When the natives kill a buffalo, which is always done at their public meetings, they do not cut it up into joints as we do an ox, but into small pieces of flesh, or steaks, which they call bantei. The hide of the buffalo is sometimes scalded, scraped, and hung up to dry in their houses where it shrivels and becomes perfectly hard. When wanted for use a piece is chopped off and, being stewed down for a great number of hours in a small quantity of water, forms a rich jelly which, properly seasoned, is esteemed a very delicate dish.
The sago (sagu), though common on Sumatra and used occasionally by the natives, is not an article of food of such general use among them as with the inhabitants of many other eastern islands, where it is employed as a substitute for rice. Millet (randa jawa) is also cultivated for food, but not in any considerable quantity.
When these several articles of subsistence fail the Sumatran has recourse to those wild roots, herbs, and leaves of trees which the woods abundantly afford in every season without culture, and which the habitual simplicity of his diet teaches him to consider as no very extraordinary circumstance of hardship. Hence it is that famines in this island or, more properly speaking, failures of crops of grain, are never attended with those dreadful consequences which more improved countries and more provident nations experience.
CHAPTER 4.
AGRICULTURE.
RICE, ITS CULTIVATION, ETC.
PLANTATIONS OF COCONUT, BETEL-NUT, AND OTHER VEGETABLES FOR DOMESTIC USE.
DYE STUFFS.
AGRICULTURE.
From their domestic economy I am led to take a view of their labours in the field, their plantations and the state of agriculture amongst them, which an ingenious writer esteems the justest criterion of civilisation.
RICE.
The most important article of cultivation, not in Sumatra alone but throughout the East, is rice. It is the grand material of food on which a hundred millions of the inhabitants of the earth subsist, and although chiefly confined by nature to the regions included between and bordering on the tropics, its cultivation is probably more extensive than that of wheat, which the Europeans are wont to consider as the universal staff of life. In the continent of Asia, as you advance to the northward, you come to the boundary where the plantations of rice disappear and the wheatfields commence; the cold felt in that climate, owing in part to the height of the land, being unfriendly to the production of the former article.