Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the Malayan races. In some of the inland villages where they may be supposed to be of the
purest race, both men and women are remarkably handsome; while nearer the coasts where
the purity of their blood has been destroyed by the intermixture of other races, they ap-
proach to the ordinary types of the wild inhabitants of the surrounding countries.
In mental and moral characteristics they are also highly peculiar. They are remarkably
quiet and gentle in disposition, submissive to the authority of those they consider their su-
periors, and easily induced to learn and adopt the habits of civilized people. They are clever
mechanics, and seem capable of acquiring a considerable amount of intellectual education.
Up to a very recent period these people were thorough savages, and there are persons now
living in Menado who remember a state of things identical with that described by the writers
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The inhabitants of the several villages were dis-
tinct tribes, each under its own chief, speaking languages unintelligible to each other, and al-
most always at war. They built their houses elevated upon lofty posts to defend themselves
from the attacks of their enemies. They were head hunters like the Dyaks of Borneo, and
were said to be sometimes cannibals. When a chief died, his tomb was adorned with two
fresh human heads; and if those of enemies could not be obtained, slaves were killed for the
occasion. Human skulls were the great ornaments of the chiefs' houses. Strips of bark were
their only dress. The country was a pathless wilderness, with small cultivated patches of rice
and vegetables, or clumps of fruit-trees, diversifying the otherwise unbroken forest. Their
religion was that naturally engendered in the undeveloped human mind by the contempla-
tion of grand natural phenomena and the luxuriance of tropical nature. The burning moun-
tain, the torrent and the lake, were the abode of their deities; and certain trees and birds were
supposed to have especial influence over men's actions and destiny. They held wild and ex-
citing festivals to propitiate these deities or demons; and believed that men could be
changed by them into animals, either during life or after death.
Here we have a picture of true savage life; of small isolated communities at war with all
around them, subject to the wants and miseries of such a condition, drawing a precarious ex-
istence from the luxuriant soil, and living on from generation to generation, with no desire
for physical amelioration, and no prospect of moral advancement.
Such was their condition down to the year 1822, when the coffee-plant was first intro-
duced, and experiments were made as to its cultivation. It was found to succeed admirably
at from fifteen hundred up to four thousand feet above the sea. The chiefs of villages were
induced to undertake its cultivation. Seed and native instructors were sent from Java; food
was supplied to the labourers engaged in clearing and planting; a fixed price was established
at which all coffee brought to the government collectors was to be paid for, and the village
