The Malay Archipelago

b >> by Alfred Russell Wallace >> The Malay Archipelago

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Leaving Kilwaru early in the morning of June 1st, with a strong
east wind we doubled the point of Ceram about noon, the heavy sea
causing my prau to roll abort a good deal, to the damage of our
crockery. As bad weather seemed coming on, we got inside the
reefs and anchored opposite the village of Warns-warns to wait
for a change.

The night was very squally, and though in a good harbour we
rolled and jerked uneasily; but in the morning I had greater
cause for uneasiness in the discovery that our entire Goram crew
had decamped, taking with them all they possessed and a little
more, and leaving us without any small boat in which to land. I
immediately told my Amboyna men to load and fire the muskets as a
signal of distress, which was soon answered by the village chief
sending off a boat, which took me on shore. I requested that
messengers should be immediately sent to the neighbouring
villages in quest of the fugitives, which was promptly done. My
prau was brought into a small creek, where it could securely rest
in the mud at low water, and part of a house was given me in
which T could stay for a while. I now found my progress again
suddenly checked, just when I thought I had overcome my chief
difficulties. As I had treated my men with the greatest kindness,
and had given them almost everything they had asked for, I can
impute their running away only to their being totally
unaccustomed to the restraint of a European master, and to some
undefined dread of my ultimate intentions regarding them. The
oldest man was an opium smoker, and a reputed thief, but I had
been obliged to take him at the last moment as a substitute for
another. I feel sure it was he who induced the others to run
away, and as they knew the country well, and had several hours'
start of us, there was little chance of catching them.

We were here in the great sago district of East Ceram which
supplies most of the surrounding islands with their daily bread,
and during our week's delay I had an opportunity of seeing the
whole process of making it, and obtaining some interesting
statistics. The sago tree is a palm, thicker and larger than the
cocoa-nut tree, although rarely so tall, and having immense
pinnate spiny leaves, which completely cover the trunk till it is
many years old. It has a creeping root-stem like the Nipa palm,
and when about ten or fifteen years of age sends up an immense
terminal spike of flowers, after which the tree dies. It grows in
swamps, or in swampy hollows on the rocky slopes of hills, where
it seems to thrive equally well as when exposed to the influx of
salt or brackish water. The midribs of the immense leaves form
one of the most useful articles in these lands, supplying the
place of bamboo, to which for many purposes they are superior.
They are twelve or fifteen feet long, and, when very fine, as
thick in the lower part as a man's leg. They are very light,
consisting entirely of a firm pith covered with a hard thin rind
or bark. Entire houses are built of these; they form admirable
roofing-poles for thatch; split and well-supported, they do for
flooring; and when chosen of equal size, and pegged together side
by side to fill up the panels of framed wooden horses, they have
a very neat appearance, and make better walls and partitions than
boards, as they do not shrink, require no paint or varnish, and
are not a quarter the expense. When carefully split and shaved
smooth they are formed into light boards with pegs of the bark
itself, and are the foundation of the leaf-covered boxes of
Goram. All the insect-boxes I used in the Moluccas were thus made
at Amboyna, and when covered with stout paper inside and out, are
strong, light, and secure the insect-pins remarkably well. The
leaflet of the sago folded and tied side by side on the smaller
midribs form the "atap "or thatch in universal use, while the
product of the trunk is the staple food of some= hundred
thousands of men.

When sago is to be made, a full-grown tree is selected just
before it is going to flower. It is cut down close to the ground,
the leaves and leafstalks cleared away, and a broad strip of the
bark taken off the upper side of the trunk. This exposes the
pithy matter, which is of a rusty colour near the bottom of the
tree, but higher up pure white, about as hard as a dry apple, but
with woody fibre running through it about a quarter of an inch
apart. This pith is cut or broken down into a coarse powder by
means of a tool constructed for the purpose--a club of hard and
heavy wood, having a piece of sharp quartz rock firmly imbedded
into its blunt end, and projecting about half an inch. By
successive blows of this, narrow strips of the pith are cut away,
and fall down into the cylinder formed by the bark. Proceeding
steadily on, the whole trunk is cleared out, leaving a skin not
more than half an inch in thickness. This material is carried
away (in baskets made of the sheathing bases of the leaves) to
the nearest water, where a washing-machine is put up, which is
composed almost entirely of the saga tree itself. The large
sheathing bases of the leaves form the troughs, and the fibrous
covering from the leaf-stalks of the young cocoa-nut the
strainer. Water is poured on the mass of pith, which is kneaded
and pressed against the strainer till the starch is all dissolved
and has passed through, when the fibrous refuse is thrown away,
and a fresh basketful put in its place. The water charged with
sago starch passes on to a trough, with a depression in the
centre, where the sediment is deposited, the surplus water
trickling off by a shallow outlet. When the trough is nearly
full, the mass of starch, which has a slight reddish tinge, is
made into cylinders of about thirty pounds' weight, and neatly
covered with sago leaves, and in this state is sold as raw sago.

Boiled with water this forms a thick glutinous mass, with a
rather astringent taste, and is eaten with salt, limes, and
chilies. Sago-bread is made in large quantities, by baking it
into cakes in a small clay oven containing six or eight slits
side by side, each about three-quarters of an inch wide, and six
or eight inches square. The raw sago is broken up, dried in the
sun, powdered, and finely sifted. The oven is heated over a clear
fire of embers, and is lightly filled with the sago-powder. The
openings are then covered with a flat piece of sago bark, and in
about five minutes the cakes are turned out sufficiently baked.
The hot cakes are very nice with butter, and when made with the
addition of a little sugar and grated cocoa-nut are quite a
delicacy. They are soft, and something like corn-flour cakes, but
leave a slight characteristic flavour which is lost in the
refined sago we use in this country. When not wanted for
immediate use, they are dried for several days in the sun, and
tied up in bundles of twenty. They will then keep for years; they
are very hard, and very rough and dry, but the people are used to
them from infancy, and little children may be seen gnawing at
them as contentedly as ours with their bread-and-butter. If
dipped in water and then toasted, they become almost as good as
when fresh baked; and thus treated they were my daily substitute
for bread with my coffee. Soaked and boiled they make a very good
pudding or vegetable, and served well to economize our rice,
which is sometimes difficult to get so far east.

It is truly an extraordinary sight to witness a whole tree-trunk,
perhaps twenty feet long and four or five in circumference,
converted into food with so little labour and preparation. A
good-sized tree will produce thirty tomans or bundles of thirty
pounds each, and each toman will make sixty cakes of three to the
pound. Two of these cakes are as much as a man can eat at one
meal, and five are considered a full day's allowance; so that,
reckoning a tree to produce 1,800 cakes, weighing 600 pounds, it
will supply a man with food for a whole year. The labour to
produce this is very moderate. Two men will finish a tree in five
days, and two women will bake the whole into cakes in five days
more; but the raw sago will keep very well, and can be baked as
wanted, so that we may estimate that in ten days a man may
produce food for the whole year. This is on the supposition that
he possesses sago trees of his own, for they are now all private
property. If he does not, he has to pay about seven and sixpence
for one; and as labour here is five pence a day, the total cost
of a year's food for one man is about twelve shillings. The
effect of this cheapness of food is decidedly prejudicial, for
the inhabitants of the sago countries are never so well off as
those where rice is cultivated. Many of the people here have
neither vegetables nor fruit, but live almost entirely on sago
and a little fish. Having few occupations at home, they wander
about on petty trading or fishing expeditions to the neighbouring
islands; and as far as the comforts of life are concerned, are
much inferior to the wild hill-Dyaks of Borneo, or to many of the
more barbarous tribes of the Archipelago.

The country round Warus-warus is low and swampy, and owing to the
absence of cultivation there were scarcely any paths leading into
the forest. I was therefore unable to collect much during my
enforced stay, and found no rare birds or insects to improve my
opinion of Ceram as a collecting ground. Finding it quite
impossible to get men here to accompany me on the whole voyage, I
was obliged to be content with a crew to take me as far as Wahai,
on the middle of the north coast of Ceram, and the chief Dutch
station in the island. The journey took us five days, owing to
calms and light winds, and no incident of any interest occurred
on it, nor did I obtain at our stopping places a single addition
to my collections worth naming. At Wahai, which I reached on the
15th of June, I was hospitably received by the Commandant and my
old friend Herr Rosenberg, who was now on an official visit here.
He lent me some money to pay my men, and I was lucky enough to
obtain three others willing to make the voyage with me to
Ternate, and one more who was to return from Mysol. One of my
Amboyna lads, however, left me, so that I was still rather short
of hands.

I found here a letter from Charles Allen, who was at Silinta in
Mysol, anxiously expecting me, as he was out of rice and other
necessaries, and was short of insect-pins. He was also ill, and
if I did not soon come would return to Wahai.

As my voyage from this place to Waigiou was among islands
inhabited by the Papuan race, and was an eventful and disastrous
one, I will narrate its chief incidents in a separate chapter in
that division of my work devoted to the Papuan Islands. I now
have to pass over a year spent in Waigiou and Timor, in order to
describe my visit to the island of Bouru, which concluded my
explorations of the Moluccas.

CHAPTER XXVI.

BOURU.

MAY AND JUNE 1861.

I HAD long wished to visit the large island of Bouru, which lies
due west of Ceram, and of which scarcely anything appeared to be
known to naturalists, except that it contained a babirusa very
like that of Celebes. I therefore made arrangements for staying
there two months after leaving Timor Delli in 1861. This I could
conveniently do by means of the Dutch mail-steamers, which make a
monthly round of the Moluccas.

We arrived at the harbour of Cajeli on the 4th of May; a gun was
fired, the Commandant of the fort came alongside in a native boat
to receive the post-packet, and took me and my baggage on shore,
the steamer going off again without coming to an anchor. We went
to the horse of the Opzeiner, or overseer, a native of Amboyna--
Bouru being too poor a place to deserve even an Assistant
Resident; yet the appearance of the village was very far superior
to that of Delli, which possesses "His Excellency the Governor,"
and the little fort, in perfect order, surrounded by neat brass-
plots and straight walks, although manned by only a dozen
Javanese soldiers with an Adjutant for commander, was a very
Sebastopol in comparison with the miserable mud enclosure at
Delli, with its numerous staff of Lieutenants, Captain, and
Major. Yet this, as well as most of the forts in the Moluccas,
was originally built by the Portuguese themselves. Oh! Lusitania,
how art thou fallen!

While the Opzeiner was reading his letters, I took a walk round
the village with a guide in search of a horse. The whole place
was dreadfully damp and muddy, being built in a swamp with not a
spot of ground raised a foot above it, and surrounded by swamps
on every side. The houses were mostly well built, of wooden
framework filled in with gaba-gaba (leaf-stems of the sago-palm),
but as they had no whitewash, and the floors were of bare black
earth like the roads, and generally on the same level, they were
extremely damp and gloomy. At length I found one with the floor
raised about a foot, and succeeded in making a bargain with the
owner to turn out immediately, so that by night I had installed
myself comfortably. The chairs and tables were left for me; and
as the whole of the remaining furniture in the house consisted of
a little crockery and a few clothes-boxes, it was not much
trouble for the owners to move into the house of some relatives,
and thus obtain a few silver rupees very easily. Every foot of
ground between the homes throughout the village is crammed with
fruit trees, so that the sun and air have no chance of
penetrating. This must be very cool and pleasant in the dry
season, but makes it damp and unhealthy at other times of the
year. Unfortunately I had come two months too soon, for the rains
were not yet over, and mud and water were the prominent features
of the country.

About a mile behind and to the east of the village the hills
commence, but they are very barren, being covered with scanty
coarse grass and scattered trees of the Melaleuca cajuputi, from
the leaves of which the celebrated cajeput oil is made. Such
districts are absolutely destitute of interest for the zoologist.
A few miles further on rose higher mountains, apparently well
covered with forest, but they were entirely uninhabited and
trackless, and practically inaccessible to a traveller with
limited time and means. It became evident, therefore, that I must
leave Cajeli for some better collecting ground, and finding a man
who was going a few miles eastward to a village on the coast
where he said there were hills and forest, I sent my boy Ali with
him to explore and report on the capabilities of the district. At
the same time I arranged to go myself on a little excursion up a
river which flows into the bay about five miles north of the
town, to a village of the Alfuros, or indigenes, where I thought
I might perhaps find a good collecting ground.

The Rajah of Cajeli, a good-tempered old man, offered to
accompany me, as the village was under his government; and we
started one morning early, in a long narrow boat with eight
rowers. In about two hours we entered the river, and commenced
our inland journey against a very powerful current. The stream
was about a hundred yards wide, and was generally bordered with
high grass, and occasionally bushes and palm-trees. The country
round was flat and more or less swampy, with scattered trees and
shrubs. At every bend we crossed the river to avoid the strength
of the current, and arrived at our landing-place about four
o'clock in a torrent of rain. Here we waited for an hour,
crouching under a leaky mat till the Alfuros arrived who had been
sent for from the village to carry my baggage, when we set off
along a path of whose extreme muddiness I had been warned before
starting.

I turned up my trousers as high as possible, grasped a stoat
stick to prevent awkward falls, and then boldly plunged into the
first mud-hole, which was immediately succeeded by another and
another. The marl or mud and water was knee-deep with little
intervals of firmer ground between, making progression
exceedingly difficult. The path was bordered with high rigid
grass, brewing in dense clumps separated by water, so that
nothing was to be gained by leaving the beaten track, and we were
obliged to go floundering on, never knowing where our feet would
rest, as the mud was now a few inches, now two feet deep, and the
bottom very uneven, so that the foot slid down to the lowest
part, and made it difficult to keep one's balance. One step would
be upon a concealed stick or log, almost dislocating the ankle,
while the next would plunge into soft mud above the knee. It
rained all the way, and the long grass, six feet high, met over
the path; so that we could not see a step of the way ahead, and
received a double drenching. Before we got to the village it was
dark, and we had to cross over a small but deep and swollen
stream by a narrow log of wood, which was more than a foot under
water. There was a slender shaking stick for a handrail, and it
was nervous work feeling in the dark in the rushing water for a
safe place on which to place the advanced foot. After au hour of
this most disagreeable and fatiguing walk we reached the village,
followed by the men with our guns, ammunition, boxes, and bedding
all more or less soaked. We consoled ourselves with some hot tea
and cold fowl, and went early to bed.

The next morning was clear and fine, and I set out soon after
sunrise to explore the neighbourhood. The village had evidently
been newly formed, and consisted of a single straight street of
very miserable huts totally deficient in every comfort, and as
bare and cheerless inside as out. It was situated on a little
elevated patch of coarse gravelly soil, covered with the usual
high rigid grass, which came up close to the backs of the houses.
At a short distance in several directions were patches of forest,
but all on low and swampy ground. I made one attempt along the
only path I could find, but soon came upon a deep mud-hole, and
found that I must walk barefoot if at all; so I returned and
deferred further exploration till after breakfast. I then went on
into the jungle and found patches of sago-palms and a low forest
vegetation, but the paths were everywhere full of mud-holes, and
intersected by muddy streams and tracts of swamp, so that walking
was not pleasurable, and too much attention to one's steps was
not favourable to insect catching, which requires above
everything freedom of motion. I shot a few birds, and caught a
few butterflies, but all were the same as I had already obtained
about Cajeli.

On my return to the village I was told that the same kind of
ground extended for many miles in every direction, and I at once
decided that Wayapo was not a suitable place to stay at. The next
morning early we waded back again through the mud and long wet
grass to our boat, and by mid-day reached Cajeli, where I waited
Ali's return to decide on my future movements. He came the
following day, and gave a very bad account of Pelah, where he had
been. There was a little brush and trees along the beach, and
hills inland covered with high grass and cajuputi trees--my dread
and abhorrence. On inquiring who could give me trustworthy
information, I was referred to the Lieutenant of the Burghers,
who had travelled all round the island, and was a very
intelligent fellow. I asked him to tell me if he knew of any part
of Bouru where there was no "kusu-kusu," as the coarse grass of
the country is called. He assured me that a good deal of the
south coast was forest land, while along the north was almost
entirely swamp and grassy hills. After minute inquiries, I found
that the forest country commenced at a place called Waypoti, only
a few miles beyond Pelah, but that, as the coast beyond that
place was exposed to the east monsoon and dangerous for praus, it
was necessary to walk. I immediately went to the Opzeiner, and he
called the Rajah. We had a consultation, and arranged for a boat
to take me the next evening but one, to Pelah, whence I was to
proceed on foot, the Orang-kaya going the day before to call the
Alfuros to carry my baggage.

The journey was made as arranged, and on May 19th we arrived at
Waypoti, having walked about ten miles along the beach, and
through stony forest bordering the sea, with occasional plunges
of a mile or two into the interior. We found no village, but
scattered houses and plantations, with hilly country pretty well
covered with forest, and looking rather promising. A low hut with
a very rotten roof, showing the sky through in several places,
was the only one I could obtain. Luckily it did not rain that
night, and the next day we pulled down some of the walls to
repair the roof, which was of immediate importance, especially
over our beds and table.

About half a mile from the house was a fine mountain stream,
running swiftly over a bed of rocks and pebbles, and beyond this
was a hill covered with fine forest. By carefully picking my way
I could wade across this river without getting much above my
knees, although I would sometimes slip off a rock and go into a
hole up to my waist, and about twice a week I went across it in
order to explore the forest. Unfortunately there were no paths
here of any extent, and it did not prove very productive either
in insects or birds. To add to my difficulties I had stupidly
left my only pair of strong hoots on board the steamer, and my
others were by this time all dropping to pieces, so that I was
obliged to walk about barefooted, and in constant fear of hurting
my feet, and causing a wound which might lay me up for weeks, as
had happened in Borneo, Are, and Dorey. Although there were
numerous plantations of maize and plantains, there were no new
clearings; and as without these it is almost impossible to find
many of the best kinds of insects, I determined to make one
myself, and with much difficulty engaged two men to clear a patch
of forest, from which I hoped to obtain many fine beetles before
I left.

During the whole of my stay, however, insects never became
plentiful. My clearing produced me a few fine, longicorns and
Buprestidae, different from any I had before seen, together with
several of the Amboyna species, but by no means so numerous or,
so beautiful as I had found in that small island. For example, I
collected only 210 different kinds of beetles during my two
months' stay at Bourn, while in three weeks at Amboyna, in 1857,
I found more than 300 species: One of the finest insects found at
Bouru was a large Cerambyx, of a deep shining chestnut colour,
and with very long antennae. It varied greatly in size, the
largest specimens being three inches long, while the smallest
were only an inch, the antenna varying from one and a half to
five inches.

One day my boy Ali came home with a story of a big snake. He was
walking through some high grass, and stepped on something which
he took for a small fallen tree, but it felt cold and yielding to
his feet, and far to the right and left there was a waving and
rustling of the herbage. He jumped back in affright and prepared
to shoot, but could not get a good vies of the creature, and it
passed away, he said, like a tree being dragged along through the
grass. As he lead several times already shot large snakes, which
he declared were all as nothing compared with this, I am inclined
to believe it must really have been a monster. Such creatures are
rather plentiful here, for a man living close by showed me on his
thigh the marks where he bad been seized by one close to his
house. It was big enough to take the man's thigh in its mouth,
and he would probably have been killed and devoured by it had not
his cries brought out his neighbours, who destroyed it with their
choppers. As far as I could make out it was about twenty feet
long, but Ali's was probably much larger.

It sometimes amuses me to observe how, a few days after I have
taken possession of it, a native hut seems quite a comfortable
home. My house at Waypoti was a bare shed, with a large bamboo
platform at one side. At one end of this platform, which was
elevated about three feet, I fixed up my mosquito curtain, and
partly enclosed it with a large Scotch plaid, making a
comfortable little sleeping apartment. I put up a rude table on
legs buried in the earthen floor, and had my comfortable rattan-
chair for a seat. A line across one corner carried my daily-
washed cotton clothing, and on a bamboo shelf was arranged my
small stock of crockery and hardware: Boxes were ranged against
the thatch walls, and hanging shelves, to preserve my collections
from ants while drying, were suspended both without and within
the house. On my table lay books, penknives, scissors, pliers,
and pins, with insect and bird labels, all of which were unsolved
mysteries to the native mind.

Most of the people here had never seen a pin, and the better
informed took a pride in teaching their more ignorant companions
the peculiarities and uses of that strange European production--a
needle with a head, but no eye! Even paper, which we throw away
hourly as rubbish, was to them a curiosity; and I often saw them
picking up little scraps which had been swept out of the house,
and carefully putting them away in their betel-pouch. Then when I
took my morning coffee and evening tea, how many were the strange
things displayed to them! Teapot, teacups, teaspoons, were all
more or less curious in their eyes; tea, sugar, biscuit, and
butter, were articles of human consumption seen by many of them
for the first time. One asks if that whitish powder is "gula
passir" (sand-sugar), so called to distinguish it from the coarse
lump palm-sugar or molasses of native manufacture; and the
biscuit is considered a sort of European sago-cake, which the
inhabitants of those remote regions are obliged to use in the
absence of the genuine article. My pursuit, were of course
utterly beyond their comprehension. They continually asked me
what white people did with the birds and insects I tools so much
care to preserve. If I only kept what was beautiful, they might
perhaps comprehend it; but to see ants and files and small ugly
insects put away so carefully was a great puzzle to them, and
they were convinced that there must be some medical or magical
use for them which I kept a profound secret. These people were in
fact as completely unacquainted with civilized life as the
Indians of the Rocky Mountains, or the savages of Central Africa-
-yet a steamship, that highest triumph of human ingenuity, with
its little floating epitome of European civilization, touches
monthly at Cajeli, twenty miles off; while at Amboyna, only sixty
miles distant, a European population and government have been
established for more than three hundred years.

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