The more powerful rajas assume authority over the lives of their subjects. The dependants are bound to attend their chief in his journeys and in his wars, and when an individual refuses he is expelled from the society without permission to take his property along with him. They are supplied with food for their expeditions, and allowed a reward for each person they kill. The revenues of the chief arise principally from fines of cattle adjudged in criminal proceedings, which he always appropriates to himself; and from the produce of the camphor and benzoin trees throughout his district; but this is not rigorously insisted upon. When he pays his gaming debts he imposes what arbitrary value he thinks proper on the horses and buffaloes (no coin being used in the country), which he delivers, and his subjects are obliged to accept them at that rate. They are forced to work in their turns, for a certain number of days, in his rice plantations. There is, in like manner, a lesser kind of service for land held of any other person, the tenant being bound to pay his landlord respect wherever he meets him, and to provide him with entertainment whenever he comes to his house. The people seem to have a permanent property in their possessions, selling them to each other as they think fit. If a man plants trees and leaves them, no future occupier can sell them, though he may eat the fruit. Disputes and litigations of any kind that happen between people belonging to the same kampong are settled by a magistrate appointed for that purpose, and from him it is said there is no appeal to the raja: when they arise between persons of different kampongs they are adjusted at a meeting of the respective rajas. When a party is sent down to the Bay to purchase salt or on other business it is accompanied by an officer who takes cognizance of their behaviour, and sometimes punishes on the spot such as are criminal or refractory. This is productive of much order and decency.
SUCCESSION.
It is asserted that the succession to the chiefships does not go in the first instance to the son of the deceased, but to the nephew by a sister; and that the same extraordinary rule, with respect to property in general, prevails also amongst the Malays of that part of the island, and even in the neighbourhood of Padang. The authorities for this are various and unconnected with each other, but not sufficiently circumstantial to induce me to admit it as a generally established practice.
RESPECT FOR THE SULTAN OF MENANGKABAU.
Notwithstanding the independent spirit of the Battas, and their contempt of all power that would affect a superiority over their little societies, they have a superstitious veneration for the sultan of Menangkabau, and show blind submission to his relations and emissaries, real or pretended, when such appear among them for the purpose of levying contributions: even when insulted and put in fear of their lives they make no attempt at resistance: they think that their affairs would never prosper; that their padi would be blighted, and their buffaloes die; that they would remain under a kind of spell for offending those sacred messengers.
PERSONS.
The Battas are in their persons rather below the stature of the Malays, and their complexions are fairer; which may perhaps be owing to their distance, for the most part, from the sea, an element they do not at all frequent.
DRESS.
Their dress is commonly of a sort of cotton cloth manufactured by themselves, thick, harsh, and wiry, about four astas or cubits long, and two in breadth, worn round the middle, with a scarf over the shoulder. These are of mixed colours, the prevalent being a brownish red and a blue approaching to black. They are fond of adorning them, particularly the scarf, with strings and tassels of beads. The covering of the head is usually the bark of a tree, but the superior class wear a strip of foreign blue cloth in imitation of the Malayan destars, and a few have bajus (outer garments) of chintz. The young women, beside the cloth round the middle, have one over the breasts, and (as noticed in Mr. Miller's journal) wear in their ears numerous rings of tin, as well as several large rings of thick brass wire round their necks. On festival days however they ornament themselves with earrings of gold, hair-pins, of which the heads are fashioned like birds or dragons, a kind of three-cornered breastplate, and hollow rings upon the upper arm, all, in like manner, of gold. The kima shell, which abounds in the bay, is likewise worked into arm-rings, whiter, and taking a better polish than ivory.
ARMS.