Penang, manned by Malay crews, and taking in cargoes of ripe cocoa-nuts, edible birds' nests, and sea-slugs, or Trepang. The captain of one of these prahus and the greater number of the crew were laid up with fever. The supercargo, a Chinese named Owi-Bing-Hong, spoke English fluently, and was of the utmost service to us in our communications with the natives. Enuang is larger than Itoe, and has about a dozen huts, but these are one and all half-ruinous, very filthy, and utterly neglected. In all the huts we found numbers of figures, cut in white wood in the very rudest style in various postures, mostly with a threatening, combative expression, intended to drive away the evil spirit, of whom the natives seem to stand in great dread; for it is the universal practice of these islanders to ascribe whatever happens to them to the influence of an evil spirit, and probably also the appearance of the Novara in the harbour of Nangkauri was laid to the account of the ill intentions
of an Eewee. One constantly sees fruit, tobacco, or betel-leaves, prepared with pearl-lime, strewed in small portions at various spots in the interiors of the huts, or suspended on the bamboo ladders by which they are entered, the object being to propitiate the Eewee in the event of his being hungry on his arrival! In one of the abandoned huts we discovered a figure resembling a cat, rudely carved in wood, before which the natives had placed tobacco and cocoa-nuts; almost all these figures were besmeared with soot, and daubed with some red pigment, and their abdomens hung with long pendent dried palm-leaves.
Not one of the natives at Enuang understood English. Only a couple of old men spoke a few words of Portuguese, of which they were not a little conceited. The Portuguese, in the 17th and 18th centuries, seem to have been the first European nations that had any commercial dealings with the Nicobar islanders. A number of words of their language, all referring to objects of civilization, and but little corrupted from the Portuguese, such for instance as "pang" (for pan, the Portuguese for bread), "zapato" (shoe), "cuchillo" (knife), and so forth, are evidences of this. The natives here seemed to us yet more hideous than those of Kar-Nicobar, especially as the everlasting betel-chewing had disfigured their mouths in the most shocking manner. It is however incorrect to allege, as has been the case hitherto, that they avail themselves of a particular substance with which to discolour the teeth, and which it was supposed induced this frightful distortion
of the mouth; it is unquestionably only the abuse of the betel (consisting of Areca-nut, betel-leaves, and coral chalk) which causes these disgusting disfigurements. At this settlement also the women and children had disappeared. Only one native woman, married to a Malay from Pulo Penang, who was at the moment officiating as cook on board one of the prahus lying at anchor in the bay, had the courage to present herself before us. She was, according to the custom of the Malays, dressed in silk, but bore on her body all the disagreeable traces of her Nicobar origin. She showed no reluctance to talk with us, and, in her somewhat scanty toilette, was the one solitary native woman with whom we found an opportunity of communicating during our entire stay at the various islands.
From Enuang we visited the first settlement of the Moravian Brothers, lying on the small neck of land between Enuang and Malacca, where apparently the amiable Father Hänsel seems to have lived, for whose interesting memoir, narrating his many years' residence upon the Nicobar Islands, we were indebted to the kindness of Dr. Rosen of the Moravian Mission at Genaadendal in South Africa.[13] At present all is once more thick majestic forest; a marvellous leafy dome, like a green pantheon, encircles and overshadows the scene of the once benevolent activity of the devoted missionary. Only a ruined well and a few brick fragments of what was the oven,
lying about, remain to show that a dwelling once stood here. At the well there were a variety of beautiful flowers growing between the stones. The place is still called, as then, Tripjet, or the "Habitation of the Friends." Here in quick succession most of the Brethren died, (no fewer than eleven out of the thirteen,) upon which the mission was transferred to the opposite island of Kamorta, first of all to the clearing at Kalaha, and ultimately to Kamút. But all these sites were as ill-selected as the first. An abode located between swamp and forest, of which latter only a space of barely 1000 feet in circumference was cleared, could not but prove fatal in a very short space of time to the unfortunate colonists. At the village of Enuang too it would seem to be that the last attempt at founding a settlement was made in 1835 by the two French missionaries; at least we were informed by several natives, who seemed to be at present about 34 to 36 years of age, that they were themselves but boys when the last missionaries lived at Nangkauri. They also further recollected that the gigantic cocoa-palms, which at present skirt the forest, were at that time quite small saplings, and the only vegetation between the beach and the mission house. At present enormous roots are stretching over the foundations of the earlier settlement. The natives who accompanied us spoke with warm feeling of the missionaries, and seemed to regret their departure. Many professed themselves with much earnestness to be Christians, but they were so only in name. According to what they reported, many natives must at that
period have been baptized in the islands of Chowra and Bampoka.
During this visit to Enuang and Malacca, it had been one of the objects aimed at by the members of the Expedition to draw up a small vocabulary of the language of the natives, when it speedily appeared that, despite the proximity of the two islands, the dialects used by the inhabitants were entirely different. Even for trees and plants, for the feathered inhabitants of the forests, as well as domestic animals, the inhabitants of the central groups of islands have different names. The cocoa-palm and its noble fruit, the betel and its ingredients, are here known by entirely different names. The accurate transcription of each individual word into German as pronounced by the native was hard work. It took us two days to make a vocabulary of one hundred words! And even this slight success would have been impossible but for our serviceable Chinese friend, Bing-Hong, who had gone to school for two years at Pulo Penang, and could read and write English with tolerable readiness and accuracy. The distortion of their mouths is one main reason why the natives pronounce the greater number of their words almost unintelligibly; it is more a lisping mutter than a language. Hence, apparently, their ability to follow out the concatenation of ideas is so slightly developed, that it is only with much difficulty they can be made to comprehend the particular subject respecting which the information was wanted. For example, if it was wished to know the word in their language which expressed
"blue," and in order to make more intelligible what was required, a variety of objects of a blue colour were pointed out, they almost invariably named the object itself, and not the colour. Or again, one wanted to know what they called "leaf" in their language, and indicated the leaf of a tree standing near; the native, however, replies by giving the name of the tree itself, instead of the word expressing leaf. It seems to us not unimportant to call attention to this circumstance, in order more completely to lay before the reader the great and manifold obstacles which present themselves in drawing up vocabularies of the languages of half-savage races, and thus more readily secure indulgence for the discrepancies which are frequently to be met with in such works.[14]