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The Resident having invited us to visit the nutmeg plantations on Great Banda, we accompanied him to the landing-place at Lontar, where we found chairs waiting for us, fitted with long poles, like those of a sedan, and were carried by eight men, who placed the poles on their shoulders, thus raising the chair, with its occupant, above their heads, a position which we found at first anything but pleasant.
Besides three large islands, there are several others, which form what are known as the Banda group. The largest is Lontar, or Great Banda a crescent-shaped island, about six miles long and a mile and a half wide. Within the circle of which this island and two others joined to it form an arc, lie three more, the highest and most remarkable of which is the Grunong Api, or the Burning Mountain.
Among the most beautiful trees was the lontar or palmyra palm Borassus flabelliformis. Mr Hooker told us that its leaves were formerly used as parchment all over the archipelago before the Chinese introduced paper. In some places, even at the present time, it is used for that purpose.
On the Lontar shore rose up perpendicular crags from two to three hundred feet high, but everywhere covered with the most luxuriant vegetation, the trees and shrubs having their roots in the crevices, and hanging down in broad sheets of the brightest green.
It encompasses the stem of the tree, and is seemingly bound to it by thicker fibres or twigs, of which the natives made pens for writing. Toddy is likewise procured from the lontar or Borassus flabellifer, the tala of the Hindus. The rambiya, puhn sagu, or proper sago tree, is also of the palm kind.
By this means it has undoubtedly carried the seed to all parts of the group, and perhaps to other islands in the neighbourhood. In one part of Lontar we heard that the mace, instead of being red, is white probably owing to some peculiarity of the soil. The deer and pig are found in the islands, and also a species of cuscus.
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