Thus: (i) A
commoner seducing a Raja's wife must be eaten; (2) Enemies taken in battle
outside their village must be eaten alive; those taken in storming a
village may be spared; (3) Traitors and spies have the same doom, but may
ransom themselves for 60 dollars a-head. There is nothing more horrible or
extraordinary in all the stories of mediaeval travellers than the facts
of this institution. (See Junghuhn, Die Battalander, II. 158.) And it
is evident that human flesh is also at times kept in the houses for food.
Junghuhn, who could not abide Englishmen but was a great admirer of the
Battas, tells how after a perilous and hungry flight he arrived in a
friendly village, and the food that was offered by his hosts was the flesh
of two prisoners who had been slaughtered the day before (I. 249).
Anderson was also told of one of the most powerful Batta chiefs who would
eat only such food, and took care to be supplied with it (225).
The story of the Battas is that in old times their communities lived in
peace and knew no such custom; but a Devil, Nanalain, came bringing
strife, and introduced this man-eating, at a period which they spoke of
(in 1840) as "three men's lives ago," or about 210 years previous to that
date. Junghuhn, with some enlargement of the time, is disposed to accept
their story of the practice being comparatively modern. This cannot be,
for their hideous custom is alluded to by a long chain of early
authorities. Ptolemy's anthropophagi may perhaps be referred to the
smaller islands. But the Arab Relations of the 9th century speak of
man-eaters in Al-Ramni, undoubtedly Sumatra. Then comes our traveller,
followed by Odoric, and in the early part of the 15th century by Conti, who
names the Batech cannibals. Barbosa describes them without naming them;
Galvano (p. 108) speaks of them by name; as does De Barros. (Dec. III. liv.
viii. cap. I.)
The practice of worshipping the first thing seen in the morning is related
of a variety of nations. Pigafetta tells it of the people of Gilolo, and
Varthema in his account of Java (which I fear is fiction) ascribes it to
some people of that island. Richard Eden tells it of the Laplanders.
(Notes on Russia, Hak. Soc. II. 224.)
NOTE 4. - Basma, as Valentyn indicated, seems to be the PASEI of the
Malays, which the Arabs probably called Basam or the like, for the
Portuguese wrote it PACEM. [Mr. J.T. Thomson writes (Proc.R.G.S. XX.
p. 221) that of its actual position there can be no doubt, it being the
Passier of modern charts. - H.C.] Pasei is mentioned in the Malay
Chronicle as founded by Malik-al-Salih, the first Mussulman sovereign of
Samudra, the next of Marco's kingdoms.
