The home-life of Borneo head-hunters

by William Henry Furness

THE ORNAMENTS IN HIS EARS ARE CARVED OUT OF THE BEAK OF A HORN-BILL, IN IMITATION OF TIGER-CAT’S TEETH.

The instrument known as the ‘Kromong’ is an importation from Brunei, the ancient capital of Borneo, and consists of a series of eleven small brass gongs laid on ropes of rice straw and struck with a wooden beater. The result is perfect in time but absolutely devoid of melody; it is merely running up and down the imperfect scale of gongs in sequence, or beginning at the deepest toned, or largest gong, with the left hand, the third in the series is struck with the right hand, then the second with the left and the fourth with the right, and so up the line of all the eleven gongs, the left hand following the right at an interval of one gong. At a distance, possibly at a very great distance, the sound wafted across the water is really not unpleasant, recalling the gurgling and tinkling of a woodland brook; but close at hand its jangling monotony is beyond words exasperating.

Jamma, to whom was due this running accompaniment, is the nephew of the redoubtable Aban Jau, who, in the wild days before Sir Charles Brooke became Rajah of the Baram district, was the ruler over all the people of the Tinjar. For years he defied the Sarawak Government, and with his numerous and formidable household of eight hundred people was the terror of the whole region. His house was over a quarter of a mile in length, and was well stocked with brass swivel-guns brought from Brunei. But he was finally overpowered by the Rajah’s trained Iban soldiers and forced to submit to the laws and the taxes of Sarawak. Mild and moderate as these were, they were too galling to Aban Jau, and he soon after migrated to the regions of ‘Bulun Matai,’—the Land of the Dead,—his household was scattered, and nothing now remains of his long-house except rows of decaying posts stretching far away into a thick, impenetrable overgrowth of palms, gigantic ferns, and tangled vines. To judge of the dead uncle by the living nephew, it cannot be said that the breed is improved; the nephew, Jamma, is a decidedly repulsive old fellow in spite of his musical strain. At the time I made his acquaintance he was sadly in need of a razor, or rather, of a pair of tweezers; a five days’ scraggly growth of grizzled bristles covered his chin and cheeks; to aid his failing eyes he wore a pair of huge, circular, brass-rimmed spectacles, evidently a bargain, purchased at random from a Chinese trader; their focus did not in the least comply with the formula of his eye-sight, and made him squinny up his eyes in a number of wrinkles that would puzzle Cocker. The eyes behind the glasses resembled those of an Orang Utan; the whites were a dirty, blood-shot brown, and the iris appeared to have overrun and left a stain around it. His eyebrows and eyelashes had been pulled out, and beneath the lower lids hung wrinkled and flabby bags of skin. His upper lip was long, and came down to a point in the middle, and his lower lip was thick and everted, exposing the pale, moist, inner surface. His nose was broad and flat, and the nostrils opened directly forward and apparently into the cavities of his skull. On his head a thin, unhealthy-looking crop of whitish hair stood up, like a scrubbing-brush, where it was not covered by the very dirty and faded blue and white jockey cap of canton flannel, which he wore with unmeasured pride and with a ‘peace in the consciousness of being well dressed,’ which all his ‘religion could not bestow.’ The stretched lobe of his right ear had given way, and one long end dangled down on his chest and whipped from side to side whenever he moved his head quickly. Long experience has taught me utterly to distrust personal appearance at first sight, but in Jamma’s case a prolonged acquaintance confirmed a belief that his intense ugliness had struck in.

The Peace-party was by this time assuming large proportions; constant additions were made to it from the houses along the river, and late in the afternoon, after a vigorous and inevitable outburst from Jamma’s gongs, we pulled up at the high sandy bank in front of the house of Tama Aping Pang. Here, beyond the region of mosquitoes, and while darkness was closing in, cooking fires were built along the shore.

After the evening meal was finished and universal benevolence was diffused by soothing cigarettes, all the Kayans went up into the house to assist Juman in the rite of ‘Usut’—that is, of obliterating a feud. The interchange of Usut is obligatory between the descendants of enemies whenever they first enter each other’s houses; they may have met many times on most friendly terms in the jungle or in the houses of neighbours, but they must not take shelter under one another’s roof until they have appeased the wrongs done by and against their ancestors. The simple rite of giving Usut for ancestral wrongs is expanded into the performance of Jawa when, in addition, the descendants have been themselves wrongdoers.

Up the notched log we all mounted to the veranda and seated ourselves in a circle on the floor. Juman and Tama Aping Pang, a short and squat little man, with a decidedly Mongolian face, sat cross-legged and facing each other. Juman began the ceremony by flinging down a roughly made iron spear-head into the centre of the circle; thereupon Jamma, still wearing his goggles and his blue and white jockey cap, arose to officiate. Upon the flat surface of the spear-head a young chicken was at once decapitated, then torn to pieces, and its warm blood smeared thickly over the point. The hideous Jamma thereupon proclaimed, in the guttural grunts of the Sibop language, that all enmity between the Houses of Tama Aping Pang and Juman was at an end, and hereafter neither of them could be reproached with having allowed the slaughter of their ancestors to go unavenged. Whereupon sundry beads and trinkets were exchanged more as a formality than on account of their value, and some blood from the spear-point having been rubbed either on the chest or arms of everyone present, including ourselves, Juman and all his clan at once hailed Tama Aping Pang and all his clan, as friends. No carousing followed, and the weary Kayans soon retired to the river-bank and to their canoes to sleep.

This house of Tama Aping Pang is famed for its manufacture of ‘Sumpits,’ or blow-pipes. All along on the partition wall of the veranda, I noticed that they were stacked in all stages of manufacture, from the rough-hewn and thick staves up to the drilled and polished tubes. The best Sumpits are made of a hard, close-grained, reddish wood of a tree called ‘Niagang.’ This is used not only on account of its hardness but also because it is exceedingly straight and has very few knots. A staff of wood about eight feet long is shaved down until it is about three and a half inches in diameter; it is then inserted in a hole in the floor of the house, and so secured that one end remains five or six inches above the floor; over it a man stands with a long, slender rod of iron flattened to a rough edge at one end; this edge an assistant keeps constantly true to the centre of the long staff, while the man raises and drops the drill perpendicularly. Gradually a bore of about a quarter of an inch in diameter is thus produced. It is an exceedingly slow process; it takes at least eight or nine hours to drill through the whole length of the staff. The bore is now smoothed, first, by means of fine sand or clay smeared on a slim rattan, which is pulled through it many times rapidly backward and forward. It is then ready for polishing with another piece of rattan ending in a loop or a cleft, wherein leaves, like the bamboo, rich in silica, are bound; it is thus polished until it shines almost as brilliantly as a gun-barrel. The staff is now trimmed down to the diameter of about an inch and a half at the mouth, and to an inch at the muzzle, and then scraped and smoothed with knives and shark-skin files. If the tube happen to be slightly sprung, the curve is overcome by a broad iron spear-head bound on at the muzzle; when the pipe is held horizontally the weight of the iron counteracts the curve.

Some of the more highly finished blow-pipes are furnished with a sight, called by the Kayans ‘Bitan,’ ingeniously made of a cowrie shell imbedded in gutta-percha near the muzzle, with the slit-like opening turned upward and parallel with the shaft; again, others have an iron sight, near the muzzle, bound on with rattan. I have never seen any carved ornamentation on a blow-pipe except a plate of bone inlaid with strips of lead, at the mouth-end. ‘Sumpitan’ is the Malay name for the weapon; the Kayans call it ‘Leput,’ and the Punans simply ‘Put;’ Ibans, who clip and elide Malay words, drop the ending an, and call it ‘Sumpit.’ All these names are, possibly, derived from an imitation of the sound when the dart is blown through the tube and the tongue closes the opening with a quick pat.

Before our departure next morning there was lively trading in the specialty of the house. The house itself was really a notable monument of industry and artistic taste; many of the projecting beam-ends were carved and the partition walls decorated with borders and frescoes in black and red. For a bolt of red cloth I bought the elaborately carved door of a dwelling-room, whereof the photograph is on the opposite page.

Our next destination was the house of the crafty and treacherous Aban Liah, once a respected Penghulu, but on account of his duplicity in connection with the murder of the Chinaman by Tinggi, (set forth in the preceding pages,) the Government had degraded him. His house was selected, nevertheless, as a rendezvous for the whole Peace-party before ascending the river to the house of Tama Aping Billing, just then the candidate for the Penghulu-ship of the upper Tinjar, and also for Aban Liah’s seat in the Council Negri.